A Sociological Response: Challenging the Modernity-centrism of Pierre Bourdieu’s Field Approach

This article is part of a special issue of the Journal of Ancient History, “Social Biographies of the Ancient World,” forming a sociological response to the other articles and case studies. It argues that engaging in discussions of Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory with historians of the Ancient Near East pushes us beyond the usual binaries that structure the social sciences. While working with and challenging binaries like ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ has become central for social scientists, the binary of the ‘modern’ and ‘pre-modern’ remains on the margins of theoretical debates in sociology. This contribution disentangles the common association of field theory with modernity. Turning the field approach towards the ancient Near East encourages us to ask questions about how far social theory exceptionalizes modernity, and whether theoretical constructs central to the social sciences actually reflect processes that predate modern history. This exercise invites scholars to consider whether the distinguishing feature of modernity is not the emergence of fields, as is commonly assumed, but rather the emergence of economic capital as primary. More broadly, a Bourdieusian analysis of the Ancient Near East encourages us to zoom out to a potential macro-historical field approach, and to reconsider field theory’s relation to time and space.