- Lived:
- 1930–2002 · Denguin (Béarn, southwestern France), Algeria, Paris
- Tradition:
- French philosophy turned empirical sociology; theory of practice
- The Big Idea:
- Society lives inside your body — your tastes, accent, posture, and sense of what is "for people like us" are class made flesh, and that is how inequality reproduces itself without anyone giving orders.
- In their words:
- "Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier."
- If you remember one thing:
- The walls that keep people in their place are mostly invisible, and Bourdieu spent a lifetime measuring them — with surveys, interviews, and statistics — so that the people they enclose could at least see them.