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The opinions expressed on this page are mine alone. Any similarities to the views of my employer are completely coincidental.

Monday 25 September 2017

Symbolic violence and the art of the random citation

It is almost always nice to be cited: in fact in the era of evaluation by metrics it is in fact always nice to be cited. Nevertheless sometimes one wonders what one has done to deserve the honour. Take for instance the following paragraph from page 95 of Gillian Evans' 'Social class and the cultural turn: Anthropology, sociology and the post-industrial politics of the 21st century Britain'  The Sociological Review Monographs, 2017, 65, 1, 88-104 where I pop up as an authority right at the tail end.

"The problem, however, precisely because the research in Distinction is not ethnographic, is that the use of the social survey method has the unintended consequence of elaborating upon the project of the legitimization of Bourgeois Culture, and of lending to the set of social fields in which this process of legitimization plays out, the discipline of sociology (as evidenced in the social survey method) as another kind of bourgeois aesthetic, whose gaze on the world cannot help but act out in practice the symbolic violence of a scheme of class-ification, which renders invisible the sociality and rich cultural life of the French working classes. In other words, because of the problem of method in Distinction, the problem of bourgeois-ification in France is made worse, and, as a result, the political power of the analysis is diminished. Furthermore, this same problem has been imported to Britain, because of the attempt in British sociology to apply to the British case Bourdieu’s method of measuring social class as sets of Cultural capitals (Bennett et al., 2009). As a consequence, the symbolic violence of the social survey method is, ironically, undermining of the sociological attempt to revitalize, for good political reasons, the study of social class in Britain (Mills, 2014)."

Now I'm no anthropologists, as Dr Evans appears to be, and most of the meaning of the above seems to me to be impenetrably obscure - what kind of doing is 'elaborating upon the project of legitimization'? is it like modulation in jazz improvisation? Well, whatever.

 But my question is this. Why am I being cited here at all? I've written nothing whatever about symbolic violence though given the author's apparent beliefs about social surveys it's conceivable she might think I've committed a bit of it from time to time. 

Is the claim that all 'class-ification' or just that arising out of social surveys is bad? If it is the former how can any observational method, ethnographic or otherwise, abstract from the warp and weft of social reality "the sociality and rich cultural life of the French working classes" without some kind of of provisional classificatory scheme to tell us what is to count as sociality and richness? And if it is the latter, what is it exactly that is particularly symbolically violent about the way in which social surveys make use of classifications?

Perhaps this is all about some sort of turf war that I'm completely unaware of. At the very least, if it is some kind of playground High Noon,  I'd like to know whether my capacity for symbolic violence has been enlisted on the side of the guys with the white or the black hats.

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