Truong, Fabien

The Taste of Others: Sociology of Intentions and Sociological Intentions - 2015.


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The French film The Taste of Others was a huge commercial and critical success when it was released in 2000. At the very same time Pierre Bourdieu gained an audience, which was to go far beyond the academic sphere of sociology. The film has often been presented as a unique creative illustration of Bourdieu’s theory about ‘symbolic violence’, social building of aesthetical tastes and cultural illegitimacy, presenting the Taste of Others as a break through ‘sociological movie’. Nevertheless, this affinity between the film and Bourdieu’s theory has always been taken for granted and has never been analysed sociologically. This paper intends to do so by understanding the dynamics in between fiction and sociology by i) presenting a sociological inquiry about how sociology could have influenced the production process of the film, based on a personal interview with the movie maker; ii) reflecting upon how the narrative ‘rule’ of the film can challenge sociology. The first concern shows how sociological knowledge can be integrated throughout the specificities of a biographical trajectory, marked by the experience of social misfits, the later shows how fiction can render particular sociological phenomenon in an efficient way: the experience of social vacillating, the reciprocal game of mutual distanciation in between groups and signs of improbable possibilities occurring in social life.