Our usual representations of the opposition between the "civilized" and the "primitive" derive from willfully ignoring the relationship of distance our social science sets up between the observer and the observed. In fact, the author argues, the relationship between the anthropologist and his object of study is a particular instance of the relationship between knowing and doing, interpreting and using, symbolic mastery and practical mastery―or between logical logic, armed with all the accumulated instruments of objectification, and the universally pre-logical logic of practice. In this, his fullest statement of a theory of practice, Bourdieu both sets out what might be involved in incorporating one's own standpoint into an investigation and develops his understanding of the powers inherent in the second member of many oppositional pairs―that is, he explicates how the practical concerns of daily life condition the transmission and functioning of social or cultural forms. The first part of the book, "Critique of Theoretical Reason," covers more general questions, such as the objectivization of the generic relationship between social scientific observers and their objects of study, the need to overcome the gulf between subjectivism and objectivism, the interplay between structure and practice (a phenomenon Bourdieu describes via his concept of the habitus ), the place of the body, the manipulation of time, varieties of symbolic capital, and modes of domination. The second part of the book, "Practical Logics," develops detailed case studies based on Bourdieu's ethnographic fieldwork in Algeria. These examples touch on kinship patterns, the social construction of domestic space, social categories of perception and classification, and ritualized actions and exchanges. This book develops in full detail the theoretical positions sketched in Bourdieu's Outline of a Theory of Practice . It will be especially useful to readers seeking to grasp the subtle concepts central to Bourdieu's theory, to theorists interested in his points of departure from structuralism (especially fom Lévi-Strauss), and to critics eager to understand what role his theory gives to human agency. It also reveals Bourdieu to be an anthropological theorist of considerable originality and power.
Bourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location, and symbolic violence to reveal the dynamics of power relations in social life. His work emphasized the role of practice and embodiment or forms in social dynamics and worldview construction, often in opposition to universalized Western philosophical traditions. He built upon the theories of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Georges Canguilhem, Karl Marx, Gaston Bachelard, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Erwin Panofsky, and Marcel Mauss. A notable influence on Bourdieu was Blaise Pascal, after whom Bourdieu titled his Pascalian Meditations.
Bourdieu rejected the idea of the intellectual "prophet", or the "total intellectual", as embodied by Sartre. His best known book is Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, in which he argues that judgments of taste are related to social position. His argument is put forward by an original combination of social theory and data from surveys, photographs and interviews, in an attempt to reconcile difficulties such as how to understand the subject within objective structures. In the process, he tried to reconcile the influences of both external social structures and subjective experience on the individual (see structure and agency).
The ideas and the concepts are groundbreaking but I really feel the text is unnecessarily difficult. I know he's French and a philsopher at that, but sentences with that many commas should be banned. If you really are a genius, you might want to keep in mind that the rest of the world might not be!
Bourdieu challenges the notions of subjectivism and objectivism, in favor of agency and structures. He adopts an approach of internalized structures that he calls habitus, which function as principles which generate and organize practices and representations. Those practices and representations can be objectively adapted to their outcomes “without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them” (53).
First of all, according to Bourdieu objectivism is a concept attributed to certain elements that lack the personal bias; they are “independent of individual consciousness and wills” (26). Because of objectivism practical knowledge is often regarded as a set of rationalizations and hence rejected. Ultimately, Bourdieu argues, objectivism reduces social science to situational analyses of phenomena. Essentially, it ignores the relationship between experimental and objective meaning in social science. Just like subjectivism, objectivism is problematic as well.
Secondly, Bourdieu critiques in his understanding of knowledge some epistemological and social breaks in order to highlight the implications of objectivism. He references Bally’s conclusions on linguistic research, which imply as social break from the actual research. This leads to the neglecting of the “social conditions of scientific activity” (33). In a participant observation there is the contradiction that the observer cannot be assume the role of the participant, hence the paradox. He also criticizes Kant, in the sense that, he too is an outsider; he assumes the point of view of the creator of art instead of the observer that views art from the outside.
Moreover, Bourdieu refers to fetishism of social laws as a criticism of structuralism. Due to their need to discover new forms in the history of social thought, structuralists fall into this notion of fetishism. Bourdieu defines it as a rejection of subjectivism that leads to specific principles of division.
Since Bourdieu rejects both objectivism and subjectivism, he undertakes another approach; that of habitus. Habitus “is constituted in practice and is always oriented towards practical functions” (52). It is the internalization of the cosmos for the creation of an identity. Essentially, structure is the result of the systems of durable, transposable dispositions that define habitus. More specifically, as Bourdieu states structured structures are predisposed to act as structuring structures. He defines them as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can “be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them” (53). The structures are objectively ‘regulated’ without being the subjective product of social action.
