1 - Biography

Summary

Introduction

The aim of this chapter is to offer a sketch of Bourdieu's biography. There are various issues to consider. For much of his life, Bourdieu was against biography, both in terms of his own personal life details and, in fact, biographical studies in general. In an article published in 1986 in Actes de la recherche en science sociales, he writes of “l'illusion biographique”. Here, he sets out his major objections to conventional biographies. He takes exception to the accounts of people's lives as constructed by historians and ethnographers, not to mention sociologists. He sets himself against these “lives” for their constructed coherence and the implied objective and subjective intentions behind the action of individuals involved. He sees this tendency revealed in the very language used by biographers: “already”, “from that moment”, “from his youngest age”, “always”. Briefly, Bourdieu objects to tidy chronologies of lives lived in a sort of pre-ordered, if not pre-ordained, manner.

Bourdieu spent most of his life avoiding reference to his personal life and, even now, we only have the most basic information. However, there is a paradox. As we shall see, Bourdieu's reflexive approach was predicated on the sociologist “objectifying” the process of objectification (see Grenfell 2004b for a fuller account). Central to this method was the need to apply the same epistemological concepts to the “knowing subject” itself as well as the object of research. How to operate such an approach then becomes a crucial question, and biography must feature in this undertaking.