Sociolinguistic ISSN: 1750-8649 (print) Studies ISSN: 1750-8657 (online) Article Thinking about language with Bourdieu: Pointers for social theory in the language sciences Linus Salö Abstract This paper presents Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological gaze, agenda and toolkit to scholars of language, so as to offer a social theoretical framework within which sociolinguistic questions can be fruitfully investigated. It outlines Bourdieu’s dual conception of social life and presents the key thinking tools – field and habitus – with which this dualism can be explored empirically. In addition, it locates work produced at the nexus of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology where Bourdieusian insights have been productively employed. It also discusses Bourdieu’s reputation as a macro theorist, and argues that this image must be supplemented with an understanding of his idea that social reality also has a mode of existence in people’s bodies, habitus, and practices. The paper argues that Bourdieu’s gaze and thinking tools import with them a solid social theoretical base of the comprehension of human practice, including linguistic practice, which therefore offers some purchase to account for the relationship between the market side of language and its embodied manifestations. KEYWORDS: SOCIAL THEORY, PIERRE BOURDIEU, RELATIONAL THINKING, FIELD, HABITUS, PRACTICE Affiliation KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Stockholm University, Sweden email: [email protected] SOLS VOL 12.3-4 2018 523–543 https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.32916 © 2019, EQUINOX PUBLISHING 524 SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDIES 1 Introduction This paper outlines the impetus that the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu can give to sociolinguists and scholars of language alike. It does so with the modest aspiration that the gaze and thinking tools developed throughout Bourdieu’s research œuvre might spawn novel and productive ways of engaging with social theory. Since Bourdieu’s work has been known to language scholars for quite some time, the aim here is not so much to introduce Bourdieu but to deepen the sociolinguistic appraisal of his intellectual agenda. Thus, rather than focusing on widely employed pivotal concepts such as habitus, capital, field, and market per se, I shall draw attention to the epistemological foundations of such concepts, and the ‘metaprinciples for research’ (Swartz, 2013) they bring into the research prac- tice. In this spirit, continuing on the path set out by Hanks (2005), Grenfell (2011), Blommaert (2015), and others, I hold that a focus on Bourdieu’s thinking offers interesting inroads for theoretically solid investigations of language in social life. The backdrop of this endeavor is the circumstance – real or perceived – that several scholarly approaches to the study of language in society are in dire social theoretical straits. In the last few decades, a number of well-positioned scholars have argued that, counterintuitively, the socially interested language sciences are often weakly anchored in social theory. In the early 1990s, Cameron (1990:81, emphasis in original) critiqued (variationist) sociolinguistics for depending on ‘naive and simplistic social theory’ and for not being able to ‘relate the social to the linguistic’. In a similar vein, Williams (1992) produced a sociological critique of sociolinguistics (and the sociology of language), arguing in harsh tones that its social theoretical underpinnings had long been either absent or completely outdated. These are quite persistent issues. Reviewing the last few decades’ sociolinguistic work published in the flagship forum Journal of Sociolinguistics, longstanding editor Allan Bell stated that ‘Most sociolinguists are linguists by background rather than sociologists, thus we have not been strong on meshing our work with social theory’ (2016:395–396; see also Blommaert, 2018 for a kindred critique). Even though there are certainly notable exceptions to this description (e.g., Heller, 2011; Park and Wee, 2012), there are reasons to be concerned about this general state of affairs. Firstly, it is a commonplace that struggles unfolding over language are rarely about language alone (e.g., Woolard, 1998) or, as Bourdieu has put it, ‘Linguistic struggles may not have obvious linguistic bases’ (Bourdieu, 1993:80). If this is true – as many sociolinguists nowadays appear to believe it is – linguistic theory must be extended with credible ways of understanding human action and interpreting social phenomena to better grasp the interrelationship THINKING ABOUT LANGUAGE WITH BOURDIEU 525 between language and society. Secondly, social theory is, arguably, particularly vital in qualitative research trajectories, because theory constitutes a feature which