In a Books and Culture review of Pierre Bourdieu’s newly-translated Sketch for Self-Analysis, D. Michael Lindsay reflects not only upon Bourdieu’s career but also upon his own:
Sketch for a Self-Analysis is a mosaic of childhood influences on the author, institutional affiliations that made a difference, and the personal and professional relationships that left marks on this scholar. Reading Bourdieu’s self-analysis forces the reader into a similar state of reflection. I found myself remembering analogous experiences in my own life. Like Bourdieu, I discovered sociology relatively late in my academic career. When I first began my graduate studies at Princeton, the sum of my sociology experience had been an introductory course as a college freshman ten years earlier. Just as the community surrounding the ENS played an important role throughout Bourdieu’s career, the community surrounding Princeton has shaped my own trajectory with surprising influence. It was there that my sociological interests were first aroused while working for George Gallup, Jr., on a book manuscript that became Surveying the Religious Landscape: Trends in U.S. Beliefs. Aside from the catchy title, my main contribution was to prepare brief analyses of Gallup’s data on nearly 100 aspects of religious belief in the United States. George generously named me a coauthor of the project, granting me much appreciated but as yet unearned credibility in the field of survey research.
Read the rest of Lindsay’s piece here.
