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.they must be tempting for some of the people,don t you think? (Bourdieu et al., 1999: 118).This raises ethical questionsof interventionism and direction of the research topics nowhere discussedthroughout the book despite the great attention given to the interview situ-ation.Early on in the book, to a white French couple living in a roughhousing estate, Bourdieu and Christin ask And the neighbourhood, isn t itdangerous for the girls? (Bourdieu et al., 1999: 20).Such a question pre-supposes that it might be reasonable to assume that those troublesomepeople who have just been discussed ( for an Arab he was great ) are also Uses Cultural Studies 10/3/05 11:52 am Page 180180 Further Materials I: Bourdieu s Weight of the Worldlikely to be sexually criminal, in fact the woman replies No no its fine.No its mostly the noise, things like that.Bourdieu argues that these individuals can be helped to understand theirown structural position, and that what would otherwise be invisible or dif-ficult for them to articulate without prior access to university education,can find expression under interview conditions such as these.The habitus(the terrain of dispositions and routine unthought-about gestures, actions,assumptions) can thus be rendered more malleable and open to change.Once again this attributes enormous weight to the research endeavours ofthe team, such that this single exercise becomes a kind of pedagogy or evensocial psychotherapy.But does better understanding necessarily lead to thekind of political or ethical outlook which Bourdieu would endorse? Myanswer would be that there can be no such guarantees.The direction inwhich the habitus is shifted by such interventions as these remains uncer-tain.And, on the impact of the interview , who is to know that youngdisadvantaged people like the two boys Ali and Francois are otherwiseincapable of explaining their own circumstances? It would take a differentkind of study, one that would entail lengthy periods of deep hanging out(Clifford, 1997) and would involve getting to know not just the boys but thewhole cultural environment including their engagement with non-verbalforms such as music, clothes, the objects of the consumer culture, the mediathey watched or listened to, to be able to develop a full understanding ofhow social structure including specific location corresponds with individ-ual accounts.Paul Willis succeeded many years ago in producing a complexanalysis of working-class lads and the counter-school culture (Willis, 1978).But the capacity of the lads to generate a counter-culture was alreadythere, it certainly did not rely on the magical presence of Paul Willis.Nowadays this kind of research typically attempts to draw in more activelythe participation of respondents, providing them with video cameras, bring-ing them together to report back on their activities, planning follow upevents, ending the project with exhibitions, user-group activities and soon, in a bid to create more democratic ethnographic modalities and also touse the process to produce some collaborative outcome (see also Clifford,1997).The trump card for Bourdieu is clearly the strategy to let the respon-dents speak out, where editing is done with a light touch.But the work isnot to be judged on the truth of the voices, but ultimately on what is donewith them.We might surmise that exactly what Bourdieu wanted to avoidwas the kind of work associated with Hebdige, whose attention to the signsof the punk subculture produced a textual analysis without any reference to Uses Cultural Studies 10/3/05 11:52 am Page 181Further Materials I: Bourdieu s Weight of the World 181the subjects of punk and their testimony (Hebdige, 1978).Bourdieu in con-trast sticks resolutely to the interview format.But surely the effectivity ofthe interview in provoking self-reflection for social understanding andpotentially action for change, is even more problematic (and inflated) as aclaim, than the ascription of resistance ever was to the iconography ofyouth culture?Allowing the interviewers to find respondents through chains of friends,neighbours or acquaintances sometimes suggests sociological opportunism.Rosine Christin talks with a woman, the daughter of farmer friends of hers,now living in Paris.She persuades the woman to bring her to work on thenight shift, once there the interviewer finds an opportunity to talk with aman which she duly reports on. Michel B, a short dark man with a mous-tache, about 60, is the division inspector, a position above TM.He has spenthis whole working life in the postal service on the night shift. (H)e remem-bers his arrival in Paris.and so on.It is almost as though the interviewerliterally bumped into somebody she thought might have something inter-esting to say.Consequently the account she offers is sociologically banal,mere reportage of degrees of misfortune, prompting (I am sorry to say) almostthe complete opposite effect which Bourdieu claims, a kind of so what? Theclosing words are a commentary on the failing marriage of the respondent things weren t going very well.everything had looked bleak (Bourdieuet al., 1999: 308).The emotive tone asks for the reader to respond withempathy, but the seemingly random way in which we are presented withthese lives torn from context and lacking in thick description disallows amore engaged response.This then is a mixed bag of misfortunes.The material includes interviews carried out in the US as well as inFrance.Loic Wacquant, who has published accounts of boxing and ghettolife in Chicago, contributes sections on hustling in the neighbourhoodcalled The Zone.Bourdieu argues in the preamble for a rigorous analysis ofthe relations between the structures of social space and those of physicalspace.The lack of capital chains one to a place (Bourdieu et al., 1999:127). Bringing together on a single site a population homogenous in itsdispossession strengthens that dispossession, notably with respect to cul-ture and cultural practices. (ibid.: 129)
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