INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND REGIONAL RESEARCH 106

DOI:10.1111/1468-2427.12534

— SOCIAL SPACE AND THE GENESIS OF

APPROPRIATED PHYSICAL SPACE
pierre bourdieu

Abstract
The structure of social space manifests itself, in the most diverse contexts, in the
form of spatial oppositions, appropriated physical space functioning as a spontaneous
metaphor for the social order. There is no space that does not express social hierarchies and
distances in a more or less distorted fashion, especially through the effect of naturalization
associated with the durable inscription of social realities in the physical world. The
structure of the spatial distribution of powers records the balance of social struggles
over the profits of space, which are waged individually (as indicated by mobility) and
collectively (through political contests over housing policy, for instance). The stake of these
struggles is the construction of spatially based homogeneous groupings, that is, segregation
that is both cause and effect of the exclusive usage of a space. These profits take the form
of profits of localization, rents of situation, profits of rank and profits of occupation. The
ability to dominate appropriated space depends on the capital possessed, which allows one
to keep undesirable persons and things at a distance and to draw desirable ones closer. Yet
one can physically occupy a location without inhabiting it properly if one does not dispose
of the means tacitly required for that, beginning with the proper dispositions, for it is the
habitus that makes the habitat.

Sociology must take into account the fact that human beings are at once
biological beings and social agents who are constituted as such in and through their
relation to a social space or, better, to fields (Bourdieu, [1984] 1985). As biologically
individuated bodies, they are––like things––situated in a locus (they do not have the
property of physical ubiquity, which would allow them to be at several loci at the same
time) where they occupy a place. The locus, topos, can be defined first in absolute terms
as the site where an agent or a thing is situated, ‘takes place’, exists––in short, as a
location. It can also be defined relationally, as a position, as a rank in an order. The place
occupied, in turn, may be defined as the range, the surface and the volume that an agent
or a thing occupies, its dimensions or, better, its encombrement (bulk or volume, as we
sometimes say of a vehicle or a piece of furniture).

Places and minds: the twofold inscription of social space

Just as a physical space is defined by the mutual externality of parts, social space
is defined by the mutual exclusion (or distinction) of positions which constitute it,
that is, as a structure of juxtaposition of social positions. Social agents, but also things
as they are appropriated by agents and thus constituted as properties, are situated in
a location in social space that can be characterized by its position relative to other
locations (as standing above, below or in-between them) and by the distance that
separates them.

This 1991 essay was translated and edited by Loïc Wacquant. It was originally prepared for presentation at the
Russell Sage/Maison des Sciences de l’Homme conference on ‘Poverty, Immigration and Urban Marginality in
Advanced Societies’, Maison des Science de l’Homme, Maison Suger, Paris, 10–11 May 1991, under the title ‘Social
space, symbolic space and appropriated physical space’. Pierre Bourdieu held the Chair of Sociology at the Collège
de France, where he directed the Center for European Sociology, the journal Actes de la Recherche en Sciences
Sociales, and the publishing house Raisons d’Agir Éditions until his passing in 2002. He is the author of numerous
classics of social science. Among them are Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture (1970, trans. 1977),
Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972, trans. 1977), Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1979,
trans. 1984), Homo Academicus (1984, trans. 1988), The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Artistic Field
(1992, trans. 1996) and Pascalian Meditations (1997, trans. 2000).
© 2018 urban research publications limited
 SOCIAL SPACE AND THE GENESIS OF APPROPRIATED PHYSICAL SPACE 107

