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The power of epistemological principles 

 
DEBORAH REED-DANAHAY, 2020, Bourdieu and Social Space: Mobilities, Trajectories, 

Emplacements, New York: Berghahn Books, 170 pp., ISBN  978-1-78920-353-0      

 

Keywords: social space; mobility; migration; trajectory; habitus   

The problem that American anthropologist Deborah Reed-Danahay sets out to solve in Bourdieu 

and Social Space (2020) is, as the title suggests, what Pierre Bourdieu really meant and did with 

the notion of social space. Reed-Danahay’s knowledge of Bourdieu’s life and work is well 

known (Reed-Danahay 2002; 2004; 2005). In the present study, however, this knowledge is 

deepened by new readings of selected works to better understand and apply not only a central 

concept but the whole of Bourdieu’s general theory of the economy of practices. Reed-Danahay 

accomplishes this via what has been called the “mother category” (Wacquant 2018:11) in 

Bourdieu’s social topology—social space—a concept that Bourdieu, according to the author, was 

less explicit in defining compared with habitus and field. The chosen modus operandi here is 

therefore new readings in order to closely examine how Bourdieu handled the question of 

spatiality throughout his production by constantly observing the relationship between spatial, 

temporal and social dimensions of social reality. 

 

Deborah Reed-Danahay’s aim is twofold: to provide a ”comprehensive overview of Bourdieu’s 

theory of social space across the span of his career” (2) and to make a contribution to the 

ongoing research on mobility and migration, where emplacement is said to be an emerging focus. 

Reed-Danahay thus argues “for an ethnographic approach to mobility that is informed by the 

concept of social space” (2) and that better can explain the voluntary or forced social and 



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geographical movements of individuals and groups from original to new settings and realities 

through physical and social space. Paths and passages that Bourdieu himself more technically 

depicted in terms of trajectories. Hence the book’s subtitle: Mobilities, Trajectories, 

Emplacements. 

 

Reed-Danahay primarily uses Bourdieu’s own theoretical tools in her investigation. The 

approach is well known from the author’s previous work on Bourdieu and from other 

researchers’ studies of Bourdieu (including Bourdieu’s own self-reflexive analyses). The primary 

reason for this being the forceful “world-making” that Bourdieu devoted himself to via his 

systemic concepts, and which might be best understood through exactly the critically affirmative 

approach to evaluate the opportunities and limitations in Bourdieu's research program, that Reed-

Danahay applies. 

 

The book consists of five chapters, an introduction and a conclusion. The first chapter contains 

the nowadays almost ritualistic element in the “field of Bourdieusian studies” where authors 

seems forced to repeatedly explain their basic understanding of Bourdieu’s “theoretical 

framework.” Then follows three chapters consisting of new readings of some of Bourdieu’s 

studies in Béarn, Kabylia and Algeria; the French literary field of Flaubert’s 19th century; the 

space of lifestyles and distinctions in France of the 1970s; the incipient neoliberal effects on the 

French housing market in the shift between the 1970s and 1980s; as well as Bourdieu’s 

investigations from the late 1980s and onwards on the State, the national social space and the 

“field of power.” Reed-Danahay then devotes Chapter 5 to an application of the insights from the 

foregoing pages onto a completely different empirical object—the European Union—outlining a 

tentative analysis of the union as a social space within which internally and externally generated 

mobility and migration, creates life situations where individuals and groups arrive in new social 

and physical spaces in search of more or less durable recognitions and emplacements. 

 

If Bourdieu’s subjectivist moment was strongly present in Reed-Danahay’s previous study of 

habitus and emotions (Reed-Danahay 2005), this time it is more of Bourdieu’s objectivist 

moment that meets the reader. This is logical and follows from the focus on social space. But 

when the author here also uses habitus to talk about the embodied structures of individuals and 



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groups, it sometimes becomes a bit too objectivist and almost formalistic when the author more 

than fifteen times explains habitus to be a “position in social space,” and that habitus “occupies a 

place in physical space and a position in social space” (22), when the general understanding is 

that the “theory of habitus rests, after all, upon a view of childhood inculcation that shapes the 

worldviews and dispositions of habitus” (97). This kind of objectivist formalism is unfortunate 

because it causes doubt in the advanced Bourdieu reader who soon may be irritated over other 

peculiarities that are at best unfortunate mistakes, but which could be signs of deeper 

misunderstandings. As when Reed-Danahay rightly points out that Bourdieu appreciated Erving 

Goffman’s work and considered the interactionist perspective indeed to be an important form of 

social explanation, but that it at the same time could not replace the analytical and explanatory 

power of the deeper and underlying structure (vis insita) that in fact both informs and structures 

interaction observed on the surface of social life. Here Bourdieu, to understand how this 

underlying structure is constituted, developed his theory of the historical differentiation and 

distribution of different forms of capital in advanced capitalist societies. However, when Reed-

Danahay conscientiously explains how Bourdieu understands and defines capital, an unfortunate 

error occurs twice in the transmission of a quote in which Bourdieu’s central explanatory term 

"immanent" becomes the similarly spelled but completely differently signifying "imminent" (30; 

67).  

