Pierre Bourdieu: Objectivism vs Subjectivism

”I was beginning to suspect that the privilege granted to scientific and objectivist analysis (geneaological reserach, for example), in dealing with the natives' vision of things, was perhaps an ideology inherent in the profession.

In short, I wanted to abandon the cavalier point of view of the anthropologist who draws up plans, maps, diagrams and genealogies. That is all very well, and inevitable, as one moment, that of objectivism, in the anthropologist's procedures.

But you shouldn't forget the other possible relation to the social world, that of agents really engaged in the market, for example - the level that I am interested in mapping out. One must thus draw up a theory of this non-theoretical, partial, somewhat down-to-earth relationship with the social world that is the relation of ordinary experience.

And one must also establish a theory of the theoretical relationship, a theory of all the implications, starting with the breaking off of practical belonging and immediate investment, and its transformation into the distant, detatched relationship that defined the scientist's position."

(Bourdieu 1994d: 20-21).