DR PAVI RAMHOTA
Social science assists us to understand ourselves, our relations to the world. Today the social sciences provide insights in so many areas. From neurons to neighbourhoods to nations. Social science is a distinct form of service to society, particularly when societies need a path to shared understanding. Social science is needed today more than ever. In 1993 the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences concluded that the state of affairs in social sciences was rather disconcerting. The ‘Open the social sciences’ report retraces the circumstances and processes through which social science was historically constructed as a form of knowledge and why it was divided into a specific set of relatively standard disciplines in-between the late eighteenth century and 1945. It discusses the issues related to colonial rule and the effects of the colonial episteme on the colonized life worlds. It then reveals the ways in which world developments since 1945 have raised questions about this intellectual division of labour and have therefore reopened the issues of organizational structuring that had been put into place in the previous period.
The report goes on to elucidate a series of basic intellectual questions about which there has been much recent debate. Finally, it discusses in what ways the social sciences can be intelligently restructured in the light of this history and the recent debates.
In this context Pierre Bourdieu suggests that social reality itself has been misrecognised by social researchers and scholarship as it is anchored in colonial knowledge systems that have been loaded. In order to comprehend ‘social realities’ Bourdieu argues that we need to go beyond received knowledge and reconstruct this knowledge through the intricate universe of the meanings and sociabilities of the life worlds, collective memories and nuanced ways of behaviour of the colonised minds.
Bourdieu intelligently argues that the earlier approaches in social sciences misrecognise the way social life is organized and thus end up either positing social reality through a structuralist or a phenomenological perspective i.e. either the structure or agency becomes immanent. He posits an alternate perspective that situates analysis in the practical 
universe of everyday practices and not in a given and bounded objective space but in relational matrix. For Bourdieu (1977, 1990) social behaviour is not to be examined in terms of a code given as a static representation, but as continual and dynamic operationalisation of actions by social actors who strategise in accordance with their practical mastery of social situations and in the given historical contexts. Hence, Bourdieu proposes a “theory of practice”.
In this schema, actors are both a product of social structures and also producers of these structures (the “generative principle” of practice) and thereby situating the analysis within the very movement of accomplishment of any social phenomenon. Such an account makes possible a science of the dialectical relations between objective structures (to which the objectivist mode of knowledge gives access) and the structured dispositions within which those structures are actualized and which in their actualization reproduce them, which he terms as the habitus.
The habitus is the mental structure through which people deal with the social world. It can be thought of as a set of internalized schemes through which the world is perceived, understood, appreciated, and evaluated.
As Bourdieu puts it “…in short, the habitus, the product of history, produces individual and collective practices, and hence history, in accordance with the schemes engendered by history. The system of dispositions – a past which survives in the present and tends to perpetuate itself into the future by making itself present in practices structured according to its principles, an internal law relaying the continuous exercise of the law of external necessities (irreducible to immediate ‘conjunctural’ constraints) – is the principle of the continuity and regularity which objectivism discerns in the social world without being able to give them a rational basis.”
If we keep on thinking with a colonized mind, no matter how much research we conduct will result into an occidental reflection with the same stereotyped theoretical assumption and finally we would not have our own research culture and end up in the same colonial thinking.
A tiny island like Mauritius, has a very complex system of societal organisation and we have the tendency to analyse the society in terms of classes and caste. Bourdieu (1977) uses instead the concept of field: A social arena in which people manoeuvre and struggle in pursuit of desirable resources. According to him, a field is a network of social relations among the objective positions within it. It is not a set of interactions or intersubjective ties among individuals. Social agents act strategically depending on their habitus in order to enhance their capital. It is a type of competitive marketplace in which economic, cultural, social, and symbolic powers are used. The pre-eminent field is the field of politics, from which a hierarchy of power relationships serves to structure all other fields.
Thinking along this line, institutions like the National Heritage Trust Fund and Aapravasi Ghat Trust Fund could play a completely different role to safeguard the various intangible and tangible elements of cultural heritage of the island. Therefore, the nature of the habitus of the agents who occupy particular positions within the field with varying amounts of species (cultural, social, symbolic and economic) capital can be mapped. It thus follows that fields are historical constellations that arise, grow, change shape, and sometimes wane or perish, over time. (Wacquant)
These agents act strategically depending on their habitus in order to enhance their capital. Bourdieu (1984) examines the social construction of objective structures with an emphasis on how people perceive and construct their own social world, but without neglecting how perception and construction is constrained by structures. An important dynamic in this relationship is the ability of individual actors to invent and improvise within the structure of their routines.
If this concept of field can be understood then the whole research scenario will take a different route towards a new process of thinking probably designed for our society to take off from the western thinking orientation. For this, Bourdieu proposes sociology of symbolic power in which he addresses the important topic of relations between culture, stratification, and power. He contends that the struggle for social recognition is a fundamental dimension of all social life. In that struggle, cultural resources, processes, and institutions hold individuals and groups in competitive and self-perpetuating hierarchies of domination. Bourdieu focuses on how these social struggles are embedded and interwoven through symbolic classifications, how cultural practices place individuals and groups into competitive class and status hierarchies, how relatively autonomous fields of conflict interlock individuals and groups in struggle over valued resources, how actors struggle and pursue strategies to achieve their interests within such fields, and how in doing so actors unwittingly reproduce the social stratification order. Culture, then, is not devoid of political content but rather is an expression of it. (Bourdieu, 1977, 1984)
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“Pierre Bourdieu suggests that social reality itself has been misrecognised by social researchers and scholarship as it is anchored in colonial knowledge systems that have been loaded. In order to comprehend ‘social realities’ Bourdieu argues that we need to go beyond received knowledge and reconstruct this knowledge …”
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“A tiny island like Mauritius, has a very complex system of societal organisation and we have the tendency to analyse the society in terms of classes and caste. Bourdieu (1977) uses instead the concept of field: A social arena in which people manoeuvre and struggle in pursuit of desirable resources.”