Social space tends to retranslate itself, in a more or less direct manner, into
physical space in the form of a definite distributional arrangement of agents and
properties. This means that all the distinctions proposed about physical space can
be found in reified social space (or, what amounts to the same, in appropriated social
space) defined, to speak like Leibniz, by the correspondence between a certain order of
co-existence of agents and a certain order of co-existence of properties. Each agent may
be characterized by the place where he or she is situated more or less permanently,
that is, by her place of residence (those who are ‘without hearth or home’, without
‘permanent residence’ or sans domicile fixe, as we say in French, have almost no social
existence––see the political status of the homeless) and by the relative position that
her localizations, temporary (as, for instance, with the regulated placings of protocol in
official ceremonies) and permanent (her private and professional addresses), occupy in
relation to the localizations of other agents. It is also characterized by the place it legally
occupies in space through real properties (houses and apartments or offices, land for
cultivation or residential development, etc.), which are more or less congesting or, as we
sometimes say, ‘consuming of space’ (the ostentation of appropriated space being one of
the forms par excellence of the ostentation of power). It follows that the locus and the
place occupied by an agent in appropriated social space are excellent indicators of his
or her position in social space. One may also note in passing that part of the inertia of
the structure that makes up social spaces results from the fact that they are inscribed in
physical space and can be modified only at a cost of a painful work of transplantation, by
moving things and by uprooting or deporting persons.
The structure of social space thus manifests itself, in the most diverse contexts,
in the form of spatial oppositions, inhabited (or appropriated) space functioning as a
sort of spontaneous metaphor of social space. There is no space, in a hierarchical society,
that is not hierarchized and which does not express social hierarchies and distances
in a more or less distorted or euphemized fashion, especially through the effect of
naturalization associated with the durable inscription of social realities onto and in the
physical world: differences produced by social logic can then be seen to arise out of the
nature of things (think of the notion of ‘natural frontier’ or that of ‘natural area’ dear to
the early Chicago School, cf. Park and Burgess, 1925).
The twofold division of the inside of the Berber house that I analyzed in detail
elsewhere (Bourdieu, [1969] 1979a) constitutes the paradigm of all divisions in separate
places (in church and in school, in public places and even in today’s home itself ) in
which the structure of the division of labor between the sexes retranslated itself and
still retranslates itself, though in a less visible fashion. But one could just as well analyze
the structure of the school space which, in its different variants, always tends to mark
the eminent location of the professor (the chair), or the structure of city space. Thus,
for instance, beyond expressing basic economic and cultural differences via the spatial
distribution of housing among central-city neighborhoods and peripheral or suburban
neighborhoods, the Parisian space presents a secondary, but very pronounced, opposition
between the ‘Right Bank’ and the ‘Left Bank’, corresponding to the fundamental division
of the field of power between, grosso modo, the poles of economic and cultural power,
managers and intellectuals, the world of art and the world of business (Bourdieu, [1975]
1987 and 1989: 3–34).
We can discern in this simple example a social division objectified in physical
space which, as I showed in The State Nobility (Bourdieu, 1989), functions at the same
time as a principle of vision and division, as a category of perception and appreciation––
in short, as a mental structure (the Berber house was another one). And we have every
reason to think that it is through the mediation of its realizations in the structures of
appropriated physical space that the muted injunctions of the social order and the silent
callings to order of objective hierarchy are reconverted in systems of preferences and
in cognitive structures (Bourdieu, 1979c). More precisely, the progressive inscription
 INTERVENTIONS108

into bodies of the structures of the social order––if perhaps accomplished for the most
part via moves and movements of the body, via the bodily poses and postures that these
social structures reconverted into physical structures––organize and qualify socially
as rise or decline, entry (inclusion) or exit (exclusion), bringing together or distancing
in relation to a central and valued site (one remembers the metaphor of the ‘hearth’,
the dominant point of the Berber house, which Maurice Halbwachs in 1972 naturally
reverted to when he spoke of the ‘hearth of cultural values’). I have in mind, for example,
the respectful demeanor called for by grandeur or height (of a monument, a stage or
a stand) or by the frontality of sculptural or pictorial works or, more subtly, all the
conducts of defense and reverence tacitly imposed by the mere social qualification of
space (VIP seats, ‘le haut du pavé’, etc.) and all the practical hierarchizations of the
regions of space (high/low, noble/ignoble, front/backstage, store/storage, right side/
left side, etc.).
Appropriated space is one of the sites where power is asserted and wielded,
and no doubt under the most invisible form, that of symbolic violence as unperceived
violence. Architectural spaces––whose silent injunctions are directly addressed to the
body, obtaining from it, as surely as the code of etiquette of the court described by Elias
(1983), the reverence, the respect born of distance (major e longuinquo reverentia [Latin
for ‘respect is greater from afar’] or, better, from being afar, at a respectful distance––are
no doubt the most important components of the symbolism of power because of their
very invisibility, including to analysts themselves, who too often fasten, as do historians
after Schramm (1935), on the most visible signs and insignia of power, such as scepters
and crowns.
Social space is inscribed both in the objectivity of spatial structures and in the
subjectivity of mental structures, which are in part the product of the embodiment of
these objectified structures. Thus is it that, as I demonstrated elsewhere (Bourdieu,
[1977] 1980a), the opposition between the ‘Left Bank’ of the river Seine (today extended
in practice to the surrounding banlieues, or lower-class outer city) and its ‘Right Bank’,
uncovered by maps and statistical analysis (of the theatregoers or of the characteristics
of the artists who exhibit in art galleries), is lodged ‘in the minds’ of potential spectators,
but also in those of the authors of plays or painters and of the critics in the form of the
opposition, which functions as a category of perception and appreciation, between
innovative, avant-garde theatre and conformist, repetitive, boulevard theatre, and
between the young, educated public of the former and the older, more bourgeois
theatregoers who prefer the latter, or yet between the cinéma d’art et essai and movie
houses that show box-office hits.
We can see that nothing is more difficult than to escape reified social space in order
to think it, especially in its relation to social space. And this is all the more true given that
social space is, as such, predisposed to being visualized in the form of spatial schemata
and that the language most commonly used to talk about it is loaded with metaphors
borrowed from physical space.

