Writing an introduction Paul Blondeel – elaborating on chapter 2 of PhD thesis { this is written as an exercise to the course ‘academic

writing’ and not yet a fragment of a full-grown paper; references still to be refined }

Ten years after his passing away in 2002, Bourdieu remains one of the most important figures in sociological theory. Compared with the founding fathers such as Marx, Weber and Durkheim (Pinto 2003), some authors believe he provided human sciences with a new paradigm (critically discussed by Frère 2006) reconnecting inner dispositions and socialization with both cultural studies and the macro-sociological analysis of societal structure (Fowler 2004 for the first; Calhoun 2007 for the latter). Both educational sociology and anthropology have found in Bourdieus theory useful tools to study the relations between those who learn and those teaching, the worlds they share and the worlds that divide them (references to be added). In a similar way, medical anthropology developed Bourdieus concepts in order to understand how health workers and general practitioners make their understanding of what patients are suffering from. A similar strand of implementation can be found in business anthropology (e.g. Ward 2011). In the ongoing process by which old and new disciplines appropriate and modulate Bourdieus thought, architecture and urbanism are absent. As if space is a category to which the Bourdieusian analytic universe does not apply.

Being an almost nonexistent category in the field of sociological analysis and theory in general (Gieryn 2003), space is given few attention in the critical reception of Bourdieu’s writings. Moreover Bourdieu himself didn’t threat space as an category sui generis, at least the later ‘sociological’ and post-ethnographic Bourdieu. This later version became the most renowned and helped in this way underestimating the very spatial foundations of Bourdieus core concepts. A close reading of Bourdieus earliest and anthropologically inspired sociology, does provide us more contextualized versions of these concepts. At this stage in his theory ‘socialization’ is not a universal scheme repeating itself in all cultures and obeying to deep inculcated structures. The younger Bourdieu conceives of it as a mimetic learning, children imitating routines of specific adults in specific places performing specific roles. The culture a child is learning, is a material culture; the content of it being related to places and practices performed in places. The disappearance of this contextuality (Frère 2007) is one of the main features in the transition from Bourdieu the ethnographer to Bourdieu the sociologist.

In this paper we claim that space and contextuality can (and should) be reintegrated in Bourdieus core theory. Especially Bourdieu’s theory about fields and habitus can be reinterpreted so that these concepts become empirically testable (Lahire 2007). This requires that we allow ourselves to consider cities and urban districts as sites that we can analyze as having the features of a field; inhabited by social groups behaving as ‘position takers’ in such a field. We do draw on Bourdieu’s main theory when analyzing the dynamics between those local groups and their positions, being aware that the boundaries and dynamics of those local groups are less singular and more permeable than his theory suggests (Lamont and Inghelieri 2004; Lamont 2004).

The empirical evidence we’ll discuss in this article, suggests that at a local scale social groups constitute each other reciprocally, an insight common to what came to be known as boundary work (Lamont 2012). In a second part of our empirical findings, we will illustrate that the assumptions that steer peoples behavior, do not belong to the darkness of reproductive routines. We hope to illustrate that people can be confronted with their own practices and routines and that by doing so, they may question some of their own presuppositions. This process approximates Bourdieus concept of habitus, at the same time questioning it: what people believed to be true and valuable about themselves and the environment, can shift when they get aware of this set of assumptions and dispositions (Hillier and Rooksby 2002).