SOURCE: Shiach, Morag. “‘Cultural Studies’ and the Work of Pierre Bourdieu.” French Cultural Studies 4, no. 12 (October 1993): 213-23.

In the following essay, Shiach outlines the difficulties of placing Bourdieu's cultural theory within British cultural studies.

Pierre Bourdieu's work has always presented something of a problem for the discipline of cultural studies in Britain, largely because it seems to operate along the fault line between textual analysis and sociological critique which has for so long disturbed the discipline's self-constitution. When Nicholas Garnham and Raymond Williams talk of Bourdieu as offering a possible ‘mediation’ between the traditions of cultural analysis represented by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and the film journal Screen, they seem to identify very precisely this ‘difficulty’, if perhaps expressing an exaggerated optimism about its possible resolution (Garnham and Williams 1980). The extent of the difficulty in assimilating Bourdieu's work is perhaps signalled by his absence from...