This article poses the question of the social and intellectual conditions for genuine social scientific internationalism, through an analysis of the worldwide spread of a new global vulgate resulting from the false and uncontrolled universalization of the folk concepts and preoccupations of American society and academe. The terms, themes and tropes of this new planetary doxa - `multiculturalism', `globalization', `liberals versus communitarians', `underclass', racial `minority' and identity, etc. - tend to project and impose on all societies American concerns and viewpoints, (...) thereby transfigured into tools of analysis and yardsticks of policy fit to naturalize the peculiar historical experience of one peculiar society, tacitly instituted as a model for humanity. The article suggests how the logic of the international circulation of ideas, the transformations of the academic field, the strategies of foundations and publishers, and of local collaborators in global conceptual `import-export' converge to foster a particularly powerful and pernicious form of cultural imperialism of which academics are at once perpetrators and victims. (shrink)

I use the collection of “carnal ethnographies” of martial arts and combat sports assembled by Raul Sanchez and Dale Spencer under the title Fighting Scholars to spotlight the fruitfulness of deploying habitus as both empirical object (explanandum) and method of inquiry (modus cognitionis). The incarnate study of incarnation supports five propositions that clear up tenacious misconceptions about habitus and bolster Bourdieu’s dispositional theory of action: (1) far from being a “black box,” habitus is fully amenable to empirical inquiry; (2) the (...) distinction between primary (generic) and secondary (specific) habitus enables us to capture the malleability of dispositions; (3) habitus is composed of cognitive, conative and affective elements: categories, skills, and desires; (4) habitus allows us to turn carnality from problem to resource for the production of sociological knowledge; and (5) thus to realize that all social agents are, like martial artists, suffering beings collectively engaged in embodied activities staged inside circles of shared commitments. (shrink)

In this response to my critics, I amplify the conceptual clarification and methodological stipulation of habitus begun in ‘Homines in extremis’ to help us move from a sociology of the body as socially construc-ted object to a sociology from the body as socially construc-ting vector of knowledge, power, and practice. The specification of habitus by membership in collectives, attachment to institutions, and analytic purpose makes it a flexible multi-scalar notion with which to construct the epistemic individual and account for both (...) reproduction and change, conformity and creativity, as well as self-revision. For this, we must reject theological interpretations that rigidly lock habitus into Bourdieu’s framework; avoid conflating the formal properties of the notion with its concrete features in specific settings and cases; and distinguish between the rhetorical invocation of his concepts (‘speaking Bourdieuese’) and their effective deployment in the construction of the empirical object. As embodied and embedded capacity, habitus brings temporality, depth, and desire to the analytic epicenter. It reminds us that the social world is not transparent, open-ended, and instantaneous, but endowed with gravity, opacity, and asymmetry. Treating the sentient and skilled organism as fount of both social intelligence and sociological acumen can help historical social science connect with enactive psychology and recover the carnality of action that conventional accounts of social life routinely erase. (shrink)

The comparative sociology of the structure, dynamics, and experience of urban relegation in the United States and the European Union during the past three decades reveals the emergence of a new regime of marginality. This regime generates forms of poverty that are neither residual, nor cyclical or transitional, but inscribed in the future of contemporary societies insofar as they are fed by the ongoing fragmentation of the wage labour relationship, the functional disconnection of dispossessed neighbourhoods from the national and global (...) economies, and the reconfiguration of the welfare state in the polarizing city. Based on a methodical comparison between the black American ghetto and the French working-class banlieue at century's turn, this article spotlights three distinctive spatial properties of `advanced marginality' — territorial fixation and stigmatization, spatial alienation and the dissolution of `place', and the loss of a hinterland — and draws out their implications for the formation of the `precariat' in postindustrial societies. (shrink)

The comparative sociology of the structure, dynamics, and experience of urban relegation in the United States and the European Union during the past three decades reveals the emergence of a new regime of marginality. This regime generates forms of poverty that are neither residual, nor cyclical or transitional, but inscribed in the future of contemporary societies insofar as they are produced by the ongoing fragmentation of wage labor relation­ship, the functional disconnection of dispossessed neighborhoods from the national and global economies, (...) and the reconfiguration of the welfare state in the polarizing city. Based on a methodical comparison of the black American ghetto and the French working-class banlieue at century’s turn, this article spotlights three distinctive spatial properties of “advanced marginality”—territorial fixation and stigmatization, spatial alienation and the dissolution of “place,” and the loss of a hinterland—and draws out their implications for the formation of the “precariat” in postindustrial societies. (shrink)

