Masculine domination is so deeply ingrained in our unconscious thatwe hardly perceive all of its dimensions. It is so much in linewith our expectations that we struggle to call it fully intoquestion. Pierre Bourdieu's ethnographic analysis of genderdivisions in Kabyle society, as a living reservoir of theMediterranean cultural tradition, provides a potent instrument fordisclosing the symbolic structures of the androcentric unconsciouswhich survives in the men and women of our own societies. Bourdieu analyses masculine domination as a paradigmatic form ofsymbolic violence - the kind of gentle, invisible, pervasiveviolence which is exercised through cognition and misrecognition,knowledge and sentiment, often with the unwitting consent of thedominated. To understand this form of domination we must analyseboth its invariant features and the historical work ofdehistoricization through which social institutions - family,school, church, state - eternalize the arbitrary at the root ofmen's power. This analysis leads directly to the politicalquestion: can we neutralize the mechanisms through which history iscontinuously turned into nature, thereby freeing the forces ofchange and accelerating the incipient transformations of therelations between the sexes? This new book by Pierre Bourdieu - which has been a bestsellerin France - will be essential reading for students and scholarsacross the social sciences and humanities and for anyone concernedwith questions of gender, sexuality and power.