Field (French:champ) is one of the core concepts used by French social scientist Pierre Bourdieu. A field is a setting in which agents and their social positions are located. The position of each particular agent in the field is a result of interaction between the specific rules of the field, agent's habitus and agent's capital (social, economic and cultural). Fields interact with each other, and are hierarchical: Most are subordinate to the larger field of power and class relations.
Instead of confining his analysis of social relations and change to voluntaristic agency or strictly in terms of the structural concept of class, Bourdieu uses the agency-structure bridging concept of field: any historical, non-homogeneous social-spatial arena in which people maneuver and struggle in pursuit of desirable resources. Much of Bourdieu's work observes the semi-independent role of educational and cultural resources in the expression of agency. This makes his work amenable to liberal-conservative scholarship positing the fundamental cleavages of society as amongst disorderly factions of the working class, in need of disciplinary intervention where they have assumed excessive privilege. Unsurprisingly given his historical and biographical location, however, Bourdieu was in practice both influenced by and sympathetic to the Marxist identification of economic command as a principal component of power and agency within capitalist society, in contrast to some of his followers or the influential sociologist Max Weber.
In agriculture, a field is an area of land, enclosed or otherwise, used for agricultural purposes such as cultivating crops or as a paddock or other enclosure for livestock. A field may also be an area left to lie fallow or as arable land.
Many farms have a field border, usually composed of a strip of shrubs and vegetation, used to provide food and cover necessary for the survival of wildlife. It has been found that these borders may lead to an increased variety of animals and plants in the area, but also in some cases a decreased yield of crops.
Language
In Australian and New ZealandEnglish, any agricultural field may be called a paddock. If stock are grazed there, the space may be called a run, e.g. sheep run; cattle run.
In video, a field is one of the many still images which are displayed sequentially to create the impression of motion on the screen. Two fields comprise one video frame. When the fields are displayed on a video monitor they are "interlaced" so that the content of one field will be used on all of the odd-numbered lines on the screen and the other field will be displayed on the even lines. Converting fields to a still frame image requires a process called deinterlacing, in which the missing lines are duplicated or interpolated to recreate the information that would have been contained in the discarded field. Since each field contains only half of the information of a full frame, however, deinterlaced images do not have the resolution of a full frame.
In order to increase the resolution of video images, therefore, new schemes have been created that capture full-frame images for each frame. Video composed of such frames is called progressive scan video.
Video shot with a standard video camera format such as S-VHS or Mini-DV is often interlaced when created, whereas video shot with a film-based camera is almost always progressive. Free-to-air analog TV was mostly broadcast as interlaced material because the trade-off of spatial resolution for frame-rate reduced flickering on Cathode ray tube (CRT) televisions. High-definition digital television (see: HDTV) today can be broadcast terrestrially or distributed through cable system in either interlaced (1080i) or progressive scan formats (720p or 1080p). Most prosumer camcorders can record in progressive scan formats.
Bourdieu's work was primarily concerned with the dynamics of power in society, and especially the diverse and subtle ways in which power is transferred and social order maintained within and across generations. In conscious opposition to the idealist tradition of much of Western philosophy, his work often emphasized the corporeal nature of social life and stressed the role of practice and embodiment in social dynamics. Building upon the theories of Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Georges Canguilhem, Karl Marx, Gaston Bachelard, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Erwin Panofsky, and Marcel Mauss (among others), his research pioneered novel investigative frameworks and methods, and introduced such influential concepts as cultural, social, and symbolic forms of capital (as opposed to traditional economic forms of capital), the cultural reproduction, the habitus, the field or location, and symbolic violence. Another notable influence on Bourdieu was Blaise Pascal, after whom Bourdieu titled his Pascalian Meditations. Bourdieu's major contributions to the sociology of education, the theory of sociology, and sociology of aesthetics have achieved wide influence in several related academic fields (e.g. anthropology, media and cultural studies, education), popular culture, and the arts.
A much more productive and rewarding approach may consist in disentangling oneself from what PierreBourdieu calls “the juridical field” in order to deconstruct other forces at play in the Hlophe saga. This process of disentanglement does not presuppose leaving the juridical field completely.
