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Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, by David Swartz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. 333 pp. $57.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-226-78594-7. $15.95 paper. ISBN:0-226-78594-5.
David Swartz launches his study of Pierre Bourdieu's work with two chapters that position Bourdieu biographically and culturally as well as intellectually. Particularly welcome is a sketch of Bourdieu's intellectual connections with Durkheim alongside more predictable delineations of how Weber's and Marx's ideas shape Bourdieu's work.
Having established that two-chapter anchor, Swartz offers a 12-page chapter on Bourdieu's metatheoretical stances. Organized around the polarity between subjectivist and objectivist approaches to social reality, this metatheoretical survey positions Bourdieu relative to thinkers such as Sartre, Cassirer, and Sapir and to perspectives such as ethnomethodology, positivism, and structuralism. Swartz, who studied with Bourdieu and interviewed him about his work, concludes this bridge-building chapter with a look at Bourdieu's relational method. Swartz argues that that method undergirds Bourdieu's "substantive positions . . . on issues such as culture, lifestyles, class analysis, and popular culture" (p. 63).
The next four chapters dissect Bourdieu's substantive positions that revolve conceptually around the social facts of power. Abjuring the role of disciple for that of a critical but sympathetic analyst (pp. vii, 4), Swartz illuminates Bourdieu's densely nuanced conceptualization of power by parading out Bourdieu's pivotal concepts and...