And the winner is...

This week I’ll show you the best sociologist, according to me of course, Pierre Bourdieu. He was born on August 1, 1930 and died on January 23, 2002.

Bourdieu was very poor and during his successful academic years he said that born in a poor village, to the inner France, make him a no-Parisian academic, relatively outsider because his manners and provincial Accent.

His work shines with original categories like “Symbolic Violence” where shows and explain a determinate cultural judgment imposition, in other words, explain how school reproduces middle social sectors common sense, teaches and qualifies students since that cultural heritage which acts like an “a priori” filter of the instruction and evaluation. Another original concept is “habitus” that allow us to understand the exteriorization- interiorization principle of the subjects inside of structurants structures and structurables. This concept explains better the action predisposition of the actors from their society relationship, Bourdieu said: “ I want to demonstrate that education and culture aren’t simple hobby with secondary influence. They are very important to state and reproduce differences between groups and social classes”.

His conviction about the most of institutions and social conventions are useful to keep “status quo” and generalized social inequality comes to some people that criticize him say that Bourdieu is contradictory because his high qualification even if he was born in a poor village, however Bourdieu explains that because “system allows to enter a symbolic number of lower classes students to keep “meritocracy” illusion”.

For these reasons I think that Pierre Bordieu is the best, because criticize the system from the system as well, he was an outsider but he can reach the top of the academic and intellectual world, simply wonderful, and the most important of his career was the search for the construction of a interdisciplinary practice according to scientific step forward of science itself and according to dominated social sectors.

video: didactic and informative introduction about Pierre Bourdieu.

image: The very famous map wich explains the four positions of capital and how, depending of the amount of capital, subjects move among this categories. (click to large view)

Me sociologist?

When I started to study after high school, I did a bachelor’s degree because I wasn’t sure about what to study, after this I studied science, Mathematics to be more exact because I always like it however this like last only 2 years since every subject that I learned got me away from reality, everything going more and more abstract to me and I realized that this couldn’t become my lifetime work. So I changed my priorities and I was looking for a new career, a career that keep me with feet on the ground, in contact with people, doing things that contributes to help people in the present, try to make a real difference. For this reason I chose sociology, because this career, I suppose, will give me all I need for what I looking for.

Well, a sociologist can contribute to the society in many ways, but the most of them are indirect because sociologist use tools to work, but is not in the decision process to contribute to improve society, in other words, sociologist contributes to decision process (in government, enterprises, etc) through his/her work.

About the tools questions it’s important to say that a sociologist have a very impressive “arsenal” that helps him in his work, and the efectiveness of each tool depends of what the sociologist want to study because every tool gives a different data. For example, a survey could give interesting data about “likes and dislikes” of many people, thousand, millions, but surveys can’t search in the depth of people feelings needed for another kind of studies, for this it’s needed a “depth interview”, other of the useful tools that give to the sociologist additional data for the investigation. Statistics are other of the most important tools of sociologist because with statistics the sociologist can explain mass behavior doing regressions, correlations, logarithmic models, etc, all of this with classical statistics formulas or using famous SPSS, a statistic relative software that make the sociologist life easier than before.

Finally, my favourite subject since I began to study sociology is no one, no one because there is not a single one; my favourite subjects are in the methodology area, practical subjects, like Qualitative and Quantitative Methodologies, instead of theoretical ones, because these subjects are among the reasons for what I began to study sociology, to do concrete things, real things, real change.