Cambridge in the 1960s: intellectual debate as a form of institutional méconnaissance

The purpose of this paper is to revisit my ‘naïve’ experience of Cambridge in the 1960s in the light of the theoretical perspective on it which I subsequently (after 1980) found in the work of Bourdieu. This process involves a retrospective consideration of the extent to which my naïve experience and the Cambridge méconnaissance of its presumed privilege provided the elements which made me susceptible to the adoption of Bourdieu’s sociological analyses, and it also raises questions about the objective ‘scientificity’ of Bourdieu’s explanatory framework – asking whether the trans-cultural applicability of Bourdieu’s concepts derived from an affinity between our social and historical situations rather more than from their general, analytical validity. If the sociological explanations which Bourdieu developed of his own situations – which I assimilated to make sense of my own experiences – were, for both of us, functions of the conditions which they explained, the pertinent further question becomes: does the discourse of the sociology of education itself become a form of ‘méconnaissance’ which aids resistance to the very democratic challenges which it identifies?

Citation:
Robbins, D. (2010) 'Cambridge in the 1960s: intellectual debate as a form of institutional méconnaissance.' Cambridge Anthropology, 29 (2) pp.73-90..