Bridging the study of culture and religion: Pierre Bourdieu's political economy of symbolic power

Sociology of Religion, Spring, 1996 by David Swartz

This essay examines key features of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of culture in light of their potential contribution to the sociology of religion. Bourdieu himself has devoted little attention to the study of religion.(1) Yet, significant features of his approach to the study of culture find inspiration in the materialism of Karl Marx and particularly in Max Weber's sociology of religion.

BOURDIEU'S POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SYMBOLIC POWER

Bourdieu proposes a sociology of symbolic power in which he addresses the important topic of relations between culture, stratification, and power. He contends that the struggle for social recognition is a fundamental dimension of all social life. In that struggle, cultural resources, processes, and institutions hold individuals and groups in competitive and self-perpetuating hierarchies of domination. He advances the bold claim that all cultural symbols and practices, ranging from artistic tastes, style in dress, and eating habits to religion, science, and philosophy - indeed to language itself - embody interests and function to enhance social distinctions. Bourdieu focuses on how these social struggles are refracted through symbolic classifications, how cultural practices place individuals and groups into competitive class and status hierarchies, how relatively autonomous fields of conflict interlock individuals and groups in struggle over valued resources, how actors struggle and pursue strategies to achieve their interests within such fields, and how in doing so actors unwittingly reproduce the social stratification order. Culture, then, is not devoid of political content but rather is an expression of it.

In his approach to culture, Bourdieu develops a political economy of symbolic practices that includes a theory of symbolic interests, a theory of cultural capital, and a theory of symbolic power. These are not tidy, well-delimited theoretical arguments but orienting themes that overlap and interpenetrate. They draw from a wide variety of intellectual influences including Marxism, structuralism, and phenomonology. But as Brubaker (1985) points out, Max Weber is the most importance influence from the classical sociological tradition on Bourdieu's work. It is impossible to probe the full complexity of these theories or to cover the full range of Bourdieu's conceptual innovations in this short essay.(2) Nonetheless, it is possible to show how Bourdieu draws from Marx and from Weber's sociology of religion to develop a sociology of cultural practices.

TRANSCENDING IDEALISM AND MATERIALISM

At the core of Bourdieu's intellectual project for over thirty years stands the central question in Western social thought since Marx: the debate between cultural idealism and historical materialism. Bourdieu's sociology represents a bold attempt to find a middle road that transcends the classic idealism/materialism bipolarity by proposing a materialist yet non-reductive account of cultural life. His thinking begins with Marx but draws more substantively from Weber.(3)

Marx

Like Marx, Bourdieu emphasizes the primacy of conflict and class-based social inequality in modern societies. Yet, he is sharply critical of class reductionist accounts of religious and cultural life. Bourdieu is a materialist in the sense that he roots human consciousness in practical social life. He is also concerned with forms of false consciousness or, in his terms, "mis-recognition" of power relations. He accepts the Marxian idea that symbolic systems fulfill social functions of domination and reproduction of class inequality. Yet he is critical of the view of ideology that focuses largely on the social functions of symbolic goods and practices without showing how they are necessary features for the enactment of social practices.

While Bourdieu accepts the Marxist claim that religion is ideology, he resists separating out the symbolic dimension of social life as separate and derivative of the more fundamental material components of social life. In short, he rejects the Marxist infrastructure/superstructure conceptual distinction as rooted in the classic idealism/materialism dichotomy that Bourdieu believes must be transcended. Here Bourdieu parts company with the structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser (1970), which was one of Bourdieu's important intellectual references in the 1960s and 1970s. Bourdieu shares Althusser's basic materialist outlook and his emphasis on the relative autonomy of religion and culture from politics and economics. Still, Bourdieu's position is not fundamentally Althusserian. Inspired by Marx's first thesis on Feuerbach, which emphasizes the underlying unity of all social life as practical activity, Bourdieu (1984a:467) rejects the idea that social existence can be segmented and hierarchically organized into distinct spheres, such as the social, the cultural, and the economic. Rather than explore the various forms of articulation of the superstructure and infrastructure as Althusserians do, Bourdieu argues that the two realms are not to be separated in the first place. Bourdieu seeks to write a general science of practices that combines the material and symbolic dimensions and thereby emphasizes the fundamental unity of social life. Nonetheless, Bourdieu's central concern with the problem of relations between the symbolic and material aspects of social life and between structure and agency stem in part from his early confrontations with this particular Marxist tradition.