renders scientific practice distinct from other knowledge-producing practices. Hence, as Gary Alan Fine has said, ‘Ethnographers differ from journalists mostly because of a six-letter word: theory’ (cited in Puddephatt, Shaffir, and Klenknecht, 2009:1). In this paper, I propose that the work of Bourdieu contains an invitation to language scholars to engage in social theory in productive ways – ways which inform our research and prod us into ‘thinking theoretically while we work ethnographically’ (Blommaert, 2005:228; see also Brubaker, 1993; Puddephatt, Shaffir, and Klenknecht, 2009). This is not a matter of adopting a theory. In general, I follow Broady (1991) in holding that Bourdieu does not offer a grand theory of society, but rather an envelope of epistemological outlooks and proce- dures for empirical scrutiny in the social sciences, including the social language sciences. Using these thinking tools effectively, I hold, requires an understanding of Bourdieu’s notion of dualism as a key epistemological preliminary from which his key concepts field and habitus derive. Like many other concepts in Bourdieu’s toolkit – interest, strategy, doxa, symbolic power, to name a few – these are ‘open concepts’ that are ill-suited to formalistic definitions (e.g., Broady, 1991; Wacquant, 1989b:5). I begin by presenting Bourdieu’s project and its relevance to studies of language in society. In exemplifying the applicability of Bourdieu’s thinking, I will make ample references to sociolinguistic work conducted at the Centre for Research on Bilingualism, Stockholm University, where the adoption of Bourdieusian thought increasingly stands out as a leitmotif. Next, I highlight some of the ways in which Bourdieu’s work may productively intersect with instances of the toolkit yielded out of the North American tradition of linguistic anthropology and recent advances in sociolinguistics. This is where I see my work as being theoretically positioned and, therefore, I exemplify throughout with references to my own work how such insights may be put to work in relation to a number of classic objects of sociolinguistic inquiry, such as competence and language choice. 2 Bourdieu: Epistemological preliminaries and thinking-tools for research Broadly, Bourdieu’s œuvre deals with practice and the workings of social worlds, including the study of culture, knowledge, social space, and symbolic power (Swartz, 1997 provides an overview). Broady (1983:21) foregrounds a two-sided strand with longstanding anchorage in Bourdieu’s work: on the one hand, the 526 SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDIES study of social space and the systems of positions it comprises; on the other, the study of people’s dispositions – habitus – that is, the capital that agents come to embody throughout their life trajectories, and which therefore orients their present and forthcoming actions. One can add to this Bourdieu’s profound interest in academic knowledge itself – epistemic reflexivity (see Salö, 2018) – as one of the most distinctive features of his scientific project (Broady, 1991). By and large, then, Bourdieu’s framework offers an inroad into understanding why agents are what they are and do what they do. As Blommaert (2005) points out, many of Bourdieu’s ideas have developed through ethnographic work. Habitus, for example, emerged out of early ethno- logy: fieldwork in Algeria and France in the ’60s and onwards. This fact notwithstanding, Bourdieu is often – and, in part, rightly so – seen as a macro theorist. For many, his work is associated with a data-oriented quantitative approach, presented in the form of statistical visualizations of the topographies of social space, broad theorizing on symbolic power, markets, and so on. However, as I shall signpost here, this is only one side of Bourdieu and his contribution to research, and in line with the stance put forth by Lizardo (2008), analysts can appropriate the tools and perspectives that seem useful and omit the rest. Boldly, it may be argued that this position resonates well with Bourdieu’s own eclectic relationship to the authorship of his intellectual predecessors. As far as I’m concerned, I have very pragmatic relationships with authors: I turn to them as I would to fellows and craft-masters, in the sense those words had in the mediaeval guild – people you can ask to give you a hand in difficult situations. (Bourdieu, 1990:28) In other words, it is certainly possible to utilize Bourdieu in a strict, programmatic sense, for example, concerning the order in which the analytical moments should be enacted (e.g., Wacquant, 1989a). However, that is not the advantage that will be the focus of this paper, which is more attuned to making the case for the value brought forth by Bourdieu-the-epistemologist. In what follows, I begin by introducing the idea of relational thinking. 3 Relational