In which Matthew reads Bourdieu

Understandability was never my forte. But I've been working on it.

And ever since life went all blue-screen-of-death in my first year at grad school, I've steered clear of theory for the most part, sticking fearfully, Pigletly close to the text and saving all my worries about social relevance for the classroom, never the library or the field. But my advisor has been leaning on me hard to get through Pierre Bourdieu's The Logic of Practice. It's slow going -- old phobias die hard -- but I need this stuff, and on my third read through the Introduction I'm finally getting why I should care (emphasis mine):

I would never have come to study ritual traditions if the same concern to 'rehabilitate' which had first led me to exclude ritual from the universe of legitimate objects and distrust all the works which made room for it had not persuaded me, from 1958, to to try retrieve it from the false solicitude of primitivism and to challenge the racist contempt which, through the self-contempt it induces in its victims, helps to deny them knowledge and recognition of their own tradition... My inevitable disquiet was relieved to some extent by the interest my informants always manifested in my research whenever it became theirs too, in other words a striving to recover a meaning that was both their own and alien to them.

If you know much about my dissertation topic, maybe you can already see the connections forming. If not: once I get my interview material from Chester online, in which I speak to modern Cestrians about their revival of medieval street theater, you'll see what I mean. I hope.