Introduction

Summary

I am not Jesus Christ. I am a sociologist, not a prophet. I refuse the chalice that one extends to me, asking me to take upon myself all the misery of the world. And nevertheless, I can hardly keep myself from doing so, revolted but resigned to drink this bitter chalice to the dregs…

(in Passeron 2003, 26).

‘The prestructured is everywhere’, in Pierre Bourdieu's vision of the social world. ‘The sociologist is literally beleaguered by it, as everybody else is’ (in Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 235). We are indeed born and raised in a world that we did not create, and we go forth into it, negotiate it, and die in it without critically reflecting upon—at least in any sustained fashion—why things are the way that they are. We go through life dutifully abiding by our societies' laws and adopting its conveyances in a generally rather automatist fashion, thus ‘socialized and led to feel “like a fish in water”’ (ibid.). We speak languages that only become ours because from birth we are bombarded by them and not others, and we go about speaking, hearing, reading and writing them as second nature, largely inconsiderate of just how it is that they came to be our native tongues in the first place.