Bourdieu Beyond the Western Gaze: Constructing Social Spaces and Fields In Asian Societies

Bourdieu’s research programme is one of the key sophisticated approaches in contemporary sociology. Nevertheless, research has so far been largely limited to Western societies. However, Asian societies have been playing a central role on the stage of global world events for a long time. Like Western societies, they are also subject to globalisation processes, but they are also characterised by their own path dependencies. Thus, Asian societies provide important contrasts to Western societies in terms of modernization and development trajectories. While Western social structures have been influenced by Enlightenment ideals, democratic governance, and moderated capitalism, many Asian societies have navigated modernity alongside Confucian, Buddhist, and other philosophies, first under post-colonial conditions and subsequently under the conditions of rather unregulated capitalism. The proposed panel thus explores the application and adaptation of Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptual framework – his concepts such as social space, field, habitus, class, and capital – in Asian contexts. By moving beyond the traditionally Western-centric interpretation of Bourdieu’s theories, we aim to investigate how these tools can illuminate social structures and power relations of and within Asian societies. Importantly, the panel invites contributions that empirically construct social spaces (such as for Asian societies as a whole) or fields (such as nationally or transnationally framed educational, economic, political, etc. spheres) using geometric data analysis and related methods. And, overall, in the spirit of Bourdieusian collective reflexivity, the panel aims for fostering dialogue between Western and Asian socio-cultural realities.