CONVERSATIONS WITH BOURDIEU
THE JOHANNESBURG MOMENT
MICHEL BURAWOY AND KARL VON HOLDT
CONVERSATIONS WITH BOURDIEU
THE JOHANNESBURG MOMENT
MICHEL BURAWOY AND KARL VON HOLDT
Published in South Africa by:
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg
Copyright© Michael Burawoy and Karl von Holdt 2012
First published 2012
ISBN (print) 978-1-86814-540-9
ISBN (EPUB - IPG) 978-1-86814-783-0
ISBN (EPUB - ROW) 978-1-86814-785-4
ISBN (PDF) 978-1-86814-540-9
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.
Edited by Alex Potter
Cover design and layout by Hothouse South Africa
Printed and bound by Paarl Media
CONTENTS
PREFACE MICHAEL BURAWOY
PROLOGUE: The Johannesburg MomentKARL VON HOLDT
CONVERSATION 1 SOCIOLOGY AS A COMBAT SPORT
Bourdieu Meets BourdieuMICHAEL BURAWOY
Bourdieu in South AfricaKARL VON HOLDT
CONVERSATION 2 THEORY AND PRACTICE
Marx Meets BourdieuMICHAEL BURAWOY
Bodies of DefianceKARL VON HOLDT
CONVERSATION 3 CULTURAL DOMINATION
Gramsci Meets BourdieuMICHAEL BURAWOY
Symbolic ChallengeKARL VON HOLDT
CONVERSATION 4 COLONIALISM AND REVOLUTION
Fanon Meets BourdieuMICHAEL BURAWOY
ViolenceKARL VON HOLDT
CONVERSATION 5 PEDAGOGY OF THE OPRESSED
Freire Meets BourdieuMICHAEL BURAWOY
DisciplineKARL VON HOLDT
CONVERSATION 6 THE ANTINOMIES OF FEMINISM
Beauvoir Meets BourdieuMICHAEL BURAWOY
Transforming Patriarchy?KARL VON HOLDT
CONVERSATION 7 Intellectuals and Their Publics
Mills Meets BourdieuMICHAEL BURAWOY
The Symbolic World of PoliticsKARL VON HOLDT
CONVERSATION 8 MANUFACTURING DISSENT
Burawoy Meets BourdieuMICHAEL BURAWOY
The Margin of FreedomKARL VON HOLDT
EPILOGUE: Travelling Theory MICHAEL BURAWOY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS
| ANC | African National Congress |
| COSATU | Congress of South African Trade Unions |
| CPF | Community Policing Forum |
| CWP | Community Work Programme |
| DA | Democratic Alliance |
| FLN | Front de Libération Nationale/ National Liberation Front |
| FOSATU | Federation of South African Trade Unions |
| MEC | Member of the Executive Council |
| SACP | South African Communist Party |
| SWOP | Society, Work and Development Institute |
| UDF | United Democratic Front |
PREFACE
MICHAEL BURAWOY
My four-year stint with the Ford PhDs, which had brought me to the University of the Witwatersrand for three weeks every year, had come to an end. Karl von Holdt, then acting director of SWOP (the Society, Work and Development Institute) invited me to come to Wits for a semester on a Mellon Visiting Professorship. I would work with students and faculty and also give public lectures. There was interest in my giving lectures on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, which I had previously done at the University of Wisconsin. I revised and expanded these lectures from six to eight. As at Wisconsin, the idea was to bring together faculty and students from different departments and develop another side to SWOP’s activities.
But Wits would be a different experience altogether, as Bourdieu was not the popular theorist in South Africa that he was in Wisconsin. After all, Bourdieu was not only a theorist of the North and from the North, but more specifically of France and from France, which made him more unfamiliar than Anglo-American theorists. His convoluted style of writing, his elliptical sentences, his erudition and his philosophical grounding – in sum, his deployment of cultural capital – make his work challenging to access.
As I had done in Wisconsin, I sought to interpret Bourdieu by presenting his ideas in relation to Marxism through a series of imaginary conversations between Bourdieu and Marx, Gramsci, Fanon, Freire, Beauvoir, Mills and myself, respectively. Bourdieu makes reference to Marx – indeed, his work is a deep engagement with Marx (as well as Durkheim and Weber) – but Marx never receives a sustained examination. As for Gramsci, Fanon and Beauvoir, his scattered references and footnotes are contemptuous, while Freire and Mills hardly get a mention. Nonetheless, there are some interesting parallels and convergences with these theorists that more often than not evaporate under closer examination. My endeavour was to rescue these figures buried in Bourdieu with a view to problematising