SOURCE: Reed-Danahay, Deborah. “Remembering Pierre Bourdieu: 1930-2002.” Anthropological Quarterly 75, no. 2 (spring 2002): 375-80.

In the following essay, Reed-Danahay presents an overview of Bourdieu's works.

Pierre Bourdieu died in Paris of cancer on January 23, 2002. He is survived by his wife of 40 years, Marie-Claire, and their three children Jerome, Emmanuel, and Laurent. Bourdieu was a prolific writer and significant post-war intellectual whose influence on contemporary thought in the social sciences and humanities has been immense. His key concepts of habitus, field, and symbolic capital continue to shape research and theory in many disciplines. The author of over 25 books, his Outline of a Theory of Practice is the best known of his works among American anthropologists.¹

Given the wide breadth of his writings, and the uneven timing of translations of his work, knowledge of Bourdieu's many contributions is scattered in the United States according to disciplinary interests, and there are relatively few...