SOURCE: McCann, Sean. “Reintroduction of the Specialists.” American Quarterly 49, no. 1 (March 1997): 183-92.

In the following essay, McCann analyzes possible reasons for the neglect of Bourdieu in the United States, using The Field of Cultural Production as the basis for this assessment.

Of the French intellectuals who have arrived on American shores to transform the humanities in the last several decades, perhaps no one has received a more partial and limiting reception than Pierre Bourdieu. Compared to peers like Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, and Lacan, whose ideas have attracted countless exegeses and attacks and who have inspired innumerable acolytes, Bourdieu's experience in the American academy looks, despite his great prestige, almost lonely. In the humanities it is difficult to find many scholars who define their work as Bourdieuian. (The adjective, which is ready to hand for the major poststructuralists, does not even exist for Bourdieu, and he would undoubtedly oppose...