Physical space and social space

We must begin by first establishing a clear distinction between physical space
and social space in order to be in a position to ask how and in what sense localization at a
point (inseparable from a point of view) in physical space and presence at this point can
affect the representation that agents have of their position in social space and therefore
of their practice itself.
Though social space is not a physical space, it tends to realize itself in a more
or less complete and accurate fashion in that space. This explains why we have so
much difficulty thinking it as such. Space as we inhabit it and as we know it is socially
constructed and marked. Physical space can be thought as such only through an
abstraction (physical geography), that is, by deliberately ignoring everything it owes to
 SOCIAL SPACE AND THE GENESIS OF APPROPRIATED PHYSICAL SPACE 109

the fact that it is an inhabited and appropriated space, that is, a social fabrication and
projection of social space, a social structure in an objectified state (viz. a Kabyle house,
or the map of a city), the objectification and naturalization of past and present social
relations.
Social space, as an abstract space constituted by the ensemble of sub-spaces
or fields (economic, intellectual, artistic, academic, bureaucratic, etc.) owing their
structure to the unequal distribution of a particular species of capital, can be grasped
as the form of the structure of the distribution of the various species of capital that
function both as instruments and stakes of struggle in the different fields (that which
is designated in Distinction––Bourdieu, 1979c––as the overall volume and structure
of capital). Physically realized (or objectified) social space presents itself as the
distribution in physical space of the various kinds of goods and services but also of
individual agents and groups physically localized (as bodies linked to a more or less
permanent site) and endowed with higher or lower chances of appropriating these
goods and services (depending on their capital and on physical distance to these goods,
which itself depends upon their capital). It is this twofold distribution in space of agents
as biological individuals and of goods that defines the differential value of the various
regions of realized social space.
The distributions in physical space of goods and services correspond to the
various fields or, if one prefers, to the different social spaces physically objectified that
tend to overlap with one another, at least roughly. The result is that the scarcest and
most valued goods and their owners tend to concentrate in certain locations in physical
space (Fifth Avenue and the Gold Coast, Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré and the upscale
town of Neuilly-sur-Seine), which thus stand opposed on all dimensions to the locations
where the most dispossessed are gathered, sometimes at the exclusion of all others (as
in the remnants of the black ghettos of America). These locations constitute traps for
the analyst in that, by accepting them as such, at their face value, the careless observer
(such as those, for instance, who try to analyze the symbolism characteristic of luxury
shops on Fifth Avenue: the use of surnames or common names borrowed from the
French, of noble doublets of ordinary names of professions, the evocation of tradition,
etc.) is condemned to a substantialist and realist approach that leaves out the crux of
the matter. Like Madison Avenue in New York City, the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré
in Paris brings together art dealers, antique shops, houses of high fashion, bottiers (boot
designers), painters, ensembliers (interior decorators), etc., that is, a whole set of shops
that have in common the fact that they occupy high positions (homologous with one
another) in their respective fields and that can be understood in their full specificity
(beginning with their name) only in relation to the shops belonging to the same field but
situated in other regions of the Parisian space. For instance, the decorative artists of the
Faubourg Saint-Honoré in the western arrondissements of Paris stand in opposition (first
by virtue of their noble names but also by all their other properties: the nature, quality
and price of the products they make and sell, the social class of their customers, etc.) to
what are called ébénistes (cabinet-makers) in the popular Faubourg Saint Antoine [in
the eastern 11th arrondissement]. Hair dressers (in English) stand in a similar relation
of opposition to the mere coiffeurs (barbers), as do the bottiers to the cordonniers
(shoemakers), and so on. Thus, inasmuch as this space cumulates the positive poles of
all the fields ( just as the ghetto concentrates all the negative poles), it does not contain
its truth within itself. The same applies to the capital city which, at least in the case of
France, is, without playing on words, the location of capital, that is, the locus in physical
space where the apex of all the fields, as well as most of the agents who occupy dominant
positions in them, congregate. It can be adequately conceptualized only in relation to the
provinces, which are themselves defined by their (relative) deprivation of capital and
their exclusion from the capital city.
 INTERVENTIONS110

