In Chapter 1 we formally outlined what we felt to be Bourdieu's major methodological themes and techniques. The intent of this chapter is to give a slightly more ethnographic approach to Bourdieu by providing the reader with an overview of the development of Bourdieu's work and the genesis of his ideas as drawn directly from himself and his reflections upon his intellectual past. The material for this chapter is drawn from personal observations and interviews with Bourdieu at the Centre de Sociologie Europeenne in 1985 and 1986,¹ as well as from his written work from 1985 to 1989. In addition to the Bourdieu material, I have also included sections from a particularly interesting interview between Bourdieu and a group of German scholars (see Honneth and Schwibs 1985), plus impressions of Bourdieu's life and work by his first major English translator, Richard Nice. Finally, I would like to point out that the layout of this chapter differs from others in the book in that the text is interrupted by descriptive sections which take up particular ideas from the text. These sections are taken from an interview with Richard Nice and help illuminate certain points. Bourdieu has always maintained that it was imperative that the academic reflect upon his or her own practice. In this interpretive essay we have tried to allow him to speak for himself.