As every great scientific production, the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) was created around an intuition, and built from strength-ideas formulated, developed, reformulated, and resumed in most of his publications - a founding intuition that seeks to articulate bigger concepts placed at the center of his analysis of the structure of the social world and social relations. Pierre Bourdieu, who wished to transform sociology in a total science capable of restoring the fundamental unity of human practice, attributed to his field a critical function that implies unveiling educational, cultural, social, and symbolic mechanisms of domination. In the present work we shall attempt to retrace the social-methodological path proposed and followed by Pierre Bourdieu through the sketching of a sort of cartography of his work, and the description of the main chapters of his intellectual and professional trajectory, emphasizing his social and political commitments. We shall also try to clarify the content of some of his main works, and his contribution to the understanding of the practices in different social fields, highlighting its limits and the criticism it has raised. Lastly, we look into the legacy of Bourdieu's work in Brazil, focusing on his contribution to the development of an important critical movement in the field of the sociology of education, and we examine intently the presence of his reflection in the emergence of a micro-sociological perspective in the field of educational research in Brazil.
Pierre Bourdieu; Sociology of education; Educational research; Social practices