The genesis and structure of appropriated physical space

Space or, to be precise, locations and places in reified (or appropriated) social
space owe their scarcity and value to the fact that they are one of the stakes of struggles
of which the various fields are the site because they signal or grant a more or less decisive
edge in these struggles. The ability to dominate appropriated space, in particular by
(materially and symbolically) appropriating the scarce goods, public and private, which
are allocated in it, depends on the capital possessed. Capital––in its various fundamental
forms: economic, cultural, social, symbolic and statist (Bourdieu, 1986; Bourdieu and
Wacquant, 1993)––allows one to keep at a distance undesirable persons and things as
well as to bring in closer desirable ones, thereby minimizing the expense (especially
in time) necessary to appropriate them. Conversely, those who are deprived of capital
are pushed away and held at a remove, either physically (relegated to distant locales
or to places difficult to reach) or symbolically, from the socially most valued goods
and condemned to come into daily contact with the most undesirable and the most
common persons and goods (as are residents of public housing projects in the US and
of stigmatized low-income estates in France). Lack of capital brings the experience of
social finitude to a climax: it chains one, ties one down to a despised locale. At the other
end, possession of large amounts of capital ensures not only physical propinquity to
scarce goods (through residence) but also the quasi-ubiquity made possible by access to
advanced means of transportation and communication. (This is often further enhanced
by the effect of delegation, i.e. the ability of the dominant to exist and to act at a distance
through the agency of representatives, deputies and employees).
It follows that the structure of the spatial distribution of powers––that is, of
durably and legitimately appropriated properties and of agents endowed with unequal
chances of access or of material and symbolic appropriation (chances which, as we saw,
are defined in the relation between the spatial distribution of agents, inseparably defined
as localized bodies and as holders of capital, and the distribution of socially available
goods and services)––represents the objectified form of a balance of social struggles over
what we may call the profits of space.
Struggles over the profits of space can take an individual form: intra- or inter-
generational spatial mobility (illustrated by movements to and from the capital and the
province, for instance, or by successive addresses within the hierarchized space of the
capital) is a good indicator of success or failure in these struggles and, more generally,
of the whole social trajectory (as long as we bear in mind that agents of various age
categories and with different backgrounds––younger and older managers of lower- or
upper-class origins for instance––can temporarily co-exist in the same positions and can
even find themselves, just as temporarily, in neighboring places of residence). Struggles
over space can also be waged collectively, in particular via political struggles, which
range from housing policies at the national level (Bourdieu, 1990) to the construction
and allocation of subsidized or public housing units at the municipal level. The stake of
these struggles is the construction of spatially based homogeneous groupings, that is, a
social segregation that is both cause and effect of the exclusive usage of a space and of
the facilities necessary for the practices and reproduction of the group that occupies it.
The domination of space is one of the privileged forms of the exercise of domination,
and the manipulation of the distribution of groups across space has always been at the
service of the manipulation of groups––think of the uses of space by various enterprises
of settler colonization, the regulation of working-class space in the social experiments of
American ‘welfare capitalism’ at the turn of the century, or the so-called ‘urban renewal’
programs that displaced blacks from central cities in New York, Chicago or Miami in the
1950s and 1960s to the benefit of white suburban commuters (Jackson, 1985).
The profits of space can take the form of profits of localization, themselves
liable to be differentiated into three classes. First we have rents of situation associated
 SOCIAL SPACE AND THE GENESIS OF APPROPRIATED PHYSICAL SPACE 111

