Bourdieu Central Issues
Bourdieu's sociological work was dominated by an analysis of the mechanisms of reproduction of social hierarchies. In opposition to Marxist analyses, Bourdieu criticized the primacy given to the economic factors, and stressed that the capacity of social actors to actively impose and engage their cultural productions and symbolic systems plays an essential role in the reproduction of social structures of domination. What Bourdieu called symbolic violence (the capacity to ensure that the predictability of the social order is ignored—or misrecognized as natural—and thus to ensure the legitimacy of social structures) plays an essential part in his sociological analysis.
Read more about this topic: Cultural Reproduction
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