Pierre Bourdieu |
Practical reasons: On the theory of action |
| Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1998 [1994]. |
Note that this translation does not include a chapter in the French version titled "Pour une science des oeuvres." It contains an appendix "La double rupture" that addresses very critically the sociology of science and particularly Latour and Woolgar's Laboratory Life. This appendix was first published in English as "Animadversiones in Mertonem" (1990)
So, while we may accept, with the ethnomethodologists, that the family is a principle of construction of social reality, it also has to be pointed out, in opposition to ethnomethodology, that this principle of construction is itself socially constructed and that it is common to all agents socialized in a particular way. In other words, it is a common principle of vision and division, a nomos, that we all have in ourheads because it has been inculcated in us through a process of socialization performed in a world that was itself organized according to the division into families. This principle of construction is one of the constituent elements of our habitus, a mental structure which, having been inculcated into all minds socialized in a particular way, is both individual and collective. It is a tacit law (nomos) of perception and practice that is at the basis of the consensus on the sense of the social world (and of the word "family" in particular), the basis of common sense. Thus the prenotions of common sense and the folk categories of spontaneous sociology which, methodologically speaking, have to be called into question, may, as here, be well founded, because they help to make the reality that they describe. In the social world, words make things, because they make the consensus on the existence and the meaning of things, the common sense, the doxa accepted by all as self-evident. (p. 66-67)
(Bourdieu on ethnomethodology)