In conclusion, Bourdieu thinks that habitus occurs during the early stages of socialization, however there still remains some kind of agency, still based on the normalized form of habitus. Just like Durkheim Bourdieu believes in the predominance of a “past self”; past behaviors that have now been unconsciously internalized.
Pierre Bourdieu's Logic of Practice proposes a model through which to understand society in the most general terms. The basic idea is that human beings are predisposed to act in their social environment in certain ways relative to a pre-determined understanding of the ways in which they think they ought to behave and relative to the perceived value certain other people have or possess in a given society. My description there clears Bourdieu's work of the quasi-technical jargon, but should the reader want to familiarize herself with the concepts, they are the following: field, habitus, doxa, capital.
According to Bourdieu, the field is sort of like the space of social possibilities, the space in which people can act and interact. Habitus is the set of dispositions that people have internalized and which of course predispose people to act in certain ways in the field. Doxa are the set of beliefs, perceptions, and so on that people have and have internalized that help a person determine what they think one ought to do in the field of possibilities. And capital is an understanding of value attributed to and possessed by people and objects, which can be a money value or can be symbolic (or social, or cultural, etc., but Bourdieu is mostly focused on symbolic capital in this book).
This is a book I read, more or less, but which I must admit to skimming. Several works in social science seem to be unnecessarily jargon-happy, and it's probably owing to certain fields which encourage that kind of thing, like literary theory or perhaps cultural anthropology. Bourdieu's book is rife with unnecessary jargon and strange and seemingly unnecessary explications. Although I think the basic ideas and concepts in this book are important, the way in which the book was written was not to my liking.
Covers a lot of the same ground as Outline of a Theory of Practice and is slightly clearer in its explanations of habitus, field and dispositions. An important work on the topic of embodied knowledge but I find Bourdieu's model on the whole to be too limited due to three factors: 1) the market metaphors of social and cultural capital don't really address some kinds of social action, 2) while denying historically determined/materialist/structuralist orientations, there is very little wiggle room to admit human agency or robust ways of accounting for social change, and 3) his insistance that embodied dispositions are never conscious or calculated isn't supported by the widely reported experience of occilation between conscious and unconscious behavior.
I read this book to see what it says about habitus formation. The book isn't about habitus formation. For example, the preface, ch1, and ch2 of book 1 is about practice theory as an alternative to objectivism and subjectivism. He goes to great lengths to describe those ways of thinking and to show the practical way in opposition to them. Chapter 3 is more centrally about habitus, but in terms of habitus formation, all it says is that habitus forms in practice, where structures are encountered.
This is what he says in Ch3 about habitus formation:
1. "habitus ... is constituted in practice" (p.52). I.e., habitus forms when people are engaging in social practices. Said in another way, habitus is "the incorporated products of historical practice" (p.52).
2. "the anticipations of the habitus ... give disproportionate weight to early experiences" (p.54). Here is his well-known, and often critiqued (e.g., by the journal article by Ho et al. 2021, "A life course perspective on cultural capital acquisition: How the timing and duration of musical socialization affect the taste for classical music and opera") idea that early (i.e., childhood) experiences are what matter most for habitus formation. He thinks this because "the habitus tends to ensure its own constancy and its defence against change [operates] by rejecting information capable of calling into question its accumulated information" (p.60-61). Which means: our subconscious understandings of how the world work like to find, in the world, their reaffirmation. Think of your Facebook or Twitter feed, the idea that everyone is locked into silos in social media where their ideas are constantly reconfirmed. It feels good to have the world tell you that your understanding is right. Even so, many scholars have found that, for various reasons, people often like to enter into new worlds of practice that are quite unfamiliar (e.g., Ho et al. 2021). He further elaborates on this by saying, "the habitus tends to protect itself from crises and critical challenges by providing itself with a milieu to which it is as pre-adapted as possible, that is, a relatively constant universe tending to reinforce its dispositions" (p.61). Again, think of the Facebook or Twitter (or other social media) feed.
3. Bourdieu also says that people go through different social trajectories, even in the same social group, and that the specific chronology of habitus formation for each particular individual person makes their individual habitus a little bit different than others even within groups to which both belong. Said in Bourdieu’s style: "The principle of the differences between individual habitus lies in the singularity of their social trajectories, to which there correspond a series of chronologically ordered determinations that are mutually irreducible to one another" (p.60).
