Thinking with Pierre Bourdieu to analyse constraint and agency in the life trajectory of a temporally located subject Mary Sumner founder of the Mothers’ Union 1876

Why do agents perceive and negotiate the social world in the way they do?

How does an individual acquire a sense of possibilities, opportunities and values in relation to structures – such as the family, religion and education? Bourdieu seeks to understand the interaction of individual agents with the structures of society through the analytical ‘thinking tools’ of habitus [ social assumptions ‘mindset’], field [spheres of activity sites of power] and capital  [attributes acknowledged as having value both material and symbolic that can be transacted for advantage]. These related categories can encompass the themes of  religion, education, class, gender, ‘race’, empire and networks, and be used to unpick where power lies (and why) and how it is accumulated, and how transformations are negotiated.

Bourdieu’s key concept of reproduction engages with how dominant groups seek to uphold their position by securing the recognition of the legitimacy of their preferred values through the exercise of symbolic violence. 

Bourdieu helped me to engage with how and why Mary Sumner, despite the (apparent) constraints of gendered notions of appropriate conduct for women, achieved worldwide fame as an individual and secure recognition and a ‘voice’ representing women within the Anglican Church for the Mothers’ Union. and to position her as an agent of change re women/educational/religious/social practice and simultaneously both an agent of symbolic violence in upholding existing power structures re class, race and region, and also a victim of symbolic violence as a women.

Through his understanding of reflexivity Bourdieu reminds that author/subject

are involved and warns of the fallacy of objectivity.