The Weight of the World Pierre Bourdieu

Overview

“We are offering here the accounts that men and women have confided to us about their lives and the difficulties they have in living those lives, and we have done so in the hope that the reader will adopt the comprehensive view that the scientific method both requires of and grants to us”

Publisher Stanford University Press
ISBN 0804738459
Year 1999
Pages646
Format PDF

Summary

In the early 1990s, a team of 23 sociologists coordinated by Pierre Bourdieu undertook a series of in-depth interviews with individuals from the social world who occupied a subordinate position within a privileged universe.

The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society (La misère du monde) is a book that, rather than offering a faithful portrait of living conditions linked to material deprivation, seeks to reveal the conditions that produce contemporary forms of misery (“positional misery”) through empathetic listening and the rigor of the sociological method.

“(…) however skeptical one may be about the effectiveness of the sociological message, one cannot ignore the effect it can have by allowing those who suffer to discover the possibility of attributing their suffering to social causes and thus feel relieved of blame. By widely revealing the social origin—collectively concealed—of misfortune in all its forms, including the most intimate and the most secret… What the social world has made, the social world, armed with knowledge, can undo.” (Pierre Bourdieu).

— ¡Thanks Lientur Alcaman!

Autor

Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist and public intellectual known for his influential analyses of power, culture, and social inequality. He developed key concepts such as habitus, cultural capital, and field. Through works like Distinction, he examined how education, taste, and institutions reproduce social hierarchies.

Book Details

Title The Weight of the World
Subtitle Social Suffering in Contemporary Society
Autor Pierre Bourdieu
Publisher Stanford University Press
Year 1999
Pages646
CountryUSA
ISBN 0804738459
Format PDF
Filesize 30.3 MB
URL Pierre Bourdieu The Weight of the World PDF