CROSSING THE BOURDIEU: MUSIC & ANTHROPOLOGY - A COMMITMENT TO LIFE ITSELF
By adamgreenwell
Sun, 19 Jun 2016
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Get Some Vision - A Tribute to Leonardo Da Vinci 1998: Introduction to Online Version and Sample of Replies from Global Figures, Including Professor Pierre Bourdieu....
CROSSING THE BOURDIEU: MUSIC & ANTHROPOLOGY -
A COMMITMENT TO LIFE ITSELF
For Ken Greenwell, who particularly enjoyed this article.
Photo By Nicolas Lardot - Own Work (created with Inkscape) ; Simplified and inspired by Raisons pratiques, Seuil, coll. Points, 1996, p. 21., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1356346
ON MUSIC :" Music is the 'pure' art par excellence . It says nothing and has nothing to say. Never really having an expressive function , it is opposed to drama, which even in its most refined form still bears a social message and can only be 'put over' on the basis of an immediate and profound affinity with the values and expectations of its audience .....Music represents the most radical and most absolute form of the negation of the world, and especially the social world, which the bourgeois ethos tends to demand of all forms of art . "- PIERRE BOURDIEU ( 1930- 2002 )from DISTINCTION : A SOCIAL CRITIQUE OF THE JUDGEMENT OF TASTE (1984)(One of the 20th century's 10 most important works of sociology by the International Sociological Association)ON ANTHROPOLOGY :" The word anthropology itself tells the basic story from the Greek anthropos ('human') and logia ('study' ) , it is the study of humankind from its beginnings millions of years ago to the present day. Nothing human is alien to anthropology. Indeed of the many disciplines that study our species, Homo Sapiens , only anthropology seeks to understand the whole panorama - in geographic space and evolutionary time - of human existence."-AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION" The point of my work is to show that culture and education aren't simply hobbies or minor influences . They are hugely important in the affirmation of differences between groups and social classes and in the reproduction of those differences " -PIERRE BOURDIEU, to THE NEW YORK TIMES ." For Bourdieu, life itself was a commitment. " -JOSE BOVE, MEMBER OF EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT.In 1998 our creative household received a handwritten card with " PIERRE BOURDIEU " and " COLLEGE DE FRANCE " stamped upon it: " Many thanks for sending me Get Some Vision. I'll listen to it. Warmest regards, Pierre Bourdieu".And on that day, in my eight years as an anthropology graduate, I realized that I hadn't put my studies on hold . My studies had taken hold of me .Discovering Bourdieu at Massey University in my student days was like receiving a Thunderbird with a V8 engine, then having to park it in a cul-de-sac garage because there's nowhere to drive it . Once an "intellectual Route 66 " is discovered , the skill and courage to drive in that direction still need to be found.
When I began university , I nearly lost a lifelong passion for reading, which I found ironic. With very little thought given to presentation of study material, not only were we undergraduates expected to pore over screeds of turgid tosh, but also to pay a hundred dollars apiece for thin, boring books that had to be specially imported .
My greatest gamble was avoiding all allocated texts on Mediterranean Ethnography for a Book Review assignment.
Instead, I submitted a 20% term paper on Jim Crace's novel about a "supernumerary land mass " ( Continent ).
I called my Course Controller to discuss the relevance of Continent to the history and culture of the Mediterranean. How the theories of leading anthropologists could be applied to Continent.
"Wait, wait, Adam ..... where the hell in the Mediterranean is this place you're talking about?"
"Nowhere in particular, it's an imaginary place. I want to say 'this could be the Mediterrean region' in my essay."
"On one condition. It has to be brilliant ", said the lecturer, when tacitly approving my approach. He warned me of the risk of complete failure...as in downwardly spiralling grades from D to E.
Fortunately, he awarded me a rare A grade. "This is, by far, the most imaginative paper presented," was the assessment.
Grades of C+ from similar attempts peppered my academic record.
" Why don't you just take books out of the university library and answer the question? You could do very well ! ", said yet another exasperated tutor.
Good question.