with being de facto situated close to things or institutions (goods and services such
as educational, recreational or health facilities) and to agents (certain neighborhoods
provide profits of safety, tranquility, etc.) deemed rare and desirable or distant from
undesirable agents and things. Secondly, we have profits of position or rank (such as those
granted by a prestigious address: some American firms located in declining central cities
rent fake addresses in more prestigious suburban locations to impress their suppliers or
customers), which are a particular case of the symbolic profits of distinction attached to
monopolistic possession of a distinctive property. (Given that physical distances can be
measured by means of a spatial metric or, better, a temporal metric insofar as movement
across space takes more or less time depending on access to public or private means of
transportation, the power that capital, in its different forms, gives over space is also, by
the same token, a power over time.) They can also take the form of profits of occupation,
the possession of a physical space (vast expanses of grass, parks, roomy apartments, etc.)
being a way of keeping any manner of undesirable intrusion at bay (Raymond Williams,
in 1973, observes in The Country and the City that the ‘smiling perspectives’ of English
mansions transformed the countryside and its peasants into a spectacle designed for the
enjoyment of the landowner; the same is true of the ‘exclusive view’ of pictures used
in real-estate advertisements). As noted before, one of the advantages given by power
over space is the possibility of keeping at a (physical) remove things and people who
are deemed a nuisance or are discredited by the collisions they provoke that are often
experienced as ‘promiscuity’, by manners of being and of behaving that are socially
incompatible, yet by invading perceived space, visual or aural, with displays or noises
that are socially branded and negatively connotated, are thus bound to be experienced
as intrusive or even assaultive.
A locale, as a socially qualified physical site, offers aggregate opportunities
of appropriation of different material or cultural goods and services available at a
given time. These chances are specified for each of the various occupants of this
locale depending on their capacity for appropriation (a Portuguese maid in the 16th
arrondissement of Paris obviously does not have the same chance as her employer of
appropriating the goods and services offered in this district). One can physically occupy
a locale without inhabiting it properly if one does not dispose of the means tacitly
required for that, beginning with the proper habitus. This was the case of the Algerian
families who, upon moving from the shanty towns of Algiers into a low-income housing
complex, found themselves, against all expectations, overwhelmed by their new place
of residence. They had long dreamed of such a dwelling, only to discover that they
could not fulfill the exigencies that came with occupying it in terms of financial means
(indispensable to cover new expenses: utilities, transportation, equipment, etc.) and in
terms of lifestyle (particularly for women) incised in a space which had all appearances
of being gender-blind, from the need for and art of fabricating drapes to the ability to
live freely in a social environment full of unknown persons (Bourdieu, [1977] 1979b; see
also Pétonnet, 1982, for similar observations among migrants removed from the Paris
slums and thrust into transitional low-income high-rises in the 1960s). In sum, it is the
habitus that makes the habitat, through the social uses, more or less adequate, to which
it inclines us and which it enables.
We are thus led to question the belief that spatial closeness or, more precisely,
the cohabitation of agents very distant in social space can, by itself, have an effect of
social rapprochement or, if one prefers, of desegregation. In point of fact, nothing is
further removed, and more intolerable, than people socially distant who happen to
come close in physical space. We must question here the (passive or active) ignorance
of the social structures of lived space and of the mental structures of their presumed
inhabitants that leads so many architects to act as though they had the ability to impose
a social use of the buildings and facilities onto which they project their own mental
structures, that is, the social structures of which these structures are the product
 INTERVENTIONS112

