Pierre Bourdieu - Life and Career

Life and Career

Born Pierre Felix Bourdieu in Denguin (Pyrénées-Atlantiques), in southern France on 1 August 1930, to a postal worker and his wife. The language spoken at home was Béarnese, an Occitan dialect. He married Marie-Claire Brizard in 1962; the couple had three sons, Jérôme, Emmanuel and Laurent.

Bourdieu was educated at the lycée in Pau, before moving to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, from which he gained entrance to the École Normale Supérieure. Bourdieu studied philosophy with Louis Althusser in Paris at the École Normale Supérieure. After getting his agrégation Bourdieu worked as a lycée teacher at Moulins from 1955 to 1958 when he then took a post as lecturer in Algiers. During the Algerian War in 1958-1962, Bourdieu undertook ethnographic research into the clash through a study of the Kabyle peoples, of the Berbers laying the groundwork for his anthropological reputation. The result was his first book, Sociologie de L'Algerie (The Algerians), which was an immediate success in France and published in America in 1962.

In 1960 Bourdieu returned to the University of Paris before gaining a teaching position at the University of Lille where he remained until 1964. From 1964 onwards Bourdieu held the position of Director of Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (the future École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales), in the VIe section, and from 1981, the Chair of Sociology at the Collège de France, in the VIe section (held before him by Raymond Aron and Maurice Halbwachs). In 1968, he took over the Centre de Sociologie Européenne, the research center that Aron had founded, which he directed until his death.

In 1975, with the research group he had formed at the Centre de Sociologie Européenne, he launched the interdisciplinary journal Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, with which he sought to transform the accepted canons of sociological production while buttressing the scientific rigor of sociology. In 1993 he was honored with the "Médaille d'or du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique" (CNRS). In 1996, he received the Goffman Prize from the University of California, Berkeley and in 2001 the Huxley Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Bourdieu died of cancer at the age of 71.