 

Deborah Reed-Danahay undoubtedly belongs to the not too many who really have the training to 

rightly decipher Pierre Bourdieu’s multilayered work. Therefore, instead of devoting so many 

words and pages referring to countless other researchers who have done something that may 

possibly remind or converge with Bourdieu’s work, one would wish that Reed-Danahay had 

devoted more interest in the underlying epistemological principles that from the beginning to the 

end informed Bourdieu’s research program (Wacquant 2018). I am thinking of principles like 

that of the primacy of relations; the epistemological break with preconstructions; the construction 

of the object; of radical historicization; and the three spaces (and not only two) of Bourdieu’s 

social topology where the symbolic space arguably forms the most important dimension for 

understanding Bourdieu and how different types of arbitrary power relations, with the help of 

symbols, classifications and representation can be turned into legitimate dominance and a 

“natural” social order. With a more focused use of these principles the theoretical application on 



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the European Union in Chapter 5 would have looked quite different. A policy preconstruction 

like that other “social space” in the hands of EU-politicians and eurocrats, would for example 

never have been put on par with Bourdieu’s scientific notion bearing no deeper resemblance with 

the former term except for the name. And so would the attempt to construct the EU as a 

“supranational social space” (a scholarly preconstruction) when the union so clearly first forms 

an international social space between twenty-seven externally and internally differentiated states, 

territories, and populations. Some basic questions for constructing the object would from the 

outset have had to be asked, like: what is it that is at stake in the EU; what is the field specific 

capital that in the EU functions both as the valued property admitting for entry into the union, 

and as the active form of power that structures the underlying field of forces that constitutes 

hierarchies and polarities in the EU, and which also structures the field of struggles where 

interaction in the form of, say, classification struggles on issues such as citizenship, mobility, 

migration and various groups’ political recognition constantly constitute the political agenda. 

 

Deborah Reed-Danahay is an excellent reader and mediator of Bourdieu’s studies and 

publications. For readers who want one more book that will help them get an even deeper 

understanding of the relationship between Pierre Bourdieu’s social trajectory and his scientific 

work, this is an absolute masterpiece. However, for those who feel ready with this type of study 

and who are looking for more concrete guidance to the scientific craft itself, that is, the 

application of all or selected parts of Bourdieu’s extensive research program, this book is 

unfortunately not it, because when it comes to the creative theoretical application of parts of 

Bourdieu's research program onto a self-formulated problem and empirical material, Bourdieu 

and Social Space is not sufficiently convincing. 

 

Works Cited 

 

Reed-Danahay, Deborah. 2002. Remembering Pierre Bourdieu 1930-2002. Anthropological 

Quarterly, 75 (2) 375-380. 

 



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Reed-Danahay, Deborah. 2004. Tristes Paysans: Bourdieu’s Early Ethnography in Béarn and 

Kabylia. Anthropological Quarterly 77 (1) 87–106. 

 

Reed-Danahay, Deborah. 2005. Locating Bourdieu. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 

 

Wacquant, Loïc. 2018. Four Transversal Principles for Putting Bourdieu to Work. 

Anthropological Theory, 18 (1) 3-17. 

 

 

Raoul Galli holds a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from Stockholm University where he teaches 

at the Department of Social Anthropology and edits its educational booklet Key Concepts in 

Social Anthropology. Raoul Galli also holds a position as research coordinator in the Swedish 

Government Offices’ Delegation for Migration Studies. Guided in periods by Bourdieu-expert 

Donald Broady and anthropologists Johan Lindquist, Christina Garsten, Annika Rabo, and Ulf 

Hannerz – Galli in 2012 published his thesis and “Bourdieusian ethnography” The Field of 

Brands: Production of Recognition in the Stockholm Advertising World (Swedish title: 

Varumärkenas fält. Produktion av erkännande i Stockholms reklamvärld). 

 

 

 

© 2020 Raoul Galli 

 

 


