Fri, 21 Oct 1994 09:08:01 -0700 for <socgrad@ucsd.edu>
Date: Fri, 21 Oct 94 11:07:33 CDT
From: alina oh <alinaoh@midway.uchicago.edu>
To: socgrad@UCSD.EDU
Subject: Bourdieu and RCT

Hi Bob - 

	It looks like we may be focusing on different texts and hence
arriving at diverging interpretations; given BourdieuUs eclectic and immense
oeuvre, itUs easy to see how this can happen. In the texts IUm looking at,
for instance, in _Outline of a Theory of Practice_  Bourdieu 
writes about how the habitus [as history turned into nature] is "unconscious"
and "forgets" the historical processes which engendered it in the first place
- and actually, in this text, he suggests that the notion of a
non-hierarchically structured social order or a hierarchically structured
order as inevitable and just - is doxic ideology at work.  
	Implicit in this notion of "Doxa," the "natural" and the taken for
granted [as distinguished from orthodoxy or heterodoxy which implies the
awareness and recognition of different or antogonistic beliefs] lies the
assumption of a hierarchially structured order.  Doxa shapes mental
structures, ethical dispositions such as honour or respect toward elders and
ancestors or discrimination towards members of certain groups; and 
especially in societies experiencing class struggle, the drawing of the line
between what can be questioned and what is beyond question is terrain for
struggle.  In this struggle, the definition of the social world is at stake,
and the dominated classes have an interest in pushing back the limits of doxa
and exposing the arbitrariness of the taken for granted [of the dominant
systems of classification while the dominant classes have an interest in
preserving doxa or at the least, substituting it with orthodoxy.

Alina