Limites ingenii definire: Bourdieu's epistemological question and its significance for archaeology

• Main Author: Teodorski Marko
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Sociological Scientific Society of Serbia 2009-01-01
• Series: Sociologija
• Subjects: symbolic violence; transfer into the other; researcher and object; double objectivation; realist construction
• Online Access: http://www.doiserbia.nb.rs/img/doi/0038-0318/2009/0038-03180904385T.pdf

The paper presents and discusses Bourdieu's perspective on the relationship between observer and observed. The term 'symbolic violence' will also be discussed, as it is an inevitable element of this relationship. The discussion starts from the assumption that scientific thinking itself engages in a particular process of construction of its object, so that the researcher inevitably 'transfers' him or herself into the observed object. Following Bourdieu, I would like to specify this distortion, this inequality in positions, as 'symbolic violence' and to expound some of the questions that revolve around this term.