Habitus (sociology)

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.

The concept of habitus has been used as early as Aristotle but in contemporary usage was introduced by Marcel Mauss and later re-elaborated by Pierre Bourdieu.

Origin of concept

Loïc Wacquant wrote that habitus is an old philosophical notion, originating in the thought of Aristotle and of the medieval Scholastics. In contemporary practice, habitus was introduced by Marcel Mauss as "body techniques" (techniques du corps) and further developed by Norbert Elias in the 1930s.

Mauss defined habitus as those aspects of culture that are anchored in the body or daily practices of individuals, groups, societies, and nations. It includes the totality of learned habits, bodily skills, styles, tastes, and other non-discursive knowledges that might be said to "go without saying" for a specific group -- in that way it can be said to operate beneath the level of ideology.

A contemporary example of habitus is in a chapter on collectives in Jung,Irigaray, Individuation, Philosophy, Analytical Psycholgy and the Question of the Feminine Frances Gray Routledge 2008

One work that employs the concept of habitus in a specific context is James English's The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value . The concept is also present in the work of Max Weber and Edmund Husserl.

Habitus in Bourdieu's social theory

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 "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. 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.

Body Habitus

Body habitus is the medical term for physique, and is defined as either endomorphic (overweight), ectomorphic (underweight) or mesomorphic (normal weight). In this sense, habitus can be understood as the physical and constitutional characteristics of an individual, especially as related to the tendency to develop a certain disease.

Scholars researching "habitus" in the field

• Loic J.D. Wacquant - USA (Berkeley Page)
• Saba Mahmood - USA
• Anthropologist Philippe Bourgois - USA (incorporates the concept of "habitus" into much of his work with injection drug users in the San Francisco area. )
• Karl Maton, University of Sydney, Australia - builds on both Bourdieu's concept of 'habitus' and the related concept of 'code' from Basil Bernstein in the sociology of education, see )

Footnotes

Further reading

• Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge University Press.
• Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process.
• Jenkins, Richard. 1992. Pierre Bourdieu. London: Routledge.
• MacLeod, Jay. 1995. Ain't No Makin' It. Colorado: Westview Press, Inc.
• Maton, Karl. 2008 'Habitus', in Grenfell, M. (ed) Pierre Bourdieu: Key concepts. London: Acumen Press.
• Mauss, Marcel. 1934. "Les Techniques du corps", Journal de Psychologie 32 (3-4). Reprinted in Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie, 1936, Paris: PUF.