[Satan]

FUCK!

[Slow Ben]

Thank gawd, I thought i was gonna read something smart.

[Cougar]

Esentially good old Pete thinks that social power is derived from certain things which have value in society (for instance adulation or recognition etc which give you a certain amount of social capital) violence is when someone uses those goods (eg the prestige they have gained or influence etc) to exercise control or power over someone who has less of those goods. I think he calls it social capital. The state can hold capital and power through the goods or an individual or group can.

I think that most of what he's on about is about practice and reproduction through repetition and language. Fuck it's a while since I've looked, I'm sure it's on the internet somewhere! (else)

I know more about his concept of Habitus really.

[HoosierDaddy]

So (hehe) Cougar's making shit up again.

[Mentalist]

who's Bourdieu?

[HoosierDaddy]

I'm pretty sure it's a part of France.

[Cougar]

He was (hmmm not sure if he's dead yet) a French sociologist/human geographer/cultural theorist. He was primarily concerned with coming up with heuristic frameworks to help us theorise and understand power realtionships and the transmission of cultural norms etc. He's pretty big in concepts of place and space, particularly his work on post-colonial spaces and homes in North Africa (I think) amongst the natives, which would be rather tangential, but somewhat relevant to my understanding of people's attachment to sites of violence which is part of the theoretical base of my thesis.

Bitches.

[Raymond Luxury Yacht]

So what you're saying is he makes wine?

[Satan]

Cougar, on 11 November 2009 - 12:03 AM, said:

Esentially good old Pete thinks that social power is derived from certain things which have value in society (for instance adulation or recognition etc which give you a certain amount of social capital) violence is when someone uses those goods (eg the prestige they have gained or influence etc) to exercise control or power over someone who has less of those goods. I think he calls it social capital. The state can hold capital and power through the goods or an individual or group can.

I think that most of what he's on about is about practice and reproduction through repetition and language. Fuck it's a while since I've looked, I'm sure it's on the internet somewhere! (else)

I know more about his concept of Habitus really.

My summary is better.

Cougar, on 11 November 2009 - 09:09 AM, said:

He was (hmmm not sure if he's dead yet) a French sociologist/human geographer/cultural theorist. He was primarily concerned with coming up with heuristic frameworks to help us theorise and understand power realtionships and the transmission of cultural norms etc. He's pretty big in concepts of place and space, particularly his work on post-colonial spaces and homes in North Africa (I think) amongst the natives, which would be rather tangential, but somewhat relevant to my understanding of people's attachment to sites of violence which is part of the theoretical base of my thesis.

Bitches.

Maybe it's only because I'm familiar with Distinction, I've always figured his main contribution has been to 'unite' the objective and subjective approach to ...whatever it is that he studies. As I said, my summary is better than yours. Njuee!

[Mezla PigDog]

Raymond Luxury Yacht, on 11 November 2009 - 09:27 AM, said:

So what you're saying is he makes wine?

Or he at least he makes Bryn whine.

[Cougar]

TBH if Bourdieu is making you whine, I'd give up and pick a different course, he's one of the most straight forward and easy to understand of his contemporaries.

He was definitely keen to try and bring together subjective and objective approaches and as an approach this is very significant.

However, I'd argue that his more significant contribution was the development of Habitus, distance and social fields which I'm sure are explained better than I can somewhere on the internet or even....in a book!

[Satan]

Yeah yeah. I've read the thing, and I figure I even understand it when I read it. Problems arrive when I try to force it onto something that really doesn't suit it. E.g. football rivalries. Or at least I don't think it suits it, seeing as I can't divorce it from the social/society/they all want recognition from the government context that it was written in (again, I've only read parts of distinction and an article on symbolic power by the man).

[Cougar]

Surely all football fans try to derive social power within football as a closed field. In PBs concept then football fans would derive social capital from the success of the team (see Liverpool fans taunting Utd fans over their prestige of having the most leagues till last year), the perceived morality of their side (from which they would derive the power to pronounce on other sides) even at a stretch the much vaunted advantage the 'big clubs' derive in decisions on the pitch from their capital as superior teams.

Hmmmm,I may be shoe horning it in a bit there. You're right, it's not an easy one to get your head round and I'm trying to write 6,000 words on representations of the blitz at the moment.

[Satan]

I've also seen the link between the taunting (use of symbolic violence) and an attempt to climb in a closed field hierarchy. What I'm struggling with is why they would want to do that? In Bourdieu's own examples, the group with most symbolic capital is de facto the legitimate group, i.e. the one with the right to define the world and what's in it. Given that view, why the fuck would fans of two opposing teams try to climb in the hierarchy? They don't have any interest of defining the world of the opposing fan. Basically, the fans are completely introvert, using taunts affirm their own values within the group, rather than imposing them on the outside group. But there's something there, and it's nagging the hell out of me that I can't see it through.

[Tiste Simeon]

Cougar spends too long on Wikipedia...

[zwitterion]

oh look a really good lecture on bourdieu! http://www.themonthl...e-bourdieu-1504
just sayin'

[Cougar]

Cougar spends way too much time studying for his PhD would be more acurate, Sim-sim the hard rock panda.

Anyway, I'd consider that actually part of the reason fan groups want to compete, and are indeed stuck in a loop is because they have no true way of establishing who has the most actual capital. Fans of Bury would say they have more capital 'as fans' as they are loyal to a shit club, a common claim from poor teams with highly loyal fan groups. Smaller but more succesful clubs, who may have not won anything, lets say...Sunderland may emphasise that areas of prestige that give them the right to call the tune, so let's say the common claim "we came to Old Trafford and outsang you c**nts", Liverpool may claim they have the right to be top of the pile since their club has the most European Cups, but Millwall fans would dispute this with bottles, bricks and hospitalisations, since for them and Cardiff, winning the game may be secondary to winning the fight, since they can't influence it the game directly.

The trouble in any situation that exists beyond Bourdieu's idealised scenarios is that 'the rules of the game' are not always clearly defined. In a classic definition a father exercises social violence over a child, clearly the father has all the capital in the relationship (not to mention coercive force should he choose to exercise it) however the child goes to the mother who makes a different decision, the question then becomes who holds the most social capital between the parents and what elements does the parenting decision require?

So the football fans emphasise that which they feel gives them the upper hand, a claim ignored by all others. The fans very definitely do have an interest in controlling and defining the world of fandom

[Bent]

My brain hurts...Bryn had it right the first post. Rep to you Bryn for keeping it simple for the not so smart people like me.