Revista Colombiana de Sociología (Jan 2018)
Convergence and divergence in Distinction. A social critique of the judgment of taste and Peasant society in the colombian Andes: a sociological study of saucío
Abstract
The present text presents a comparative analysis between two fundamental works f the respective authors: Peasant Society in the Colombian Andes: a Sociological Study of Saucío by Orlando Fals Borda and Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste by Pierre Bourdieu. The article aims to establish convergences and divergences between such different pieces of research, whose methodologies are nonetheless similar. Halfway through the twentieth century, in the context of contemporary sociology’s boom and configuration, it is no wonder that in places as different as rural Colombia and urban France the necessity arose to study the differences in the levels of belonging to a social class and the positioning within this, recurrent aspects in both texts. For example, the characteristics of physical space (Fals Borda) and symbolic space (Bourdieu), and their “becomings” in what Bourdieu called classification and declassification are criteria also investigated by the Colombian sociologist under his own concepts. The results are responses to the necessity of a diagnosis: to know what happens in rural Andean society, on the one hand, and in French society, on the other, from phenomena and places as elementary as the school and the local store of Saucío to the expansion of the educative levels and scopes. In order to reach their objectives, the authors had to review society and to review themselves to understand such complex and diffuse categories as lifestyles reflected in music, home decoration/utensils and all types of material and symbolic inventory. With this base, the authors were able to understand the configuration of all type of social relations and the positioning of individuals and agents. Although the geospatial and epistemological places are different, both works are sociologically all-encompassing, as each is a form of understanding the rural world and the urban one by questioning the way in which society and community recognize themselves.
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