The bachelors' ball : the crisis of peasant society in Béarn / Pierre Bourdieu ; translated by Richard Nice.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bourdieu, Pierre, 1930-2002

Standardized Title:

Bal des célibataires. English

Language:

English

French

Subjects (All):

Single people--France--Béarn.

Single people.

Marriage--France--Béarn.

Marriage.

Sociology, Rural--France--Béarn.

Sociology, Rural.

Béarn (France)--Rural conditions.

Béarn (France).

France--Béarn.

Physical Description:

vi, 205 pages : illustrations, plan ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Summary:

The enforced bachelorhood of eldest sons in traditional French rural society was a subject to which Pierre Bourdieu devoted three major articles, written at widely spaced moments in his career as a sociologist and ethnographer. He brings them together in this book, with an introduction in which he presents them as stages in "a kind of intellectual Bildungsroman" through which one can follow the development of his theory of practice: from phenomenological observation and analysis of structures, through the notion of strategy (as opposed to rule), to the mature conceptual apparatus which subtly analyzes the interrelations of field, symbolic capital, and habitus in a unified matrimonial market which condemns the peasantry to irreversible decline. The opening scene, which is observed - with the astute eye of a novelist - at a country dance and which gives the book its title, can ultimately be seen as a paradigm of the collapse of traditional French rural society.

This book gives the reader sociological and anthropological insight into the interaction of occupation, social class and marriage and how these factors affect smaller communities, and provides a penetrating analysis of the disintegration of rural communities and the nature of social change.

Contents:

Bachelorhood and the peasant condition

The system of matrimonial exchanges in traditional peasant society

Internal contradictions and anomy

The opposition between the bourg and the hameaux

The peasant and his body

Conclusion

Bibliographical notes

Changes in population, 1836-1954

Dialogue between a villager and a peasant

Another dialogue between a villager and a bachelor

The exemplary tale of a younger son from a modest family

Excessive maternal authority and bachelorhood

An attempt to generalize : bachelorhood in 16 rural cantons in Brittany.

Notes:

Articles previously published in 1962, 1972, and 1989.

Includes bibliographical references (pages [160]-163) and index.

ISBN:

9780226067490

0226067491

9780226067506

0226067505

OCLC:

174501833

Online:

Contributor biographical information

Publisher description