This article draws on 35 months of ethnographic fieldwork and apprenticeship in a boxing gym located in Chicago's black ghetto to explicate how prizefighters apperceive and express the fact of being live commodities of flesh and blood, and how they practically reconcile themselves to ruthless exploitation in ways that enable them to maintain a sense of personal integrity and moral purpose. The boxer's experience of corporeal exploitation is expressed in three kindred idioms, those of prostitution, slavery and animal husbandry. The (...) first likens the fighter-manager combo to the prostitute-pimp duo; the second depicts the ring as a plantation and promoters as latter-day slave masters; the third intimates that boxers are used in the manner of livestock. All three tropes simultaneously enounce and denounce the immoral marketing of disquiescent bodies. But this acute consciousness is neutralized by the doxic belief in the normalcy of exploitation, in the `agency' of corporeal entrepreneurship, and in the possibility of individual exceptionalism. This practical belief, inscribed in the bodily dispositions of the fighter, helps produce the collective misrecognition whereby boxers collude in their own commercialization. (shrink)

The sudden growth and glorification of the penal state in the United States after the mid-1970s (and in Western Europe two decades later) is not a response to the evolution of crime, but a reaction to—and a diversion from—the social insecurity produced by the fragmentation of wage labor and the destabilization of ethnoracial hierarchies following the discarding of the Fordist-Keynesian compact. It partakes of a new government of poverty wedding restrictive “workfare” and expansive “prisonfare,” which ensnares the precarious fractions of (...) the postindustrial proletariat in a carceral-assistential net designed to steer them towards deregulated employment or to contain them in their dispossessed neighborhoods and in the booming prisons that have become their satellites. This policy of penalization of urban marginality guided by moral behaviorism partakes of a broader reengineering and remasculinizing of the state that has rendered obsolete the traditional scholarly and policy division between welfare and crime. It must be grasped, not under the narrow rubric of repression, but under the generative category of production, as it has spawned new state agencies, social types, knowledges and experts. It makes the study of incarceration an essential chapter in the sociology of the state and social stratification in the era of triumphant neoliberalism. (shrink)

The sudden growth and glorification of the penal state in the United States after the mid-1970s (and in Western Europe two decades later) is not a response to the evolution of crime, but a reaction to—and a diversion from—the social insecurity produced by the fragmentation of wage labor and the destabilization of ethnoracial hierarchies following the discarding of the Fordist-Keynesian compact. It partakes of a new government of poverty wedding restrictive “workfare” and expansive “prisonfare,” which ensnares the precarious fractions of (...) the postindustrial proletariat in a carceral-assistential net designed to steer them towards deregulated employment or to contain them in their dispossessed neighborhoods and in the booming prisons that have become their satellites. This policy of penalization of urban marginality guided by moral behaviorism partakes of a broader reengineering and remasculinizing of the state that has rendered obsolete the traditional scholarly and policy division between welfare and crime. It must be grasped, not under the narrow rubric of repression, but under the generative category of production, as it has spawned new state agencies, social types, knowledges and experts. It makes the study of incarceration an essential chapter in the sociology of the state and social stratification in the era of triumphant neoliberalism. (shrink)

The 2005 Avignon Theatre Festival sparked a vast controversy about the insistent presence of bodies (whether wounded, broken, or humiliated) on stage. Without subscribing to the reactionary critical response to the Festival, it is legitimate to return to the debate in order to question the ubiquity of the “victim body” in contemporary theatre. Such representations, far from being heterodox, are in fact part of the massive ideology of “the ethical”, as diagnosed by Alain Badiou. The oppressed body thus tends to (...) be assimilated to the body of the victim. The result is the obliteration of the resistance of subjects to their oppression, or of their active response to it, theatre being reduced to the maxims of a democratic materialism: “there are only bodies and languages”. (shrink)

