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••• Framing Bourdieu •••

in 1962 – working at the University of Lille and in Aron’s research group in the Ecole
des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales – Bourdieu pursued his interest in accultura-
tion in his analyses of the experiences of students. The uncertainty continued about
the ‘field’ within which his work should be located. The research report published as
a working paper of the Centre de Sociologie Européenne in 1964 was entitled ‘Les
étudiants et leurs études’, while the influential publication that adapted this research
report was entitled Les héritiers, les étudiants et la culture (1964).
The anthropological orientation of the book, expressed in the title, was confirmed by
an opening quotation from Margaret Mead, but it rapidly was regarded as a contribution
to the sociology of education. One strand of Bourdieu’s work in the 1960s did increas-
ingly seem to be located within the field of the sociology of education, culminating in
the publication of La reproduction in 1970 which, significantly, was sub-titled: Eléments
pour une théorie du système d’enseignement. This text was a turning-point, both in respect
of Bourdieu’s own approach to the analysis of educational and cultural phenomena and,
relatedly, in respect of the emergence of competing fields of reception across national
sub-fields. I have argued elsewhere (Robbins, 2000) that Bourdieu’s analyses of cultural
phenomena in the 1960s (in relation to museums/art galleries and in relation to pho-
tography, published, respectively, as L’amour de l’art, 1966, and Un art moyen, 1965) were
not liberated from the controlling conceptual framework of the sociology of education.
During the 1960s, Bourdieu’s interest in the accessibility of various cultural forms was
linked with his interest in access to education and to the problem of the dominance
within the educational system of exclusive cultural assumptions. La reproduction opened
the way to the study of cultural forms in themselves. It is important that Bourdieu con-
solidated this breakthrough by launching his own journal – Actes de la recherche en
sciences sociales – in 1975, introducing the first number with an article – ‘Méthode scien-
tifique et hiérarchie sociale des objets’ (Bourdieu, 1975) – which insisted that the com-
mon feature of his practice was that all phenomena should be subjected to social
scientific scrutiny regardless of whether the phenomena as such might prenotionally be
given ‘topic’ labels. Bourdieu sought to counteract the proliferation of ‘sociologies of’ –
of education, of culture, of religion, or whatever – and to counteract the tacit league
tables of sociological practice and practitioners whereby, for instance, the sociology of
religion might still retain dominant status by comparison with the sociology of sport.
The establishment of the Actes, specifically emphasizing the performativity of research,
was a deliberate attempt to subvert topic-specific journals and to institutionalize
research practice founded on methodology rather than phenomenal objects.
It was during the same period when Bourdieu was constructing his own ‘intellec-
tual field’ by means of the Actes de la recherche, that he also came to recognize the dis-
torting effects of communication between differently constituted national
intellectual fields. The years in which Homo academicus germinated spanned the
period in which Bourdieu moved from simply practising sociology of knowledge
towards recognizing that this sociology could become a form of international cross-
cultural action. Much of the information for that book was gathered at about 1968
when Bourdieu undertook a ‘sociology of knowledge’ analysis of Parisian higher edu-
cation. This was the period of Le métier de sociologue (1968), ‘Champ intellectuel et

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