Field (Bourdieu)

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Field is one of the core concepts used by French social scientist Pierre Bourdieu. A field is a setting in which agents and their social positions are located. The position of each particular agent in the field is a result of interaction between the specific rules of the field, agent's habitus and agent's capital (social, economic and cultural) (Bourdieu, 1984). Fields interact with each other, and are hierarchical (most are subordinate of the larger field of power and class relations).

Bourdieu shared Weber's view, contrary to traditional Marxism, that society cannot be analyzed simply in terms of economic classes and ideologies. Much of his work concerns the independent role of educational and cultural factors. Instead of analyzing societies in terms of classes, Bourdieu uses the concept of field: a social arena in which people maneuver and struggle in pursuit of desirable resources.

In Bourdieu's work, a field is a system of social positions (e.g. a profession such as law) structured internally in terms of power relationships (e.g. the power differential between judges and lawyers). More specifically, a field is a social arena of struggle over the appropriation of certain species of capital--capital being whatever is taken as significant for social agents (the most obvious example is monetary capital). Fields are organized both vertically and horizontally. This means that fields are not strictly analogous to classes, and are often autonomous, independent spaces of social play. The field of power is peculiar in that it exists 'horizontally' through all of the fields and the struggles within it control the 'exchange rate' of the forms of cultural, symbolic, or physical capital between the fields themselves. A field is constituted by the relational differences in position of social agents, and the boundaries of a field are demarcated by where its effects end. Different fields can be either autonomous or interrelated (e.g. consider the separation of power between judiciary and legislature) and more complex societies are "more differentiated" societies that have more fields.

Fields are constructed according to underlying nomos, fundamental principles of "vision and division" (the division between mind and body for example, or male and female), or organizing "laws" of experience that govern practices and experiences within a field. The nomos underlying one field is often irreducible to those underlying another, as in the noted disparity between the nomos of the aesthetic field that values cultural capital and in some sense discourages economic capital, and that of the economic field which values economic capital. Agents subscribe to a particular field not by way of explicit contract, but by their practical acknowledgement of the stakes, implicit in their very "playing of the game". The acknowledgement of the stakes of the field and the acquiring of interests and investments prescribed by the field is termed illusio.