My presentation for the 12th Conference of the European Sociological Association 2015, Prague 25-28.8. The general title of the ESA's Conference was «Differences, Inequalities and Sociological Imagination».

1. Some notes on methodology
in Pierre Bourdieu’s «The Weight of the World»
Lorenza Boninu,
Department of Political and Social Sciences,
University of Pisa
lboninu@gmail.com
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2.  The hermeneutic interview according Bourdieu.
 The polemic against methodological rigidity.
 The meaning of relational perspective and the
reflexivity.
 The political outcomes of Bourdieu’s approach.
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3. Bourdieu’s complex epistemology
leads to
political engagement as a coherent effect of the
sociologist’s trajectory in the academic field.
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4.  researcher's deep involvement in the issue;
 active and methodical listening;
 hybrid method in building and explaining the space of
different points of view;
 awareness of the work of construction done by science
(reflexivity);
 researcher's extensive knowledge of the matter.
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5.  For the social researchers the hermeneutic
interview is a tool of meticulous investigation.
 For the interviewees the hermenuetic interview is
a way of getting conscious of the social
mechanisms that influence the seemingly most
natural speech.
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6. References to literary models
References to philosophy
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7. Following the lead of novelists such as
Faulkner, Joyce or Woolf,
we must relinquish
the single, central, dominant, in a word, quasi-
divine, point of view that is all too easily adopted
by observers –
and by readers too, at least to the extent they do
not feel personally involved.
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8. We must work instead with the
multiple perspectives that
correspond to the multiplicity of
coexisting, and sometimes directly
competing, points of view.
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9. Social science, with its specificity, is the
common horizon for these suggestions to be
justified, in so far as they contribute to the
explanation of the empirical data.
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10. The social researcher will be able to connect
the humble and indispensable fieldwork
with a multiplicity of theoretical
contributions.
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11.  The refusal of «a methodology more scientist
than scientific».
 The rejection of the unscientific bias of «the
advocates of mystic union» .
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12. It needs to carefully evaluate the consequences
of the unequal positions in the social field of
both the interviewer and the interviewee.
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13. Only the reflexivity synonymous with
method, but a reflex reflexivity based on a
craft, on a sociological "feel" or "eye,"
allows one to perceive and monitor on the
spot, as the interview is actually taking
place, the effects of the social structure
within which it is occurring.
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14.  About the theoretical foundations of sociology.
 About the symbolic violence of the linguistic
mechanisms working in the social relationships,
notably in sociological field.
 About the possibilities of real resistence against
the world shaped by neoliberal doxa (strategic
functions of the so-called collective intellectual).
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15. The social scholar should be able to cross the
oppressive, narrow boundaries among the
disciplines, so as to move towards a «rational
utopianism» with the capacity of factually
affecting the social world.
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16.  The false neutrality of science is grounded on
a reductive and trivialising claim of
objectivity.
 The opinion polls or the news reports often
overlook the «effect of imposition» of
common sense, that is a social construct, not
natural at all.
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17. Sociology, as a scientific enterprise, should
struggle against the illusion of immediate
knowledge, by the mean of a constant
practice of reflexivity.
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18. It is and endless struggle towards the truth.
The truth of the social world is the object of
struggles in the social world and in the
sociological world which is committed to
producing the truth of the social world, the
struggle for the truth of the social world is
necessarily endless (And social science will never
come to the end of the effort to impose itself as a
science).
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19. Conducting an interview will have a double effect:
 on the interviewers' side, it is a true «spiritual
exercise that, through forgetfulness of self, aims at
a true conversion of the way we look at other
people in the ordinary circumstances of life»;
 on the interviewees' side it gives «an exceptional
opportunity to testify, to make themselves heard, to
carry their experience over from the private to the
public sphere».
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20.  The Weight of the World is a social
denouncement…
 … but it also unveils the unconscious way the
social conditioning works, shaping even the
individuals deepest beliefs.
 The interviews in The Weight of the World mean
to restore the possibility of self expressing for
those who are subjects to neoliberal doxa, without
manipulating their words and feelings.
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21.  According Bourdieu, when the sociologist
publicly takes the field, he repeats the Socratic
action to unveil, through maieutic inquiry, the
truth under social appearances.
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22. Only by this kind of maieutic activity and the
awareness (of the limits and the possibilities) that
follows it, the committed intellectuals will be able
to accomplish the true «Realpolitik of Reason”»,
i.e. to generalize the access to the universal.
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23. Any political program that fails to take full
advantage of the possibilities for action
(minimal though they may be) that science
can help uncover, can be considered
guilty of nonassistance to a person in danger.
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24. 24

25. Science can have nothing to do with the
totalizing excess of a dogmatic rationalism, at
one extreme, or with the aesthete's resignation to
nihilistic irrationality, at the other. It is content
with the partial and temporary truths that it can
conquer against the common perception and the
intellectual doxa, truths able to secure the only
rational means for using fully the margin of
maneuver left to liberty, that is to political
action»
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26. 26

27.  Bourdieu P., Leçon sur la leçon, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1982.
 Id., Für eine Realpolitik der Vernunft, in S. Müller-Rolli (edited by), Das Bildungswesen der Zukunft, Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta,
1987.
 Id., The Corporativism of the Universal. The Role of Intellectuals in the Modern World, in «Telos», 81 (1989).
 Id., Vive la crise! For heterodoxy in social science, in «Theory and Society», XVII, 5 (1988).
 Id. (sous la direction de), La Misère du monde, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1993 [Engl. transl., The Weight of the World. Social
Suffering in Contemporary Society, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1999].
 Id., Raisons pratiques. Sur la théorie de l’action, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1994.
 Id., Méditations pascaliennes. Eléments pour une philosophie négative, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1997.
 Id., Contre-feux. Propos pour servir à la résistance contre l’invasion néo-libérale, Paris, Éditions Liber, 1998.
 Id., Contre-feux 2. Pour un mouvement social européen, Paris, Édition Raison d’Agir, 2001.
 Id.., Science de la science et réflexivité: cours du Collège de France 2000-2001, Paris, Éditions Raison d’Agir, 2001 [Engl.
transl., Science of Science and Rflexivity, Cambridge, The University of Chicago Press and Polity Press, 2004].
 Id., Interventions politiques (1961-2000). Textes & contextes d’un mode d’intervention politique spécifique, Marseille,
Agone, 2002.
 Id., Esquisse pour une auto-analyse, Paris, Éditions Raisons d’Agir, 2004.
 Id., Id., Chamboredon J.-C., Le métier de sociologue, Paris, Mouton, 1967.
 Id., Wacquant L., Réponses. Pour une anthropologie réflexive, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1992 [Engl. transl., An Invitation to
Reflexive Sociology, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1992].
 Id, Chartier R. Le sociologue et l’historien, Paris, Agone, 2010.
 Id., Sur l’État. Cours au Collège de France (1989-1992), Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 2012.
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28. Thank you!
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