4. Finally, Bourdieu makes a link between what people understand to be possible and habitus formation. He says that habitus is formed in practice, but that practice is entered into partly via what is understood to be possible (p.64). I like this because I have often thought that what leads people into different career trajectories is often not what career would be best for them but the career that they know to be possible based on their parents/guardians, relatives, friends' parents, etc. When I was a teenager I wanted to be an ecologist (the biological kind, not a political ecologist, of which I had absolutely no understanding back then), but I somehow realized that ecologists probably had a lot of taken-for-granted understandings that I would never be exposed to in my family group, so I started reading autobiographies of ecologists to understand what they thought to be possible. That reading did indeed lead me into new kinds of practices, which I am sure did contribute to forming my habitus.
That's basically all he says about habitus formation in chapter 3.
Chapter 4 is also pretty interesting, called "Belief and the Body". This is what I found there about habitus formation:
1. "The body believes in what it plays at: it weeps if it mimes grief" (p.73). I think this means that emotional states come with dispositional scripts on how to perform those emotions. I.e., that there are taken-for-granted ways of acting out different emotions, like weeping to indicate grief. So basically those templates of how to perform grief are inscribed in habitus, but he doesn't say exaclty how.
2. Then he starts belaboring probably one of the weirdest points in the Bourdieu/Wacquant universe, this idea that discursive knowledge is not very relevant in habitus, an idea that, in chapter 6, he then rejects, but then goes on to keep using it in chapters 7-8. I understand of course that much of what we know in our bodies is non-discursive. But talk is still always important in habitus formation, or almost always. Not every part of every disposition will be talked about, but I still think Bourdieu and Wacquant, in their various publications, underplay the role of talk in habitus formation. So in Ch4 Bourdieu says, "What is 'learned by body' is not something that one has, like knowledge that can be brandished, but something that one is. This is particularly clear in non-literate societies, where knowledge can only survive in the incorporated state" (p.73). But incorporated knowledge can and is still "brandished". E.g., someone showing off that they can hit a three-pointer in basketball or can throw a javelin really far or something like that (experiences from my teenage years!). Or spike a volleyball so hard that it bounces so high that it hits the roof. Etc. People know what their incorporated skills are and often do brandish them consciously. Second, there are many "knowledgeable practices", in the sense of, practices where a big part of the practice is discursive knowledge. Of course all practices are knowledgeable in the sense of embodied or bodily knowledge as well. But in many practices, discursive knowledge is embodied in neural nets (e.g., as described by D'Andrade in the excellent book, The Development of Cognitive Anthropology) and often activated in practices (academia is one clear example!). It is knowledge that can and indeed is "brandished", such as to identify a common raven (in bird-watching groups) or to bring a criticism of a theory up at an academic conference presentation. People talk about what they are doing all the time, and sometimes that talk basically constitutes the practice, such as at academic conferences.
3. He also talks about how the dispositions of habitus can operate in new practices without conscious a decision to use those elements of habitus for the new practice, which I agree with: "schemes are able to pass from practice to practice without moving through discourse and consciousness" (p.74). E.g., let's say you're a proficient snowboarder, you will apply many bodily schemes, like how to balance on a board, if you start surfing, even if you don't think about and maybe even can't think about the dispositions you have that are about how one balances on a board while moving forward quickly.
4. "every society provides structural exercises which tend to transmit a particular form of practical mastery" (p.76). So there are institutions in society, or long standing rituals, that expose people to particular experiences, that are part of habitus formation. Pretty banal, but another part of the general idea about how habitus forms. In Kabylia, where Bourdieu did his fieldwork for this book, there are "riddles and ritual contests" (p.75), games, duels, gift exchanges, "discussions in the men's assembly", etc. (p.75).
5. In this chapter he also introduces something pretty interesting. The experiences of fear in Kabylia. He talks about the "warnings that inculcate a fear of supernatural dangers" (p.76) which to me looks like a process where knowledge is mobilized to create a negative emotion, which ends up being part of habitus formation (although Bourdieu doesn't theorize those links between knowledge and emotion in habitus formation). These kind of relations between knowledge and emotion are an important part of habitus formation in my view, and I try to keep track of when scholars talk about them. They aren't specifically theorized as such here, but he still mentions them. Later he talks about nature and these fears, which I will comment on below.
