Abstract
The influence of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu on many fields of social sciences, such as anthropology, philosophy, media and cultural studies, and especially on his main discipline, sociology, is indisputable. Those who examine Bourdieu’s contributions to the field will see his productivity in many areas, such as the dynamics and intergenerational transfer of power in society, the interaction of social classes on tastes and practices, and the concept of habitus. The book Bourdieu in the City: Challenging Urban Theory is written by Loïc Wacquant, a student who inherited Bourdieu’s sociological legacy, Wacquant (2024), rightly introduces himself as a sociologist who tries to wed epistemology, ethnography, social theory, and comparison to capture the carnality of social existence; the structure, dynamics, and experience of urban marginality; the making of the penal state and the rise of neoliberalism; the specificity of ethnoracial domination and the predicament of the precariat (p. 1).
Drawing on his 30 years of comparative research experience on marginality, ethnicity, and penal issues in the post-industrial metropolis, Wacquant presents Pierre Bourdieu as an urban theorist to the reader. The fundamental thesis of this work, as expressed by Wacquant (2023), is: I propose to rethink the urban as the domain of the accumulation, diversification, and contestation of capitals, plural, and the terrain for the commingling and collision of variegated habitus, which makes the city a central site and stake of historical struggles (p. xii).
However, while defending this thesis, Wacquant also notes that the book is a self-critical work, emphasizing Bachelard’s (1953: 123) assertion that a social scientist must critique themselves and he acknowledges that previously he had not grasped the pervasiveness and power of Bourdieu’s (2023) topological mode of reasoning (p. xii). This work, which focuses on the city and Bourdieu’s theoretical reasoning, is an enlightening resource for all social scientists, such as sociologists, urban planners, political scientists, and anthropologists, and consists of three main sections.
In the first chapter, Bourdieu in the Urban Crucible, Wacquant (2023: 18–60), examines criticisms that Ripoll (2010) made as in Bourdieu’s analyses ‘the spatial dimension of urbanization and domination, even if not neglected, was underestimated’ (p. 365). This examination was ignited by Mike Savage’s (2011) provocative presentation, The Lost Urban Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, at a workshop at York University in 2012. But could the master analyst of social details have really overlooked the city in his analyses? Wacquant begins this inquiry with Bourdieu’s early works, which examined the conflicts and contradictions ravaging colonial Algeria and, on the other hand, the crisis in the rural village society of Béarn in France. In both studies, urbanization was the key driving force of social transformation. In his research on Béarn, Bourdieu combined social history, statistics, and ethnography to reveal how marriage patterns, cultural conflicts between town and village cause decline in marriage. The decline in village marriage rates and the rise in ‘outside marriages’ led Bourdieu ([1962] 2002) to conclude that ‘social distance imposes much more stringent limitations than spatial distance’ (p. 85). In his research in Algeria, Bourdieu focused on two settlements that emerged as a result of the population movements imposed by the French army during the independence war to curb support for the national uprising. These were ‘military-controlled camps and shanty-towns in and around the colony’s main cities’ (Wacquant, 2023: 24). According to Wacquant (2023: 24), the clearest blueprint of Bourdieu’s urban sociology can be found in the camps for displaced peasants because ‘. . . . the camp offers an accelerated and extreme social experiment’ in what Bourdieu christens ‘real and fictive urbanization’. The transformation in the social fabric of the camp is not unlike the changes revealed in Bourdieu’s research in Béarn. As in Béarn, social and symbolic oppositions between urban and rural emerged in the camp in Kabylia, Algeria. From these early studies in two rural areas to his later works like La misère du monde (Bourdieu and Accardo, 1993), La distinction (Bourdieu, 1979), and Le sens pratique (Bourdieu, 1980) and his other works, Bourdieu saw theory ‘not as the haughty master but as the humble servant of empirical inquiry’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 29–35). With his unique perspective and contributions to social science, Bourdieu illuminated the urban analysis of successors, such as Pinçon and Pinçon-Charlot (1992), Savage (2015), Tissot (2007, 2011), and Desmond (2018), pioneering urban studies that combined multiple correspondence analysis with field observations.
