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FABIO MASSIMO LO VERDE

Pierre Bourdieu e le pratiche sociali

Abstract

Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) is considered one of the greatest sociologists of the contemporary era. A scholar of many interests, as can be seen from the number of his works, the breadth of the topics he dealt with, and the breadth of the theoretical-epistemological issues he debated with the sociological scientific community, he represents the example of a French intellectual who combines an intense research life with an equally intense presence in the public debate concerning controversial issues. Born into an underprivileged family (his father was a sharecropper later employed as a postal worker) in a small town in southern France, he trained at the École Normal Supérieure under Luis Althusser. Between 1958 and 1960 he worked at the University of Algiers, a city where he had been sent during his military service. And in Algeria he would conduct his first ethnographic research focusing on the life of the Berber population of the Cabili, work that he would take up in a later essay in the 1990s, La domination masculine (1998, tr. it., 1998) to explain the processes of construction and legitimization of gender inequality and later publishing Sociologie de l'Algérie (1958) and other works on Algerian society. Research in Algeria, especially that on the uprooting of Algerian peasants and the emergence of that country's urban underclass, would deeply mark the intellectual journey of Bourdieu, who defined himself as a "colonized from within" (Yacine, Wacquant, Ingram, 2004) as a southerner distant from the center of France and steeped in peasant culture.