The title of Deborah Reed-Danahay’s book is a little misleading. If the title had not already been used by another work, her volume could have been appropriately called Understanding Bourdieu, using the term understanding in the somewhat technical sense that Pierre Bourdieu himself gave to it in an important late work, which Reed-Danahay discusses briefly (pp. 144, 150). Bourdieu sees the relationship between researcher and research participant as, ideally, one of “intellectual love,” in which the concept of “love” represents a relationship of mutuality that, however momentarily, rises above or steps out of the agonistic relationships characteristic of most human life. This relationship provides the ground for true understanding. Reed-Danahay tries to engage with Bourdieu’s work in this spirit and often succeeds by allowing Bourdieu to speak to the reader through her work in interesting ways.

Reed-Danahay describes her approach as one in which she has “worked to uncover the autoethnography in Bourdieu’s work” (p. 152). She sees Bourdieu’s work as a kind of ethnography, one in which the immanent object of inquiry is Bourdieu himself—hence, autoethnography, a form of discourse that she succinctly defines at one point as “commentaries and analysis by informants on their own sociocultural milieu” (p. 130). But, to complicate things further, she describes her own approach to Bourdieu as itself ethnographic. She adopts the role of an ethnographer in relation to his work, taking seriously Bourdieu’s own admonition that “informants produce a discourse for the anthropologist that cannot be taken at face value” (p. 131).

Reed-Danahay’s book is actually two books in one. One, the first half of the volume, is devoted to revealing the autoethnographic dimension of Bourdieu’s work. Thus, for example, in a long chapter on education (ch. 2), she shows how Bourdieu’s own educational experience and trajectory are the ground on which he builds his theory of the work of the educational institution in France. Like an ethnographer, she locates his educational experience and his displaced representation of his own experience (displaced in the sense that Bourdieu only rarely directly alludes to his own experiences in his writing about education) in the wider context of the field of education in France. In another chapter (ch. 3), she directly explores “Bourdieu’s point of view,” focusing, in particular, on the miraculous way in which he made good as a scholarship boy. Yet another chapter (ch. 4) examines the way the resonances between Bourdieu’s early social background in southern France and that of the Kabyle peasants he studied are the basis for his thinking about reflexivity.

Reed-Danahay’s “other” book consists of two long essays that relate Bourdieu’s work to important trends in contemporary anthropology: the anthropology of the emotions (ch. 4) and the place of narrative and the representation of subjectivity in social science (ch. 5). Reed-Danahay quite rightly points out how little Bourdieu’s work has been used in the “emotional turn” in anthropology, which is quite surprising given the visceral nature of his concept of “habitus.” She draws out and highlights the potentially useful connections between this emergent field and Bourdieu’s work. This includes discussion of the place of emotion in fieldwork. The latter, however, I feel could have done with a closer reading of Bourdieu’s later reflections on the place of “love” in research practice and also his reference to the place of “spiritual exercises” in that practice.

Reed-Danahay set herself a subtly difficult task, ethnography of autoethnography, and she has succeeded to a considerable extent. One of my main reservations relates to an occasional tendency to disparagement: she describes Bourdieu, for example, as “somewhat disingenuous” in “disowning any ambitions regarding intellectualism” (p. 167), pointing to his voluminous writings as evidence to the contrary. These sorts of remarks, rare though they are, detract from her account and seem to be unnecessary. But they point to what is, for me, a more puzzling element of her work. Given Reed-Danahay’s interest in autoethnography, her ethnography of Bourdieu lacks an autoethnographic dimension itself. I would have been interested in seeing Reed-Danahay handle this aspect of the order of tasks confronting her a little more successfully. This could have been done, for example, by a little more critical reflexivity about the choices of topics—“emotion,” “subjectivity,” and “narrative”—that she makes the focal points of her engagement with the hidden dimensions of Bourdieu’s work. As Bourdieu himself would remind readers, such choices are not arbitrary but are revelatory of various forms of doxa.

This is an excellent book, and I would recommend it both to those who want to begin an engagement with Bourdieu’s work and to those who would like to be surprised by fresh understandings of that work.