Cultural Property Law: A Practitioner's Guide to the Management, Protection, and Preservation of Heritage Resources Book

Truth be told, all you probably need out of this book is the editor's introduction. It's more than serviceable, rather excellent in fact, and you'll get all the important Bourdieusian conceptsâ„¢ you need ' field(s), habius, flavors of capital, how they all fit together in his general theory of practice. But if you like me fancy yourself some sort of intellectual and "above" the lowly act of perusing secondary texts you will plough on defiantly, whereupon six hours later you're sort of done but you do ponder to yourself if you got anymore out of it past the first half an hour spent on the introduction. My point, I guess, is that the marginal returns on time reading Bourdieu can be rather meagre. Why-ever do I put myself through this. I know, I know, the grand pursuit of cultural capital, and because I know to be a scholarâ„¢, to acquire that symbolic capital necessary to declare myself sociologist (and have others accept my claim therein), I must read the original Bourdieu, preferably in French.

All cultural products 'whatever your literary craft of choice ' are socially located. By this I mean they take place in the social world all of us live in: this is where they are produced, consumed, and consecrated (collective judgement of 'greatness'). Whatever would be call such a social context? Let's call it a field. A literary field. A field of cultural production, and so on. Fields of culture are subordinate to the grand field of power, but they are at least semi-autonomous (Bourdieu likes to say they correspond to, but do not reflect the field of power ' which is a nice way to put it.) and have their own internal logics. From this central axiom we can derive a whole slew of syllogisms. Hell I'm too lazy to talk about them. Read the editor's introduction. It's all there. But trust me it's good stuff. Great to think with. It's the best kind of social theory I think ' original and generative. I'm not sure how much more one can ever ask.