The Bachelors' Ball: The Crisis of Peasant Society in Béarn

The enforced bachelorhood of eldest sons in traditional French rural society was a subject to which Pierre Bourdieu devoted three major articles, written at widely spaced moments in his career as a sociologist and ethnographer. He brings them together in this book, with an introduction in which he presents them as stages in a kind of intellectual Bildungsroman through which one can follow development of his theory of practice: from phenomenological observation and analysis of structures, through the notion of strategy (as opposed to rule), to the mature conceptual apparatus which subtly analyses the interrelations of field, symbolic capital and habitus in a unified matrimonial market which condemns the peasantry to irreversible decline. The opening scene, which is observed with the astute eye of a novelist at a country dance and which gives the book its title, can ultimately be seen as a paradigm of the collapse of traditional French rural society.