Abstract
The international success of Bourdieu, attested by the numerous translations of his books, may seem paradoxical for a body of work so firmly anchored in empirical studies centered on France. This oeuvre has been in effect received and appropriated as a theoretical reference and “research program” (Lakatos). This chapter analyzes the geography and stages of Bourdieu’s international reception through the prism of the translation of his books. First acknowledged as a sociologist of education and of culture, he acquired in the early 1990s the status of a social theorist, before becoming a “global intellectual,” and after his death a classical author. The effects of this reception on his reflection on the circulation of ideas and on comparativism is examined in the last section.
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Notes
- 1.
This paper is a translation of Gisèle Sapiro, “Du théoricien du social à l’intellectuel global: la réception internationale de l’œuvre de Pierre Bourdieu et ses effets en retour,” In Lectures de Bourdieu, eds., Frédéric Lebaron and Gérard Mauger, 373–389. Paris: Ellipse, 2012; the translation was done by Kevin McAleer and revised by Gisèle Sapiro, while she was a fellow at Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, which kindly funded the translation.
- 2.
Of these there are 25 in Castilian, seven in Catalan, one in Galician, and one in Valencian.
- 3.
Interview with Ary and Vera Zolberg, June 19, 2009; written account by Vera Zolberg, June 8, 2009.
- 4.
Interview with Craig Calhoun, February 3, 2009.
- 5.
For a bibliography of Bourdieu translations into German, see Jurt (2004).
- 6.
- 7.
I myself was part of this team and that is how I discovered Bourdieu’s work. I subsequently enrolled at EHESS under his supervision for my doctoral research.
- 8.
Interview with Craig Calhoun.
- 9.
On the misunderstandings that can result through the transfer of a work like this to another country, see Wacquant (1993).
- 10.
- 11.
These lectures first appeared in English in the review Poetics Today 12(4), 1991, 625–670, which at that time was led by Itamar Even-Zohar (to whom he sent the text of his presentations for an anthology that he was preparing in Hebrew), in my translation as revised by Brian McHale. They are reprinted in Practical Reason (Bourdieu 1998).
- 12.
Another project relating to education had been submitted at the same time, in 1997–1998, but did not obtain funding. I thank Frédéric Lebaron for this information.
- 13.
In May 1989, he gave a conference in Turin that was entitled “Pour une Internationale des intellectuels” (reproduced in Politis 1 [1992a]); and in October the third conference in Japan had the theme “For a Corporatism of the Universal” (it appeared in French as a post-scriptum in Les Règles de l’art [Bourdieu 1992b]). In 1993 he was involved in establishing the International Parliament of Writers.
- 14.
- 15.
Retransmitted online: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xx6kd_pierre-bourdieu-davos-.26-janv-2001_news.
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Sapiro, G. (2020). From Social Theorist to Global Intellectual: The International Reception of Bourdieu’s Work and Its Effect on the Author. In: Sapiro, G., Santoro, M., Baert, P. (eds) Ideas on the Move in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Socio-Historical Studies of the Social and Human Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35024-6_11
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