Published in South Africa by:

      Wits University Press

      1 Jan Smuts Avenue

      Johannesburg

       www.witspress.co.za

      Copyright© Michael Burawoy and Karl von Holdt 2012

      First published 2012

      ISBN (print) 978-1-86814-540-9

      ISBN (EPUB - IPG) 978-1-86814-783-0

      ISBN (EPUB - ROW) 978-1-86814-785-4

      ISBN (PDF) 978-1-86814-540-9

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.

      Edited by Alex Potter

      Cover design and layout by Hothouse South Africa

      Printed and bound by Paarl Media

      CONTENTS

       ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS

      PREFACE MICHAEL BURAWOY

      PROLOGUE: The Johannesburg MomentKARL VON HOLDT

       CONVERSATION 1 SOCIOLOGY AS A COMBAT SPORT

      Bourdieu Meets BourdieuMICHAEL BURAWOY

      Bourdieu in South AfricaKARL VON HOLDT

       CONVERSATION 2 THEORY AND PRACTICE

      Marx Meets BourdieuMICHAEL BURAWOY

      Bodies of DefianceKARL VON HOLDT

       CONVERSATION 3 CULTURAL DOMINATION

      Gramsci Meets BourdieuMICHAEL BURAWOY

      Symbolic ChallengeKARL VON HOLDT

       CONVERSATION 4 COLONIALISM AND REVOLUTION

      Fanon Meets BourdieuMICHAEL BURAWOY

      ViolenceKARL VON HOLDT

       CONVERSATION 5 PEDAGOGY OF THE OPRESSED

      Freire Meets BourdieuMICHAEL BURAWOY

      DisciplineKARL VON HOLDT

       CONVERSATION 6 THE ANTINOMIES OF FEMINISM

      Beauvoir Meets BourdieuMICHAEL BURAWOY

      Transforming Patriarchy?KARL VON HOLDT

       CONVERSATION 7 Intellectuals and Their Publics

      Mills Meets BourdieuMICHAEL BURAWOY

      The Symbolic World of PoliticsKARL VON HOLDT

       CONVERSATION 8 MANUFACTURING DISSENT

      Burawoy Meets BourdieuMICHAEL BURAWOY

      The Margin of FreedomKARL VON HOLDT

      EPILOGUE: Travelling Theory MICHAEL BURAWOY

       BIBLIOGRAPHY

       INDEX

ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS

PREFACE

      MICHAEL BURAWOY

      My four-year stint with the Ford PhDs, which had brought me to the University of the Witwatersrand for three weeks every year, had come to an end. Karl von Holdt, then acting director of SWOP (the Society, Work and Development Institute) invited me to come to Wits for a semester on a Mellon Visiting Professorship. I would work with students and faculty and also give public lectures. There was interest in my giving lectures on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, which I had previously done at the University of Wisconsin. I revised and expanded these lectures from six to eight. As at Wisconsin, the idea was to bring together faculty and students from different departments and develop another side to SWOP’s activities.

      But Wits would be a different experience altogether, as Bourdieu was not the popular theorist in South Africa that he was in Wisconsin. After all, Bourdieu was not only a theorist of the North and from the North, but more specifically of France and from France, which made him more unfamiliar than Anglo-American theorists. His convoluted style of writing, his elliptical sentences, his erudition and his philosophical grounding – in sum, his deployment of cultural capital – make his work challenging to access.

      As I had done in Wisconsin, I sought to interpret Bourdieu by presenting his ideas in relation to Marxism through a series of imaginary conversations between Bourdieu and Marx, Gramsci, Fanon, Freire, Beauvoir, Mills and myself, respectively. Bourdieu makes reference to Marx – indeed, his work is a deep engagement with Marx (as well as Durkheim and Weber) – but Marx never receives a sustained examination. As for Gramsci, Fanon and Beauvoir, his scattered references and footnotes are contemptuous, while Freire and Mills hardly get a mention. Nonetheless, there are some interesting parallels and convergences with these theorists that more often than not evaporate under closer examination. My endeavour was to rescue these figures buried in Bourdieu with a view to problematising