Posted by Jay Livingston
Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) was certainly one of the biggest names in sociology in the last 25 years. He was even the subject of a documentary film “La Sociologie est un Sport de Combat” that was something of a hit in France.
He was also politically engagé as well as thoughtful. Now Tina Guenther, a sociologist who blogs from Germany (Bamberg, I think) in both English and German, has posted a recently released video of a brief interview with Bourdieu about politics. The interviewer, Gabi Reich, is obviously German; the producer-director is Pierre Carles, who also did the Combat Sport film.
Bourdieu says, among other things that there’s nothing worse than a failed revolution, and points to the return in force of extreme conservatives after the demise of leftist movements at Berkeley and Columbia. (I wasn't there. Is he accurate in this?)
What also struck me is the location of the interview – an ordinary café in Paris.
You can hear the clank of plates and glasses, the buzz of motos outside on the street. I can’t help thinking that if this were an American video done by Americans, it would have been set in the professor’s office, and in front of the great man would have been a gleaming wooden desk, not a café table and an empty beer glass, and behind him, the bookshelves full of books of all colors and sizes, not a street scene with buses and pedestrians and a video game store across the street.Despite Starbucks, we still don’t have the hang of this café thing – the public private space – in the way that Europeans have had for a couple of hundred years.
nice observation, and very true. This intermediate cafe space we take for granted here in Paris (where I live) is very much absent from NY (where I'm from). Diners are the closest thing I can think of after Starbucks, but I'm having a hard time imagining PB giving an interview in one of them.
ReplyDeleteI'm French and lived in England for a while: cafés were what I missed the most, along with bread.
ReplyDeleteOne think should be added: cafés are something special to intellectuals too. My guess is that it has something to do with the universities in France lacking any comfortable, nice place for students to meet: no student union building, uncomfortable, barely opened libraries, etc. So students meet, talk, read, write, learn and work in cafés.
American universities seem to be based on some bucolic ideal -- the campus (literally field) as a self-contained community, usually away from the city. They're a controlled environment, like a theme park. So they need to provide their own version of the kinds of places urban schools can take for granted and which are provided by a diversity of people and institutions.
ReplyDeleteSo we have student centers that are spacious and comfortable, are populated only by university people, and serve lousy bread.