Waiting for Bourdieu, Still: The Appropriation of Critical Concepts in Brazil and Latin America

The paper analyzes the Brazilian reception of the main critical concepts and theoretical notions of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology, such as habitus, symbolic violence, field, and various forms of capital — including cultural, political, intellectual, economic, and symbolic capital. Our objective, however, is twofold: in addition to analyzing the Brazilian appropriation of Bourdieu’s critical categories, we propose a comparison with other South American countries. From an empirical standpoint, our primary source of analysis is a corpus of texts extracted from the database comprising the main Social Sciences journals indexed on the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) platform in Brazil (Scielo.br). Methodologically, we conduct an analysis that evaluates the patterns of use of these concepts within the set of analyzed texts, utilizing both Atlas.ti and Sphinx Léxica. In line with previous partial results (Campos & Szwako 2019), the analysis of the Brazilian reception pattern contradicts common perceptions about Bourdieu in Brazil. First, unlike in other South American countries, the notion of field gained theoretical prominence over other concepts, while its conceptual scope tends to narrow, losing some of its specificity and analytical depth. On the other hand, concepts more central in other national traditions, such as the notion of habitus, are relatively marginal. In our view, this pattern of reception can be understood in light of the mediations and intellectual mediators who facilitate the adaptation of the French sociologist's work to the Brazilian context.