Bourdieu situates his work in relation to those thinkers who were influential in the formation of his views, from Marx and Durkheim to Levi-Strauss and Wittgenstein, and retraces the development of his ideas from his early ethnographic studies to his most recent work on the sociology of cultural fields. He responds to some of the criticisms which have been made of his work, and offers his own criticisms of some of his contemporaries, including Althusser, Foucault and Habermas. The volume also contains important contributions to the sociology of symbolic forms, of religion and of sport, as well as Bourdieu's inaugural lecture at the Collège de France.