Reinventing Practice in a Disenchanted World: Bourdieu and Urban Poverty in Oaxaca, Mexico (review)

Cheelen Mahar's book on changing life strategies and worldviews among residents of Oaxaca's urban periphery provides a fascinating account of transformations across a thirty year span. This unusually long study period, beginning with interviews in the early 1970s and concluding with re-interviews of the same study participants in the 2000s, provides this account with a wealth of both information and wisdom gleaned from participant reflections on lives lived, loves found and lost, and children growing up and in turn having children of their own. This extended time span provides the narrative underpinning for an exceptionally engaging and lucent study in which the author encounters, and seeks to interpret, a rather brusque set of changes: livelihood strategies of the early 1970s that had turned in part on communal and cooperative labor exchanges and administrative participation had given way, by the 2000s, to strategies reliant upon nuclear and extended family ties, and corresponding social ideologies had also been transformed in like manner. This change in the texture of social life is also, she finds, interwoven with changes in the character of the 'place' of the colonia, which had been altered, during this same period, from an 'irregular' settlement definitively beyond Oaxaca city's urban center into but one of many neighborhoods tightly interwoven into an urban zone that had tripled in size to nearly a half million inhabitants.

In her search for an appropriate theoretical paradigm with which to frame these changing livelihood strategies, the author turns, as the book title makes clear, to the sociological theories of Pierre Bourdieu. In particular, she makes a strong case for the evolution of resident 'doxa' – a set of practical theories about the character of the world that people use to formulate livelihood strategies, from village-based communality to urban individualist capitalism. This shift gives the rest of the book's title, as residents struggle to reform their practical life strategies along individualist lines within a context of 'disenchantment' induced by urban poverty and income instability.

Of particular value in this account is a focus on women's lives. Indeed, male voices are refreshingly sparse in this account and often occur only when speaking through the reflections of women informants. The author develops an unusually coherent sense of individual voice, built through successive interviews recorded decades apart, that enlivens and clarifies the question of how and why individual strategies evolved and changed. Here the use of Bourdieu serves to strengthen the work, as shifts from initial to latter habitus are made explicit, and yet also and implicitly brings to light some of the problems that underlie Bourdieu's schema (I say implicitly because although the ability to highlight inadequacies in Bourdieu's theory speaks to the strength of the book's underlying empirics, these theoretical failings are not noted by the author).

To amplify these observations, the author's struggle to fit women's lives into Bourdieu's theory of social distinction provides (at least) two avenues through which Bourdieu's theory might be enriched. The first would seek to forge an improved sense of the relation between gender and class. Mahar's narrative revolves around women's lives, often with particular attention to women's roles in reshaping their children's class tastes along aspirational lines with an eye towards attaining a different class position through children's labor. This gender role in shaping the reproduction of habitus is not addressed by Bourdieu: quite the opposite in fact. As Bourdieu notes in Distinction: "Sexual properties are as inseparable from class properties as the yellowness of a lemon is from its acidity…" (1984, 107), a formulation that leaves little room for strategies that seek to revise the habitus as a means of securing a more stable livelihood.

A second area in which this volume might extend Bourdieuian theory regards the relations between classes in urban life...