Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre Bourdieu

Habitus

Habitus: 
Cultural habitat which becomes internalised in the form of dispositions to act, think, and feel in certain ways. A set of culturally determined bodily dispositions which have no representative content and at no stage pass through consciousness. E.g., the disposition to stand different distances from people in different circumstances; the disposition to behave or think in a racist was (e.g., someone who simply sees people from another race as ‘shifty’ or ‘arrogant’). 
 
Features of Habitus:

0. We are not normally consciously aware of habitus but we may become aware of it through conscious reflection or finding ourselves in an alien environment. However, it is important to note that in so doing we are not transforming the habitus itself into a set of representational mental states (beliefs, desires etc., rather we are acquiring beliefs about the habitus (which is an remains inherently non-representational).
1. Habitus is acquired through our aculturation into certain social groups such as social classes, a particular gender, our family, our peer group, or even our nationality.
2. There are different habituses associated with each of these groups. Each individual’s habitus is a complex mix of these different habituses together with certain individual peculiarities.

 
2 Ways of Missing Habitus (the Objectivist and Subjectivist Mistakes): 
 
The Objectivist Mistake: 
When we examine a society or culture from an objective point of view, we must attribute beliefs and desires to the members of that society or culture in order to make their behaviour intelligible to us. The objectivist mistake lies in taking this description in terms of beliefs and desires (representative mental states) and reading it back into the minds of the people we are studying. In other words, the objectivist mistakenly assumes that, because he can only make his subjects’ behaviour intelligible by translating it into the language of beliefs and desires, there must be beliefs and desires in his subjects’ minds which are causing them to behave as they do. Thus he completely overlooks the fact that the subjects behaviour can be simply a matter of bodily dispositions (habitus) with no representative content whatsoever. E.g. Saussure and the structuralist anthropologists. 
 
The Subjectivist Mistake: 
When we examine our world and our choices from a purely subjective point of view we do not, and cannot, see the objective structures (habitus) which colour our world and shape our choices. E.g., we see our world in a certain way, under a certain aspect, and, because we are looking at it from a first person perspective, cannot see the cultural forces which dispose us to see it in that way or under that aspect. So, the subjectivist mistake is to assume that because it is not possible to see the habitus from a subjectivist perspective, there is no habitus. E.g., Sartre. 

http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~fl3min4/130/bourdieu.html

Prepared by Diana Fleming, University of California, Berkeley