Bourdieu's Theory of the Symbolic: Traditions and Innovations

This chapter identifies the various traditions of analysis that go into the making of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the symbolic, and specifies the way in which the author innovates with them, to surpass them in power and scope. Thus Bourdieu’s theory of the symbolic shares with the neo-Kantian view of symbolic systems as structuring structures, a recognition of their cognitive functions, and also finds a point of departure for a sociology of symbolic forms in Durkheim’s postulate of a correspondence between mental structures and social structures. The critical difference, however, is that in Bourdieu’s theory, the coherence of symbolic structures emanates not from the universal structures of the human mind, but from the structures of the material and social environment that both engenders human practice (which includes the practice of symbolism), and is constructed by it.