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Martin Petzke, Bielefeld University
The theory of Pierre Bourdieu has more recently been discovered as a conceptual arsenal not just for historical sociology but also for postcolonial sociology. However, pleas to mobilize Bourdieusian theory for such ends have mostly focused on his concept of fields. The paper alerts to the as yet neglected concept of “de-particularization” from Bourdieu’s theory of the state, which resonates with a postcolonial move of “provincializing” symbolic structures that have grown out of particular contexts yet have been naturalized as universal standards. For Bourdieu, the state wields the monopoly of legitimate symbolic violence as it imposes a class- cultural particular as the official and universal view of the world. In the unification and integration of the state, non-official class-cultures are thereby disqualified as less accomplished forms of the dominant culture. Bourdieu has been less outspoken on the exact mechanisms of de-particularization. It is here where the paper builds on postcolonial perspectives in arguing that the universalization of a dominant culture within European metropoles and the universalization of Western culture in the context of colonial domination were mutually constitutive. Constructing analogies between dominated class-cultures in the metropole and the racialized Other in the colonies naturalized and legitimated a dominant cultural particular in the metropole. Drawing on examples from the "worker question" and the “Kulturkampf” in Imperial Germany, the paper argues that the conceptual armamentarium of Bourdieu is uniquely suited to investigate how internal and external processes of Othering were mutually reinforcing in the process of de-particularizing national cultures in emerging nation states.
No extended abstract or paper available
Presented in Session 55. Presidential Session: New Perspectives in Postcolonial Social Theory