Participant Objectivation

Abstract

On December 6, 2000, the Royal Institute of Anthropology in London celebrated the great French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and awarded him the famous Huxley Medal. On this occasion Bourdieu gave what was perhaps one of the most profound lectures of his life, concerning the delicate matter of the deep– rooted and inherent, ambiguous, and cognitively influential relationship that arises between the knowing subject and its object, or in other words answering the question: What is reflexive sociology? The lecture was first published posthumously (in 2002) – translated from French into English – in Volume 9 of the Journal of the Royal Institute of Anthropology (2003), and later the same year in its original form in the journal that had been supervised by Bourdieu himself – Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales (ARSS), volume 150. In this lecture, Bourdieu explains in depth the difference between deconstructing the narcissistic dimension in the relationship of the knowing subject with the subject, and the deconstruction of social conditions that produce and position the knowing self itself, as a positioned subject. In so addressing this topic, Bourdieu takes on his many and diverse opponents, from Roland Barthes to Geertz, Fischer, R. Rosaldo and the so–called "post–modernists" – and many others besides them. Because of the epistemological import of this lecture, and to enable it to make a broad theoretical contribution to Arab sociological production at its core, Omran is publishing a precise Arabic translation of the text – based on its original French version – in the hope that we can provide a valuable service to Arabic readers in the field and to critical studies in Arabic.