This article reflects on the international reception of my book Prisons of Poverty as revelator of penal developments in advanced societies over the past decade. I show that the global firestorm of law and order inspired by the United States that the book detected in 1999 has continued to rage far and wide. Indeed, it has extended from First- to Second-World countries and has altered punishment politics and policies around the globe in ways that no one foresaw and would have (...) thought possible two decades ago. I extend the analysis of the role of think tanks in the diffusion of US-style crime-fighting notions and nostrums in Latin America as one element of the international circulation of pro-market policy packages fostering the punitive management of poverty. I elaborate and revise the original model of the link between neoliberalism and punitive penality, leading to the analysis of state-crafting in the age of social insecurity developed in my book Punishing the Poor. (shrink)

Written in the form of a dialogue with Brussels sociologist Dieter Vandebroeck, this article retraces the social and intellectual trajectory of Loïc Wacquant as stepping stone to reviewing and discussing the major concepts coined and theoretical propositions elaborated in the course of his research on comparative urban marginality, racial domination, the ghetto, the penal state, neoliberalism, and carnality. This provides an opportunity to specify the relationships between ethnography, history and theory; the dialectic of domination and resistance; the role of public (...) (dis)honor in social life; the uses of Bourdieu's bureaucratic field; and the social and academic conditions of incubation, diffusion, and death of scholarly myths such as the “underclass.” The article closes on a call to clearly distinguish the rhetorical, metaphorical, and analytical usages of concepts and reaffirms the need for epistemic reflexivity as sine qua non for the articulation of robust scientific problematics. (shrink)

La investigación sociohistórica sobre el cuerpo –su configuración social, sus usos culturales y alteraciones físicas- ha experimentado una explosión sin precedentes en las últimas dos décadas, como lo ha demostrado la extraordinaria lluvia de monografías históricas, tratados filosóficos, indagaciones antropológicas y varios estudios inspirados en el feminismo o algún interés en la sexualidad..

Tomando como referencia la obra de Pierre Bourdieu, se reconstruyen los orígenes del concepto de habitus y desde una perspectiva sintética se indican algunas de sus principales propiedades teóricas. Se reseñan los principales horizontes teóricos de los que participa esta noción.

Drawing on the Begriffsgeschichte of Reinhart Koselleck and the reflexive sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, my book The Invention of the ‘Underclass’ draws a microhistory of the birth, diffusion, and demise of this racialized folk devil at the intersection of the academic field, the journalistic field, and the politics-policy-philanthropic field. This history illuminates the politics of knowledge about dispossessed and dishonored categories in the metropolis and suggests three notions that can help researchers parse the use and abuse of other social science (...) constructs and thus practice better conceptual hygiene: lemming effects (illustrated by the wild rush to deploy ‘diaspora’), conceptual speculative bubble (as with ‘racial capitalism’), and turnkey problematics (such as the ‘resilient city’ and the ‘creative city’). I discuss the factors that foster the development of epistemic bandwagons, speculation, and turnkeys, and specify the criteria that make for a robust concept in terms of semantics (clarity and neutrality), logics (coherence and type-specificity), and heuristics (empirical adequacy and theoretical productivity). (shrink)

Resumen La formidable expansión e intensificación de las actividades de la policía norteamericana, las cortes criminales y las prisiones durante los últimos treinta años ha sido finamente dirigida, en primer lugar a la clase, en segundo a la raza, y en tercero al territorio, conduciendo no a un encarcelamiento masivo sino a un hiper-encarcelamiento del (sub)proletariado conformado por hombres negros que provienen del ghetto implosionado. Esta triple selectividad revela que el edificio del pantagruélico estado punitivo que ha hecho de los (...) Estados Unidos el campeón mundial del encarcelamiento resulta una reacción tardía al movimiento de los Derechos Civiles y a los disturbios de los ghettos de mediado de los años sesenta, y un instrumento desplegado para fomentar la revolución neoliberal ayudando a imponer la inseguridad laboral como el horizonte normal de trabajo para las fracciones no cualificadas de la clase trabajadora postindustrial. El doble acople de la prisión con el hiperghetto dilapidado, por un lado, y el workfare 2 por el otro, no es un dilema moral sino un problema político que requiere un análisis expandido del nexo del estigma étnico, la desigualdad de clase y el castigo en la era postfordista. (shrink)

