Muriel Darmon

University of Paris 5.^[7] While pursuing her fieldwork, Darmon ran into difficulties accessing a psychiatric hospital for her research. She ultimately described this in her article, “La sociologue, le psychiatre et le boulangère : analyse d'un refus de terrain” (transl. ”The sociologist, the psychiatrist and the baker: analysis of a refusal in fieldwork”), after the head doctor of a hospital rejected Darmon’s request for interviews by saying sociologists had no more to say about anorexia than bakers did: “It’s simple: [anorexics] don’t eat bread.”^[8]

grandes écoles (a parallel system to the open enrollment at most of France’s public universities). Over the course of two years of fieldwork, Darmon conducted 100 interviews and spent 100 hours of observation in two prépas, one for science and the other economic, at what she describes as an “intermediary” school situated between Paris’s best-known high schools and the smaller provincial schools.^[10] On the basis of this material, Darmon, following the sociological tradition of Pierre Bourdieu,^[9] analyzed the power structures that come to define the students’ identities over course of their time in these classes: what habitus, and thus, types of selves, these schools produce.^[11]