In the second chapter titled The Bitter Taste of Territorial Taint, Wacquant (2023: 61–110) focuses on the commonalities between the sociologies of Goffman and Bourdieu rather than their differences. Erving Goffman (1963: 23), in his theory of stigma defined as ‘discrediting differentness’ derived from ordinary interactions, categorizes stigmata into three broad classes based on abominations of the body, blemishes of individual character, and tribal affiliations transmitted through lineages. Bourdieu (1997: 219) emphasizes that symbolic power contributes to ‘making and unmaking groups’ by partitioning social space in ways that (de)mobilize its members. Wacquant (2023: 64) merges Goffman’s concept of stigma with Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic power to discuss the concept of spatial stigma or, in his terms, territorial taint. Just as stigma effectively separates or unites social groups, territorial taint also affects physical space through symbolic power. For Wacquant (2023), territorial taint is a: . . . product of the sudden breakdown or gradual dissolution of the districts of relegation emblematic of the Fordist–Keynesian phase of industrial capitalism: namely, the black ghetto in the United States, traditional working-class territories in the deteriorating central city or metropolitan periphery in Europe, and stabilizing shanty-towns across much of Latin America (p. 71).
Although today we witness spatial taint manifesting in six different ways through systematic, state-supported symbolic violence and emotional involvement, the roots of this phenomenon lie in Goffman’s legacy of stigma theory (Wacquant, 2023: 72–81). Consequently, Wacquant rejects the view that Goffman (1963; 1983) and Bourdieu (1989a; 1989b; 1997) are incompatible theorists, arguing instead that they are not only compatible but also complementary.
In the third chapter titled Marginality, Ethnicity, and Penalty in the Neoliberal Metropolis, Wacquant (2023: 111–160) combines the discussion of marginality and problematic categories and areas, which he started in the previous chapter, with penal policies. Wacquant (2023: 137) argues that prisons, located on the peripheries of cities, are urban institutions where the socially marginal, culturally discredited, and symbolically negatively marked individuals are physically held. These individuals, similar to those found in stigmatized ghettos, are members of the precariat, including the unemployed, black, homeless, and poor. Wacquant insists that we must incorporate Bourdieu’s symbolic, social, and physical trialectic into every level of urban studies, including the prison as an urban institution. In addition to the trialectic of spaces, he emphasizes that Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, symbolic power, bureaucratic field, and social field can provide a strong understanding of the city. According to him (Wacquant, 2023), The causal chain can then be retraced back from the bottom up: habitus directs our peregrinations in physical space, propels the lines of action that reaffirm or alter the structures of social space, and the collective meshing of these lines in turn reinforces or challenges the perimeter, programs, and priorities of the state and its categorizations (p. 130).
In summary, Wacquant (2023) expressed the theoretical framework of his position in this work with the following words: I walk in the footsteps of Pierre Bourdieu and maintain that the distribution of people, things, and species of capital across city districts results from struggles waged at once in symbolic, social, and physical space, as well as at their articulations (p. 155).
Consequently, Bourdieu in the City: Challenging Urban Theory, as Wacquant mentions in the preface, starts with the idea of questioning the criticism of the lost urban sociology in Bourdieu, but it does not stop there. The book also clarifies new concepts that Wacquant masterfully elaborates on, such as the trialectic of symbolic space, social space, and physical space, infra-stigmatization, and hyperincarceration. Returning to the concept of the lost urban sociology criticism in Bourdieu (2015, 2016) mentioned ‘urban’ and ‘city’ as words and adjectives only once each in the 2000 pages of notes from his 6-year general sociology course and his famous work Distinction (Wacquant, 2023: 172). Therefore, it can be seen that Bourdieu remained theoretically and quantitatively silent on urban phenomenon. However, in the dozens of works he wrote, Bourdieu introduced the concepts of symbolic power, bureaucratic field, and habitus, which are both theoretical and empirical levers, to the social sciences and particularly to urban sociology. In doing so, he engaged symbolic, social, and physical space, which Wacquant (2023: 19–44) calls the trialectic of spaces, to understand the world, the city, and its functioning in his analyses. The answer to the question posed at the beginning of this review, whether Bourdieu overlooked the city in his analyses, is that from his early works to his late ones, while ‘urban’ may not quantitatively appear frequently, qualitatively and empirically, his work fundamentally constitutes the source of urban sociology.