Bourdieu the Ethnographer

A remarkable feature of the way in which Bourdieu’s work has been adopted in studies of language in society is the emphasis on Bourdieu as a macro-sociologist providing insights into the larger processes of structuration in tightly integrated First-World societies. Yet, Bourdieu himself consistently emphasized the ethnographic epistemological foundations of his work, and especially in the last years of his life abundantly acknowledged influences from ethnography. This paper delves into Bourdieu’s views on ethnography-as-epistemology, arguing that one of Bourdieu’s central concepts, habitus, should be seen as inextricably linked to situated ethnographic inquiry. Taking habitus as an ethnographic concept, we may find better ways of investigating problems of voice – the conditions for speaking in society. This point is illustrated with examples from the Belgian asylum procedure, where habituated conversational practices by the interviewer simultaneously appear to contain proleptic moves that ‘prepare’ the story of the applicant for the next step in the asylum procedure. We see in this form of simultaneity the on-the-spot, layered deployment of macro-social (institutional) conventions through conversational, co-operative practices.