Working on the concept of the habitus as defined by Pierre Bourdieu.
Habitus is a complex concept, but in its simplest usage could be understood as a set of acquired patterns of thought, behavior, and taste. These patterns, or "dispositions," are the result of internalization of culture or objective social structures through the experience of an individual or group.
Bourdieu re-elaborated the concept of habitus from Marcel Mauss and extended the scope of the term to include a person's beliefs and dispositions. He used it, in a more or less systematic way, in an attempt to resolve a prominent antinomy of the human sciences: objectivism and subjectivism.
In Bourdieu's work, habitus can be defined as a system of durable and transposable[3] "dispositions” (lasting, acquired schemes of perception, thought and action). The individual agent develops these dispositions in response to the determining structures (such as class, family, and education) and external conditions (field)s they encounter. They are therefore neither wholly voluntary nor wholly involuntary.
The habitus provides the practical skills and dispositions necessary to navigate within different fields (such as sports, professional life, art) and guides the choices of the individual without ever being strictly reducible to prescribed, formal rules.[4] At the same time, the habitus is constantly remade by these navigations and choices (including the success or failure of previous actions).
Describing neither complete determination by social factors nor individual autonomy, the habitus mediates between “objective” structures of social relations and the individual “subjective” behavior of actors. In this way Bourdieu theorizes the inculcation of objective social structures into the subjective, mental experience of agents.
In Bourdieu's theory, agency is not directly observable in practices or in the habitus, but only in the experience of subjectivity. Hence, some argue that Bourdieu’s project could be said to retain an objectivist bias from structuralism. Further, some critics charge that Bourdieu's "habitus" governs so much of an individual's social makeup that it significantly limits the concept of human agency. In Bourdieu's references to "habitus" it sometimes seems as if so much of an individual's disposition is predetermined by the social habitus that such pre-dispositions cannot be altered or left behind.
Defenders of Bourdieu argue that such critics have misunderstood and exaggerated the conservative extent of "habitus" in Bourdieu. Bourdieu allows agency its location within the bounded structures of society and self. And, Bourdieu advocates a method for researchers to include diverse cultural voices in their work.[5]
Random Points:
*system of structured, structuring (unconscious) dispositions, constituted in practice and based on past experience
*the anticipations of the habitus, practical hypotheses based on past experience, give disproportionate weight to early experience
*the habitus, a product of history, produces individual and collective practices in accordance with the schemes of history
*the habitus is the active presence of the whole past of which it is a product
*thru the habitus, a present past tends to perpetuate itself into the future by reactivation in similarly structured practices
*the habitus is not consciously mastered and contains an ‘objective intention’ which outruns the conscious intentions of its apparent author
*the members of a same group or class, being products of the same objective conditions, share a habitus
and the practices of these members are better harmonized than the agents know or wish
*the habitus is an imminent law, inscribed in bodies by identical histories, which is a precondition for coordination of practices, and mobilization
Strat: habitus entails social reproduction. Social change: habitus is both an obstacle and a prerequisite to social change. Berg/Luck (and Lefebvre): habitus is both a product and a producer of the structure.
^ English, James, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value, Harvard UP, 2005
^ Bourdieu, Pierre, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 1972
^ Calhoun, Craig (ed) Dictionary of the Social Sciences, Article: Bourdieu, Pierre, Oxford University Press, 2002
^ See Bourdieu 'Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste', Chapter 3
