A Levantine Archaeological Response: Thinking with Bourdieu though Limited Data and Explicit Assumptions

Abstract This article is part of a special issue of the Journal of Ancient History , “Social Biographies of the Ancient World.” It serves as response paper whose purpose is to identify a core question underlying the three case studies in this special issue: does Bourdieu’s field theory help us to understand how people made decisions in the ancient world, given that its predictive capabilities will necessarily be limited by the information we have? To explore this question, the idea of “using theory” as a method is engaged, comparing premodern applications of Bourdieu’s core concepts to the limits of the scientific “theory of evolution.” A brief assessment of the strengths of the case studies in this special issue is followed by an articulation of several resulting take-aways: (i) the value of the concepts of field, capital, and habitus in focusing on our data and its limits, rather than academic ideologies; (ii) the importance of articulating each scholarly assumption explicitly as we apply these concepts; (iii) the recognition that we can use Bourdieu to reveal new interpretive possibilities but not to fill in missing data; and (iv) the productive assumption that each text from the ancient world was the result of an actor(s) leveraging their capital in order to negotiate their perceived optimal position within a field. Together these points illustrate the utility of this issue’s systematic approach to the application of Bourdieu’s field theory in the study of the ancient world.