Pierre Bourdieu’s Relational Theory of Social Inequality

This chapter introduces Pierre Bourdieu’s relational theory of social inequality. Not only are society and social practice relational but Bourdieu’s main terminology can also only be understood in reference to each other. This chapter focuses on core concepts, such as symbolic violence, habitus, social space and fields, and capitals. It also explains how the guiding questions of Bourdieu’s sociology were developed in response to his experiences in Algeria. Social theory as ‘reflexive sociology’—Bourdieu maintains—should constantly interrogate not only the position of researched populations in structures of inequality but also the researcher’s own situs in that space. Sociology is a social practice in a relational space and is thereby bound to understandings that are bound to the researcher’s doxic modality: the structuration and limitation of understanding the world through their own common sense and ideas that are taken for granted. This chapter also discusses Bourdieu’s own doxa: a Eurocentric and neoliberal understanding of human action and the delineation of the social within the (territorial) borders of the nation state.