Applications

Soon after Outline of a Theory of Practice first appeared in French in 1972, Pierre Bourdieu began attracting considerable attention in fields beyond sociology, especially education, art and literary criticism, and anthropology. Having already taken interest in his two major articles on religion, which were published just the year prior, scholars of religion, too, began exploring ways to apply Bourdieu's theory of practice to their subject. The first book-length study to emerge in this exploration was Otto Maduro's Religion and Social Conflicts, discussed below, which was first published in Spanish in 1979. A second, François-André Isambert's Le Sens du sacré, soon followed. Meanwhile, articles citing Bourdieu and covering a variety of topics in religious studies began to appear, first in France and Belgium, in the 1970s (e.g., Liénard and Rousseau 1972; Remy 1972; Colonna 1974; and Grignon 1977) and somewhat later abroad in the 1980s (e.g., Weiler 1983; Kennedy 1984; Devisch and Vervaeck 1985; Vincent 1985; Delteil 1986; Ebertz and Schultheis 1986a, 1986b; and Prakash 1986), covering a fairly wide range of topics, from religious indifference, religious education and religious language, to African divination, Catholic pastoral theology, and popular religion.