Expert on my field (sociology)

Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist, anthropologist and philosopher, known principally for his work about the dynamics of power in society, and the creation of the term “symbolic violence”.

Son of a poor family in southern France, Bourdieu was born 1^st August 1930, he studied in a public school in Paris, where he gained access to the École Normale Supériure  where he studied philosophy. After that he started teaching at a public school, until he was called to serve in the military for a year in Algeria, where he continued to be a lecturer during the years of the Algerian war (1958 – 1962), and undertook an ethnographic study about the Kabyle peoples, which result became the book “The sociology of Algeria”.

After that, he served as a professor in different Paris’ universities, and in 1968, he took the director’s chair in the Centre de Sociologie Européene, where he continued working until his death in 2002.

I admire Bourdieu because of the influence of his work, that alongside Foucault’s are key elements to understand de dynamics of power in modern society, for example, his book “Masculine Domination” (1998), is very illustrative of the ways a group can dominate another in a symbolic way, allowing us to understand the whole picture in such a topic as the patriarchal relations in society.

“Renouncing to violence as a mean of freedom, when this one is the only way to put an end the daily suffering of the masses and the cruel tragedies that scourge humanity, will mean becoming responsible of the hate that we lament and the evil that emerge from that hate” (P. Bourdieu)