Bourdieu’s Field Theory Revisited: A Case for ‘National Signification’

ABSTRACT

This essay investigates whether the term national signification may serve better than the more common national identity to describe how sports people variously enrol and reference the nation to position themselves and their practice. Taking the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu as a ground for analysis, this essay investigates four cases involving elite athletes from Norway to situate them within the field of sports culture and the larger fields of power and class relations. For Bourdieu actors’ ‘practical sense’ mediated between their subjective striving for autonomy and the objective weight of structured class relations. This essay shows how these athletes’ struggle for relative autonomy is differently expressed by the way they enlist the nation to position themselves within the field of power. An athlete’s positions within the larger, structured fields circumscribe their articulatory space, and realising this state of affairs can aid our understanding of how these elite practitioners differently enlist the national sign in their specific quest for cultural autonomy. The analysis shows athletes that are better placed in economic terms can afford to take greater risks when it comes to the national signifier. Conversely, a relative smaller access to economic gain appears to correlate with an increase in the importance granted to the national signifier. Thus, the nation becomes a sign that can be actively enlisted in an ongoing struggle for relative autonomy from the field of class relations, rather than an attribute that is passively endorsed by them. What this suggests is that a term such as national identity is less descriptive for the actual work of these elite players; instead, we propose that an active national signification more aptly describe how these cultural actors enlist a highly coveted sign to achieve their specific aim.

KEYWORDS:

• Nation and nationalism
• sociology
• Bourdieu
• semiotics
• elite sports

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The author wishes to thank Pål Bjerketvedt, Prof. Emeritus Chris Norris, Prof. Mike McNamee, and the reviewers of the Sport, Ethics and Philosophy journal for their helpful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this text.

2. Anthony Smith, a professor with London School of Economics, proposed ethno-nationalism as a distinct term (Smith 2009). It will not form part of the discussion in this essay.

3. To be more precise, when Bourdieu invoked the nation he would tend to refer to it as a space that stood in opposition to an international or, as some would say today, globalist domain, i.e. the nation stood in for the local (see, e.g. Bourdieu 1999b, 227; cf. Esmark 2006, 111–113). This distinguished Bourdieu from some of his contemporaries, such as Benedict Anderson, for whom the nation clearly was a temporal, limited concept.

4. Most well-known of these is the voluminous Distinction (1984).

5. While some of Pierre Bourdieu’s key concepts, such as habitus and dispositions, are certainly not new in social analysis, the quote from Gibbons reveal just how disastrous a popular understanding of sociological concepts can be when coupled with a wide-ranging and, we may add, ideological reappropriation of them. To Bourdieu the term habitus described ‘a system of lasting, transposable dispositions which, integrating past experiences, functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions and makes possible the achievement of infinitely diversified tasks, thanks to analogical transfers of schemes permitting the solution of similarly shaped problems, and thanks to the unceasing corrections of the results obtained, dialectically produced by those results’ (Bourdieu 1977, 82–83). Importantly, for Bourdieu the habitus is generated at the level of social class, which means that it resides on a deeper and more enduring level than any actor’s disposition to perceive, think and act. Instead, the habitus has the capacity to reach across generations, which makes the term ‘class habitus’ appropriate. To put it differently, habitus is descriptive of our sedimented dispositions, particularly with regard to how these dispositions are organised by class position. For these reasons, Gibbon’s term ‘emotional habitus’ is a curious animal, since it does not account for the sense of Bourdieu’s term, even as it comes across as an attempt by the author to seek recognition as an expert on Bourdieu’s terminology.

6. The difference between a more traditional framework organised around the concept of identity and the one suggested here, what we call an approach the takes ‘signification’ as its cue, is best understood in the context of a theory of articulation, such as the one we find in Laclau and Mouffe (1987). The distinction we want to emphasise can be expressed in terms of the ‘identity’ of an object, such as a football. Within more traditional sociological theories the ‘identity’ of this object can be established by reference to its ‘referential materiality’; however, to Laclau and Mouffe the spherical object only becomes a football when it ‘establishes a system of relations with other objects’, which is to say that the same ‘spherical object’ can have various destinies, contingent on its specific context of articulation. For our purpose, it is well worthing noting that Laclau and Mouffe specifically advises that it is this context that ‘constitutes the subject position of the social agent, and not, therefore, the social agent which is the origin of discourse—the same system of rules that makes that spherical object into a football, makes me a player’. In this essay, therefore, the term ‘national signification’ positions this social agent within a specifically national context; however, the sense or meaning of an agent within such a context is not given, but a matter of articulation, and in so far as the agent or actor can take an active part in this articulation we can refer to it as strategic. National signification, then, is a term used here to describe the actor or agents active, strategic mobilisation of the national signifier in an act of articulation, or positioning, in a social context.

7. This supplementary logic, as an attempt to overcome the relatively entrenched division between sociology and semiotics, was further developed in Fjeld (2016); cf. Bowman (2007).

8. Bourdieu explained the specific connection between what he called symbolic capital and recognition thus: ‘Symbolic capital, that is to say, capital—in whatever form—insofar as it is represented, i.e. apprehended symbolically, in a relationship of knowledge or, more precisely, of misrecognition and recognition, presupposes the intervention of the habitus, as a socially constituted cognitive capacity’ (Bourdieu 1986, 283n3).

9. Bourdieu treated sport specifically in the two essays ‘Program for a sociology of sport’ (Bourdieu 1988) and ‘How can one be a sports fan?’ (1993b); however, many of the comments he makes elsewhere on topics such as the field of class relations and power, the various logics of the economic and cultural fields, and so on, are also addressed in more general terms, or in different contexts elsewhere in his oevre. Going into any further depth on these deliberations would bring this essay far beyond the boundaries of submissions for this journal; however, in the list references provided at the end of this article there are many leads should the reader wish to pursue further any of these topics.

10. Lie and Carlsen (2018). For simplicity’s sake we have made 1 USD equivalent to 10 NOK.

11. Norges Idrettsforbund (2022). All numbers are for 2021.

12. FIS, the Fédération Internationale de Ski, reports that they have 439 elite alpinists from Norway registered with them (2022).

13. Hjellen and Hagen (2013). It was clear from the beginning that the Chess Federation was reluctant to accept this rule, citing, e.g. Magnus Carlsen’s participation in competitions from the age of seven as a precondition for his later success.

14. Carlsen has successfully participated and reached prominence in both these games (Chessdom.com 2022; Levy 2020).

15. A point is to be made here on the relatively dominated position of chess in the field of sports or games, and how Carlsen sought to alleviate this domination by leveraging his access to the economic field in an attempt to overturn the established relation of sports in the national field. However, as this particular issue is not the main point here further comments will have to be delegated to a future essay.