Facets of a Brazilian Bourdieu

moments of his reception in Brazil

Abstract

In response to the global influence of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology, the study of the social conditions that have governed the reception of his oeuvre within different national contexts has attracted a growing number of researchers from around the world, including Brazil. Based upon works that have focused on the history of the reception of Bourdieu’s work in the Brazilian intellectual setting, as well as an ongoing investigation into the author’s correspondence with researchers from Brazil, this article attempts to show how the circumstances of this reception have conditioned the different images ascribed to the French sociologist within the social sciences in Brazil over the last fifty years. Factors such as the pace of Brazilian translations of his writings and the internal conflicts around different research agendas within the national intellectual field have resulted, as we affirm in this text, in depictions of Bourdieu that have stressed different aspects of his sociological work in toto, such as the ethnography of popular classes, the sociology of culture in its “restricted” and “enlarged” dimensions and, finally, the interpretation of class society(ies). The ambivalent presence of Bourdieu’s structural praxeology within social-theoretical reflections in Brazil will also be discussed, with a special emphasis upon the somewhat surprising implications of his critique of “theoretical theory” to the problem of “ideas out of place” within a peripheral intellectual setting.