Pierre Bourdieu is a distinguished French sociologist working today. This study is designed to make his dense and complicated thought easily accessible to a student audience. Written in a clear style, the author adopts a critical stance to Bourdieu, covering the full range of his work from the early Algerian fieldwork, to the massive surveys of French cultural consumption, to his most recent theoretical essays. Placing Pierre Bourdieu's sociological enterprise in its proper context - French intellectual life since the 1950s - Jenkins offers a critique which acknowledges Bourdieu's massive achievement while at the same time recognizing the shortcomings and problems of his work. All of the main substantive areas about which Bourdieu has written are discussed - culture, education, social stratification, language and the ethnography of the Kablyia - but the emphasis is upon his contributions to theory, methodology and epistemology.