But there was a method to my madness.
In my spotty-faced, naïve and youthful opinion, these turgid readings celebrated neither the joy of knowledge nor a love of life .
Their heaviness seemed to be laden with ulterior motives.
I noticed a trend:
Professor Charley Farley could become the world's expert on a particular subject by throwing every academic theory under the sun at it.
Then Charley Farley would get a bigger office, more overseas trips
( timed closely with sports tournaments), more media coverage and more lucrative postings.
Charley Farley may never personally care much for his subject, nor see any real merit in it. But the more he writes and speaks about it, the more money/kudos he earns as a world expert .
As a result, freezing, financially-struggling students are reading Charley's turgid tomes as their course requirement. They are inexplicably mind-numbed by the uninspiring futility of it all .
Yet Bourdieu was different. I happily bought his " Outline of a Theory of Practice". I was even more delighted that the cover was stuck on the wrong way, thus giving the impression that I was reading the book upside down . That's symbolic because Bourdieu lived for turning a world of Professor Farleys upside down, by analysing inequalities with a " theory of practice " grounded in everyday life.
At the time of his death, Bourdieu had been decorated with many honours and was rightly regarded as a great figure in the intellectual life of France. He came from humble origins and spoke a peasant dialect at home. He then went on to study philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superiure, the traditional cradle of French intellectuals .
In many ways Bourdieu was a consummate self-made man and could have easily told the oppressed - "Harden up. I pulled myself up by the bootstraps, you can do it too".
Instead, he thought deeply and asked the hard questions about how social and cultural breeding were critical to achieving status .
Capital acts as a social relation within a system of exchange, and that includes the cultural knowledge that confers status and power, as well as money itself. This "cultural capital" can be observed through tastes, which are the practical confirmation of inevitable differences. Tastes are generally proposed in relation to other tastes, reflecting an attraction or aversion to different lifestyles.
" Distinction is the social force which gives different individuals different value", says Bourdieu scholar Rhiannon Goldthorp, Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University.
Power of dominant social groups is reinforced by the inheritance and investment of cultural capital in the fields of knowledge, language, social skills, style, values, taste etc . Conformity - "symbolic violence"- is then imposed by dominant groups and classes through social institutions.
Bourdieu expanded the concept of "habitus" - personal dispositions based on beliefs ; neighbourhood ; values and practices; aspects of culture . The social arena in which people struggle in pursuit of power relationships , are independent spaces of social play - as opposed to classes- known as "fields" .
Bourdieu's genius lay in the study of the formative roots of class distinctions and power structures as reflected amongst the media, intellectuals, language, and poverty, to name but a few .
He is perhaps only matched by Emile Zola, Jean - Paul Sartre, and Jacques Lacan as outstanding French thinkers who saw their world clearly ; judged that world with a broader than usual overview ; then acted upon it in good and clear conscience.
Bourdieu's theories have been expanded to include the study of multiculturalism in Australia; racism and poverty worldwide, perhaps as much for their profound social concern as for their intellectual rigour .
I'll leave you with a footnote that I'm sure Bourdieu would have analysed with relish:
A Rhodes Scholar, US Army captain/ helicopter pilot and West Point Military Academy teacher -all rolled into one- left his prestige behind to get a job as a janitor at a Nashville recording studio.
Why on earth would he do that??
Because he hoped to meet and learn from the great country music singers he met there. At the same time, he was perfecting his own song-writing technique.
He was fired as a janitor. But a singer who recorded at the studios got him reinstated, and supported the janitor's song-writing efforts .
The singer was Johnny Cash . The janitor was Kris Kristofferson . Kris Kristofferson's "Me and Bobby McGee" is my father's favourite song. I listen to that song a lot as a ' voyage around my father '.
Wise observers comment about Kristofferson's lyrics in that song - "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose" -
That could only have been written by a Rhodes Scholar!
Tastes; power structures; habitus; cultural capital; social fields - crossing the Bourdieu, with a commitment to life itself!
- ADAM GREENWELL, 2007/Edited 2016
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