Then on to chapter 6 (chapter 5 says nothing about habitus formation), where he talks more about when and how discursive knowledge is part of habitus formation. So for example, he says, "The pedagogic work of inculcation ... is one of the major occasions for formulating and converting practical schemes into explicit norms" (p.102-103). So when people are learning something new, they often search for discursive knowledge to help them figure out the new practice, and there are often teachers who explicitly teach them how to do it. E.g., there are dance instructors, even in a very "corporeal" practice like dancing, who talk to people a lot about how to learn what they are learning (e.g., see Hancock's 2013 book, American Allegory, of which I have another review). Bourdieu quickly adds: but sometimes these explicit rules don't work well! (p.103). He always wants to bring the discussion back to non-discursive learning. He also quickly adds, "the rule is the obstacle par excellence to the construction of an adequate theory of practice" (p.103). But rules are everywhere, especially when learning a new practice, or when learning something risky. Matthew Desmond's (2007) book On the Fireline is a good example of how explicit discursive rules are often part of a practice, even when much of a practice is non-discursive—Desmond's book is primarily about 28 rules that wildland firefighters are constantly taught and asked to recall. Even after an entire book on habitus formation and expression, Desmond still sees 18 of the rules as a critical part of the practice and understanding of wildland firefighters (the other 10 rules he sees as being part of inculcating a problematic individualism into firefighters, leading them to blame their fellow firefighters, rather than the institutional decisions made on any fire, if they get into dangerous situations or die during their work). But then Bourdieu goes back and affirms: "representations ... have a dialectical relationship with the dispositions that are expressed through them and which they help to produce and reinforce" (p.108)!!!! So Bourdieu ends up admitting that there are "representations" (e.g., ideas, images, things that are consciously talked about) that are constantly in dialogue with practice, which is basically what Desmond (2007) says throughout his book. So I feel like some better editing on Bourdieu's part to consistently articulate what he actually thinks about rules/representations/etc. would have made his ideas clearer. He describes this role of representations more on p.108. He says this good quote I just related about representations, but then also has other passages where he emphasizes that "What is 'learned by body' is not something that one has, like knowledge that can be brandished, but something that one is." (p.73). I understand what he is saying but this articulation of the situation on p.108 is much more accurate.
Ok so all of that is about Book 1, called "Critique of Theoretical Reason".
Then Book 2 is a detailed description of how practical sense worked in Kabylia (and sometimes about his hometown of Bearn, where he also did a study, although sometimes it is unclear which place he is actually talking about at a given moment!). Reading through Book 2 was sometimes a bit of a struggle—I'm sure if Levi-Strauss was reading this, he would have been very interested. But if you're not Levi-Strauss, nor very interested in a wide range of very detailed and obscurely written descriptions of life in pre-capitalist Kabylia, it may be something you want to skip. Chapter 3 of Book 2 (which is 70 pages long) has a few things to say about habitus formation.
1. The first sentence is the most relevant to the issue of habitus formation, although it isn't much elaborated upon: "The extend to which the schemes of the habitus are objectified in codified knowledge, [and] transmitted as such, varies greatly between one are of practice and another" (p.200). So, sometimes parts of practices can be translated into discursive knowledge (e.g., the many little instructions that the boxing instructors in Wacquant's book, Body and Soul, are constantly giving the boxers about their bodily practice, like, "move your head [out of the way of punches]!", something that Wacquant [in the book, Body and Soul] had a hard time doing when he was learning boxing initially). But what Bourdieu still doesn't say here is that discursive knowledge itself is often part of practices. But, as with the degree to which practices are encoded in discursive knowledge (the case Bourdieu says exists), different practices have different levels of discursive knowledge that are naturally part of them (what Bourdieu doesn't say). Even within the same practice, different practitioners make the practice more or less focused on relevant discursive knowledge, such as bird watchers who just want to go out and enjoy being in nature while seeing some birds, to those who want to identify every bird species and talk with others about the ecological information they all know about the birds and their environments (a difference among people I have seen in my own research, in nature groups). The example Bourdieu gives of how certain practices are described in more discursive knowledge than others is that, in Kabylia, agriculture and those practices "linked to or directly associated with agricultural activity" (p.200) have the most "sayings, prohibitions, proverts, and strongly regulated rites" (p.200), that is to say, explicit knowledge representing different parts of the practices.
2. So one of my own interests is the relationships between knowledge and emotion in habitus formation. It seems like one of the main claims about the relation between knowledge and emotion in Kabylia, in Book 2, is that there is a great fear of nature and a great deal of knowledge mobilized to do practices that ritualistically lower that fear by allegedly having ritual effects (e.g., p.235). The great negative emotion (the fear) is lessened or neutralized via ritual knowledge (p.235). And I'd say that in fact, those rituals are part of a whole social structure that has enabled sustainability in agricultural practices, so in fact the rituals do have a positive effect on nature. The people in Kabylia also speak of people among them who don't respect nature, who instead only think in terms of a capitalistic market logic, and in so doing invite ruin ("The indignant comments provoked by the heretical behaviour of peasants who have departed from traditional ways draw attention to the mechanisms which inclined the peasant to maintain an enchanted relationship with the land and made it impossible for him to see his toil as labour. ‘It’s sacrilege, they have profaned the earth. They have done away with fear (elbiba). Nothing intimidates them or stops them. They turn everything upside down, I’m sure they will end up ploughing in lakbrif (the fig season) if they are in a hurry and if they feel like spending lab’lal (the licit period for ploughing) doing something else, or in rbia (spring) if they’ve been too lazy in lah'lal. It’s all the same to them.’" p.116). So the reverential fear and subsequent knowledge of respecting nature and how to go about that do help promote sustainability (that's my own idea, Bourdieu basically shows that but doesn't comment on it).
