“You are what you are because of where you are.” — Charles Olson, The Maximus Poems
“We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining our identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression.” — Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self
Charles Olsen and Pierre Bourdieu
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Introduction
In Sources of the Self, philosopher Charles Taylor traces the intellectual and moral history of Western identity, showing how the modern self came to be imagined as autonomous, self-authoring, and inwardly defined. In Taylor’s account, this modern conception of the self—shaped by Enlightenment rationalism and expressive individualism—has come to forget its own grounding in history, community, and embodied moral frameworks. What emerges is a vision of the person as disembedded, free-floating, and abstracted from the places and traditions that shape them.
This essay turns to two figures who, in very different modes, resist that disembedding. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, through his theory of habitus, and the American poet Charles Olson, through his sprawling Maximus Poems, both present a view of the self not as sovereign and self-made, but as formed—by land, memory, inheritance, ritual, and the quiet weight of the social world. For Bourdieu, the self is structured by inherited dispositions—bodily, affective, and often unconscious. For Olson, the self is shaped by a landscape thick with history, myth, and ancestral pattern.
Though working in different disciplines, Bourdieu and Olson share a core concern: how identity is not chosen in isolation, but received and re-lived through place and lineage. Their visions converge in their insistence that place—whether Bourdieu’s social fields or Olson’s Gloucester—acts as a crucible for identity, embedding historical practices in everyday life. This connection, rarely explored due to the disciplinary divide between sociology and poetry, reveals a shared critique of modern disembedding, as both thinkers ground the self in communal and historical roots. Where Bourdieu provides a conceptual analysis of the social body, Olson enacts the same insight through poetic embodiment—walking the streets of Gloucester, invoking its names, and attempting to recover himself through the geography that made him.
This essay traces five nexuses where their visions intersect: place and the body, familial inheritance, symbolic naming, ritual memory, and the absent feminine. Through these interwoven strands, we will see how Olson’s poetry performs the logic of Bourdieu’s habitus—and how both writers, in their own way, answer Taylor’s call to recover the deeper sources of the self from beneath the illusions of modern autonomy.
I. The Fish in the Self: Place and the Embodied Habitus
At the heart of both Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology and Charles Olson’s poetry lies the conviction that the self is not constructed in abstraction but formed through the physical and social spaces it inhabits. For both, place is not a passive backdrop but a dynamic force that molds identity, much like a fishing community shapes its residents’ resilience and practical knowledge. For Bourdieu, this idea takes shape through the concept of habitus—a system of embodied dispositions, acquired through prolonged immersion in social and material environments. For Olson, it emerges through his poetic meditation on Gloucester, Massachusetts, where the geography of land and sea becomes inseparable from the soul that takes shape within it. In both, place is not a setting but a structuring force.
Olson expresses this with arresting simplicity in The Maximus Poems (Letter 27):
“You can’t step outside the fish. He swims in you. And in the water you swim in. You are what you are because of where you are.”
This poetic intuition mirrors Bourdieu’s analytical description of habitus, as found in The Logic of Practice:
“The body is the repository of accumulated history… a practical mimesis of the structures of the world.”[^1]
Olson’s fish is not just metaphor but mnemonic embodiment. Like Bourdieu’s individual marked by the “silent pedagogy” of class and culture, Olson is marked by the invisible pedagogy of Gloucester: the tides, the labor, the architecture, the griefs. The fishermen of Gloucester, with their embodied knowledge of the sea, exemplify a habitus shaped by place, their calloused hands and tidal rhythms reflecting what Bourdieu calls “history turned into nature.” The poem doesn’t describe this formation—it performs it.
II. The Father’s Body, The City’s Lineage: Inheriting Social Structure
If place is where the self is inscribed, family is how it is transmitted. In The Maximus Poems, Olson writes:
“my father’s father’s father’s father was a fisherman in Gloucester” “the city is the father’s body” “I come back to the geography of it, the land falling off to the left where my father shot himself.”[^2]
For Olson, lineage is pressure. His repeated evocation of the paternal line is not celebratory but weighty. Gloucester is both the father and the condition that made the father.