Este trabajo trata de aplicar el modelo teórico de la relación entre la división etnoracial y el Estado penal en los Estados Unidos al fenómeno del extraordinario incremento de la encarcelación de los inmigrantes postcoloniales en la Unión Europea durante las dos últimas décadas en la era del neoliberalismo triunfante. La construcción de la “Europa fortaleza” en la era de la flexibilización del trabajo y de la inseguridad social generalizada, ha acelerado un doble movimiento que condena al ostracismo a los (...) inmigrantes. El primero actúa a través del traslado externo, mediante la expulsión, de los inmigrantes irregulares. El segundo opera a través de su extirpación interna mediante el incremento de su encarcelación. Estos dos procesos se dirigen directamente contra las poblaciones que expresan el “exterior”, tanto desde punto de vista social como simbólico, de la emergente Europa postnacional, a saber, los inmigrantes postcoloniales y sus descendientes más inmediatos. (shrink)

This article seeks to illumine the street-level, internal, meshing of social structure, strategy and experience in the contemporary black American ghetto by dissecting the practices of a professional `hustler' who works the streets of Chicago's South Side. A socioanalytic interpretation of Rickey's life - his background, worldview and social attachments, as well as his techniques of coping and methods of predatory entrepreneuralism - shows how individual strategies of survival at the core of today's `dark ghetto' can aggregate into a trajectory (...) of collective destruction that gives all appearances of being self-inflicted, even as it is determined by the twofold retrenchment of market and state and by the social entropy that these determine. Through an ironic historical reversal, it is whites who, having vanished from the social universe and consciousness of ghetto residents, have become the `invisible men' of the new sociospatial structure of relegation that consigns poor urban blacks to an internecine war with neither victors nor end. The analysis of a single individual lifeworld thus serves to illumine the whole system of material and symbolic relations, visible and invisible, local and societal, that compose the late 20th-century ghetto as instrument of relegation and lived reality. (shrink)

De los relatos que Jack London ha consagrado al boxeo, A Piece of Steak es sin dudas aquel que merece hoy nuestra mayor atención, e incluso un lugar en el panteón de los textos literarios sobre el Noble Arte, y junto a él otros tres títulos..

L'articolo, che sintetizza le tesi esposte in Punishing the Poor, tenta di elaborare una teoria dello Stato all'epoca del neoliberismo. Secondo l'autore, le politiche economiche restrittive basate sullo sfruttamento del lavoro dequalificato e sullo sgretolamento delle acquisizioni sociali, da un lato, e la svolta securitaria e penitenziaria nella gestione della criminalitÀ, dall'altro, rappresentano le due facce della stessa medaglia. Quel che ne emerge č una visione sommamente contradditoria dello Stato: decisamente liberale in sede economica e tollerante verso le élite; profondamente (...) attivo e violento in ambito giuridico e nei confronti degli ultimi. (shrink)

Es imposible seleccionar cinco libros de sociología sin dejar fuera importantes trabajos y desairar a muchos excelentes cientistas sociales, clásicos y contemporáneos, que merecen figurar en la mayoría de la lista de preferencias de cualquiera. Así que primero quisiera disculparme con los 95 autores que no tengo espacio para mencionar aquí...

¿Qué debe a Pascal la gran obra de Bourdieu, las Meditaciones Pascalianas ? ¿Cómo presentar la referencia a Pascal en un sociólogo como Bourdieu?..

Rastreando los orígenes filosóficos y el uso inicial por Pierre Bourdieu de habitus para dar cuenta de la disyunción histórica producida por la guerra argelina de liberación nacional y por la modernización de posguerra del campo francés, podemos clarificar cuatro errores de comprensión recurrentes sobre el concepto: (1) el habitus no es nunca la réplica de una simple estructura social sino un set de esquemas de muchas capas, multiescalar y dinámico sujeto a “revisión permanente” en la práctica; (2) el habitus (...) no es necesariamente coherente y unificado sino que presenta grados variables de integración y tensión; (3) porque no es siempre congruente con el cosmos en que se desarrolla y despliega, el habitus es tan apropiado para analizar crisis y cambio como cohesión y continuidad; pero (4) no es un mecanismo autosuficiente para la generación de acción: la disección de disposiciones debe proceder siempre en conexión cercana con el mapeo del sistema de posiciones que alternadamente excita, suprime o redirecciona las inclinaciones y capacidades socialmente constituidas del agente. De modo crucial, en manos de Bourdieu, habitus no es un concepto abstracto derivado y orientado a disquisiciones teóricas, sino un modo estenográfico de designar una postura de investigación que pone al modo de pensamiento genético en el corazón del análisis social. (shrink)