That is all the book has to say about habitus formation.
I think he has less of a need to understand habitus formation than I do—my scholarly work is about social change, specifically how social justice and environmental-friendliness can come about to a much greater degree. Bourdieu's work, at least as reflected here, is more oriented toward understanding social structure/social order. So I think that is why there is less of a focus on habitus formation, although perhaps in another source he goes into more depth.
Bourdieu introduces an insightful theoretical perspective toward the practical logic of everyday actions by means of the concept of "habitus" (roughly and simply can be defined as "cultural capital") as well as the objective structures within which such action are carried on. He, by some ethnographic cases, shows that how recognition of everyday life practices requires the anthropologists to consider the interplay and overlaps of various structures which are surrounding a case. To me the most interesting part of the book was his critique of researchers in humanistic disciplines because of their detachment from the "ongoing reality". He discusses reasons of such detachment in depth and then discusses his own suggestions to modify humanistic and specifically anthropological methods.
I love Bourdieu in terms of his theories, and really felt that a lot of the stuff in this book was detailed and comprehensive, but DAMN I wish there were more full stops.
Bourdieu gets a lot of flak for his prose--this is a rare case where I (sometimes) lean toward the critics' side. My experience reading this and other works was very akin to gold-mining: slogging through pages of cramped, twisted, choking pitch, with the occasional sentence or phrase (nugget) of absolute genius.
HOWEVER! Since I'm currently knee-deep in the translation of French philosophy, I wonder how much of B's writing problems come down to poor translation. The French language is *much* more forgiving with run-on sentences, and some translators (either because they don't know any better or because they're too terrified of "deviating" from the original) take a very literal, one-to-one approach when putting French philosophy into English. Run-ons are usually preserved, and idioms/turns of phrase are often treated as proprietary/technical vocabulary. As a result, French philosophers often strike English audiences as wordy, nonsensical, or deliberately obscure. Just fwiw, if you find yourself struggling with Bourdieu, Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, and so on.
Bourdieus Sozialer Sinn finde ich zwar interessant, seine Versöhnung der objektivistischen und der subjektivistischen Sichtweise anhand des Habitus ist großartig, aber (i) er hätte alles mit VIEL weniger Worten sagen können 🙈 (ii) er analysiert in dem zweiten Teil (Praktische Logikformen) die vorkapitalistische Gesellschaft der Kabylei (Nordalgerien), welche keinen Gebrauch von Bildungstiteln macht ➡️ empirische Belegung deckt nur teilweise das, was im ersten Teil (Kritik der theoretischen Vernunft) behauptet wird. Judith Butler ist leichter und interessanter zu lesen!
Bourdieu introduces an insightful theoretical perspective toward the practical logic of everyday actions by means of the concept of "habitus" (roughly and simply can be defined as "cultural capital") as well as the objective structures within which such action are carried on. He, by some ethnographic cases, shows that how recognition of everyday life practices requires the anthropologists to consider the interplay and overlaps of various structures which are surrounding a case. To me the most interesting part of the book was his critique of researchers in humanistic disciplines because of their detachment from the "ongoing reality". He discusses reasons of such detachment in depth and then discusses his own suggestions to modify humanistic and specifically anthropological methods.
As a newcomer to Bourdieu, I found this book particularly dense, and the translation difficult at best. This volume has a clear account of Bourdieu's definitions of field and habitus, as well as links between these concepts and Bourdeiu's conception of distinction. As he tends to recycle his ideas frequently between books, however, I find that most of the insights in this book are more clearly articulated in "Practical Reason" and "Distinction."
The theoretical background was rather complicatedly written and I covered it from the wikipedia-article. The examples later in the book were at parts fascinating but mostly way too detailed (from a sociology student's POV).
It didn't really help that the backcover nor the prefix explained what "logic of practice" was, and I went half-way through the book before I even realised what this was about.
To reconcile never ending debate between structuralists and subjectivists, Bourdieu's Habitus does make a persuasive case as to understand both systems to get a sense of individual in totality.