Cataloging Pierre Bourdieu's Books

The problems of culture and ideology have been studied in phenomenology, structuralism, and historical materialism, but they fail to make connections between theory and social reality. To solve this situation, Pierre Bourdieu proposes the Theory of Practice. This Theory of Practice, together with his notions of Cultural capital, Field, Habitus, Social reproduction, Symbolic power, and so on, are the subjects of 23 books written by Bourdieu up to 1991. Because the purpose of Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) is to guide users to the subject(s) of a given book, one would expect to find those conceptual categories present in the subject headings assigned to Bourdieu's books. This paper is a study of the subject headings given to those 23 books, and their different translations into English, Spanish, Portuguese, and German, comprising 89 records in OCLC as of December 1991. However, due to lack of availability one book and its respective record were eliminated, reducing the universe to 22 books and 88 records. It was found that most of the books erroneously received headings that do not correspond to their content, as the headings were assigned from the functi onalist paradigm. In general, LCSHs ignore the conceptual categories of other paradigms, do not match the current vocabulary used by social scientists, and are ideologically biased.