(see Pinçon, 1981, for an analysis of cohabitation and conflicts in a public housing
complex designed in that fashion).
We may regard the limiting experience of families that are and feel displaced,
out of place in the space granted to them as the paradigm for the experience to which
we are exposed every time we penetrate a space without fulfilling all the conditions it
tacitly demands of its occupants. These requirements include possession of a certain
volume and type of cultural capital, this veritable ‘custom duty’ that can forbid the
actual appropriation of goods presumed to be ‘public’, of open access, or even stifle the
very desire to appropriate them. One thinks immediately here of museums (Bourdieu
and Darbel, [1966] 1991), but this applies also to a range of routine services that are
thought of as universally necessary and available, such as juridical or medical services,
or even those offered by institutions destined to promote access to these services, such
as welfare programs or various forms of free social assistance. One enjoys the Paris of
one’s economic capital but also the Paris of one’s cultural and social capital: it is not
enough to enter Beaubourg to avail oneself of the museum of modern art; it might not
even be necessary to enter the rooms devoted to modern art (something that, in any
event, not everybody does) to discover that entrance is not in itself a sufficient condition
for appropriating them.
Entry in certain spaces, and particularly the most ‘select’ of them, requires not
only economic and cultural capital but social capital as well. Such selective locales can
grant social capital and symbolic capital, via the effect of ‘club’ resulting from the lasting
and regular congregation, within the same space (those of the upscale districts of Paris
described by Pinçon and Pinçon-Charlot, 1989, of luxury residential complexes, or of
the ‘prep schools’ of the American Eastern seaboard as depicted by Cookson and Hodges
Persell, 1985), of people and things that are alike in that they are different from the mass
of people who have in common the fact of not being ‘common’, insofar as they exclude
de jure (via a more or less open form of numerus clausus) or de facto (intruders are fated
to a sort of internal exclusion liable to deprive them of the profits of membership) all
those who do not display all the desired properties or who present any one of a number
of undesirable properties.
The effect of ‘ghetto’ is the exact opposite of the effect of ‘club’: whereas the
upscale neighborhood, functioning in the manner of a club founded upon active
exclusion of undesirable persons (Domhoff, 1974; Miller, 1987), symbolically consecrates
each of its residents by allowing him or her to partake of the capital accumulated
by the totality of its residents, the ghetto symbolically degrades its inhabitants by
gathering in a sort of reservation a set of agents who, being deprived of all the assets
necessary to participate in the various social games, share little beyond their social
excommunication. Other than the effect of stigmatization, the concentration in the same
site of a population homogeneous in its dispossession also has the effect of redoubling
dispossession, particularly in the cultural realm ( just as, conversely, it reinforces
the cultural privileges of the privileged). Among all the properties presupposed
by legitimate occupation of a location, some of the most important ones cannot be
acquired but through lasting occupation of that location and by active and prolonged
intercourse with its legitimate occupants. Such, of course, is the case of the social capital
of connections (and particularly of the privileged connections of childhood or school
friendship) and of all the more hidden dimensions of cultural and linguistic capital,
such as corporeal manners and ways of speaking, eating, walking, etc. All these traits
contribute to increasing the specific weight of the place of birth.
To show how power, and in particular the power over space granted by
possession of capital, becomes retranslated into appropriated physical space in the
form of a spatial distribution of possessions and of chances of access to scarce goods
and services, I undertook, a few years ago, with Monique de Saint Martin, to gather all
the available statistics for each of the around 95 French départements, on the indicators
 SOCIAL SPACE AND THE GENESIS OF APPROPRIATED PHYSICAL SPACE 113

of economic, cultural and even social capital and on the goods and services offered in
each region. The aim of this enterprise was to try to capture everything we tend too
easily to impute to geographic space, by an unconscious submission to the effect of
naturalization operated by the transformation of social space into objectified social space,
and which can and must in reality be traced back to the effect of the structure of the
spatial distribution of resources and goods, private and public, that itself is nothing more
than the crystallization, at a given moment in time, of the whole history of the local unit
under scrutiny and of its position in national and international space. Although we never
completed it for lack of time, this project had at least the virtue of showing that most of
the regional differences that are often attributed to geographical determinisms––in the
logic, dear to Montesquieu, of the opposition between ‘the Nord and the Midi’ (Bourdieu,
1980b)––owe their permanence in history to the effect of circular reinforcement between
the structures of social space and of appropriated physical space unfolding continually
over time. Given that aspirations, in matters of housing and cultural consumption, are
for a good part the product of the structure of the distribution of goods and services in
appropriated physical space, they tend to vary with the capacity to satisfy them, so that
the effect of the unequal distribution of aspirations reinforces at every moment the effect
of the existing unequal distribution of the means and opportunities to satisfy them.
Having identified and measured the totality of the phenomena which, though
apparently linked to physical space, are in fact manifestations of social and economic
differences, there would remain the task of trying to isolate the irreducible residual that
could be independently attributed to propinquity and distance in purely physical space.
I think, for instance, of the ‘screening’ or ‘blinding’ effect resulting from localization
in a point of physical space and from the anthropological privilege which is that of
the directly perceived present and, simultaneously, of the visible and sensible space
of physically co-present objects and agents, of neighbors and the surroundings. One
can thus observe that hostilities and tensions linked to proximity in physical space can
obscure solidarities rooted in the position occupied in national or international social
space, or that representations imposed by the point of view associated with the position
held in local social space (such as the village) can prevent one from becoming aware of
the position simultaneously occupied in national social space.

Pierre Bourdieu

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