Bourdieu similarly writes in The State Nobility:
“Every family tends to produce a ‘body’ of dispositions that ensures the perpetuation of its place in social space.”[^3]
The poet’s father is not merely a man but a transmitter of form—of pain, of work, of orientation toward the world. Gloucester is both the location and the medium of that inheritance. This familial transmission mirrors Bourdieu’s habitus as a collective phenomenon, where shared practices within a community—like Gloucester’s fishing heritage—bind individuals into a communal identity, what Olson calls “polis.”
III. The Name and Its Weight: Symbolic Capital and Personal Myth
Olson confronts the burden of his name:
“I am the son of a particular man named Charles who himself lived here and named me, again Charles and I in my turn have taken on the burden of his name.”[^4]
In Language and Symbolic Power, Bourdieu observes:
“A proper name is never purely personal; it is always loaded with social and symbolic capital.”[^5]
Names position individuals within a field of meaning. Olson resists this passive positioning by re-naming and re-claiming Gloucester in his poetry. His act of naming becomes symbolic strategy, not merely symbolic inheritance. By invoking Gloucester’s streets, ships, and histories, Olson asserts a form of symbolic capital, much as Bourdieu describes how individuals navigate social fields to claim legitimacy, reinforcing the poet’s role as a steward of communal memory.
IV. Ritual, Memory, and the Practice of Return
In The Maximus Poems, Olson writes:
“I come back to the geography of it, the land falling off to the left where my father shot himself.”
And:
“I have this sense, that I am one with my skin Plus this—plus this: that forever the geography which leans in on me I compel backward, I compel Gloucester to yield, to to give me the memory.”[^6]
In The Logic of Practice, Bourdieu writes:
“Memory is not something we have, but something we do: it is reenacted through the body, through rituals and rhythms.”[^7]
For both, memory is not recollection but re-entry. Olson’s poetic return is a ritual reenactment of identity. Bourdieu calls this the mnemonic function of practice. This ritual mirrors the communal practices of Gloucester’s polis, where shared acts—like fishing or storytelling—sustain a collective habitus, resisting the fragmentation of modern capitalism, which Olson decries as “pejorocracy,” the rule of the worst.
V. The Absent Feminine: Gender and the Limits of Formation
Olson writes:
“My mother was not from here. She was Boston.”[^8]
In Masculine Domination, Bourdieu notes:
“The social world is structured according to a fundamental division between the masculine and the feminine… Women function in the transmission of symbolic capital… but rarely occupy positions of recognized authority.”[^9]
In both thinkers, the feminine is absent, symbolic, or subordinate. The father is foregrounded; the mother distanced or mythologized. This absence reflects the very gendered structure of the symbolic systems they expose—and leaves a gap for future inquiry. This gap limits the fullness of their visions of habitus and polis, as the feminine perspective could enrich the relational and communal dimensions of identity they champion.
Conclusion: Remembering the Sources, Reclaiming the Whole
Charles Olson and Pierre Bourdieu, each in his own idiom, confront the modern illusion of the self as a sovereign agent. Instead, they reveal a deeper truth: that identity is formed in relation—through body, place, lineage, and repetition. Olson’s poetic return to Gloucester enacts what Bourdieu’s concept of habitus explains: the self is an archive of prior worlds.
And yet, in the critical absence of the feminine—as shown in Nexus V—both thinkers remain bound within inherited frames of power. If their work opens the door to a more grounded and historical understanding of identity, it also leaves us with the task of asking what voices, relationships, and structures have been omitted.
Taylor’s insight remains central: we cannot define the self without recovering its sources. By bridging Bourdieu’s sociology with Olson’s poetry, we see how place and history shape a collective habitus, offering a counterpoint to modern individualism. But if we are to move toward a truly integrated and full human identity, we must now ask: what would a self look like if it emerged not only from place and memory, but from the fullness of relational, gendered, and symbolic life?
Footnotes
[^1]: Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).
[^2]: Charles Olson, The Maximus Poems (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
[^3]: Pierre Bourdieu, The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power, trans. Lauretta C. Clough (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
[^4]: Olson, The Maximus Poems.
[^5]: Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).
[^6]: Olson, The Maximus Poems.
[^7]: Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice.
[^8]: Olson, The Maximus Poems. [^9]: Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).
Bibliography
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Edited by John B. Thompson. Translated by Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Masculine Domination. Translated by Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.
Bourdieu, Pierre. The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power. Translated by Lauretta C. Clough. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.
Olson, Charles. The Maximus Poems. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.
Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.
