One of the pervasive themes of our study this semester has been the concept of power; the different forms of its manifestation and the its implications on society throughout history. In Reading Pierre Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice, I found power to again play an integral role in this week’s material. Utilizing his field observations in Kabylia to provide a contextual example of his practice theory, Bourdieu presents power, or some form of it, as a central component of social interaction.
Notions of power are immediately presented in Bourdieu’s discussion of challenge and riposte in Kabylia. The author invokes the process of gift giving and receiving as a specific example illuminating inequalities of power in Kabylian society and the constructed conciousness by which the system perpetuates itself. Through these interactions, power is exerted, albeit indirectly, through the challenge to a man’s honour by his response to a given gift. The giver’s power over the receiver is thus manifested through the indebtedness of receiver to giver. Once a riposte has been made, power shifts from the original giver to the original receiver, and thus through a continual process of preserving one’s honour the actors become locked into a perpetual struggle for power. Of course, if the original receiver is unable to respond with a gift of his own, “a gift which is not matched by a counter-gift creates a lasting bond, restricting the debtor’s freedom and forcing him to adopt a peaceful, co-operative, prudent attitude.” (195)
In her essay Toward a Feminist, Minority, Postcolonial, Subaltern, etc., Theory of Practice Sherry B. Ortner critiques Bourdieu’s practice theory for its lack of focus on power struggles. Ortner argues that the “practices of power” in Bourdieu’s analysis are not true manifestations of power, as they “are largely utilitarian and economistic.” (4) However, it seems that these relations too, despite the absence of violence and other characteristics of power exertion, certainly constitute a viable form of power, within the social framework of a pre-capitalist society. Power, it seems, is an integral aspect of all social interaction and it is the nature of that interaction that constitutes the specific manner in which power relations manifest themselves.
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