Contribution
A compact restatement of habitus by Bourdieu’s closest expositor. It adds nothing new to the concept. It lists its philosophical ancestry (Aristotle, Aquinas, Durkheim, Mauss, Weber, Veblen, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Elias), gives a five-part anatomy, and corrects four “recurrent misunderstandings” (p. 68). Its use to this record is that it states, with Wacquant’s authority, that habitus is layered, can be split, can misfire, and is inert without a field that triggers it.
Key insight
Habitus is a disposition that needs a situation: “like a spring, it needs an external trigger and so it cannot be considered in isolation from the definite social worlds (and eventually fields) within which it operates” (p. 69). So an analysis of dispositions is always paired with “the mapping of the system of positions that alternately excite, suppress, or redirect the inclinations of the agent” (p. 69). Practice comes from the meeting of the two, which Wacquant calls “the microdialectic of dispositions and positions” (p. 69).
Assumptions
- Dispositions are acquired socially, in the body. Habitus is “the ways in which the sociosymbolic structures of society become deposited inside persons in the form of lasting dispositions” (p. 65).
- It operates below consciousness. “a practical competency, acquired in and for action, that operates beneath the level of consciousness” (p. 66).
- Earlier layers filter later ones. Each layer “operates as a prism through which later experiences are filtered” (p. 67), so infancy weighs most.
- The essay is Bourdieu’s frame throughout. Rival accounts of action (rational choice, symbolic interactionism) are characterized briefly and dismissed as “spontaneist, instantaneist, and intellectualist” (p. 68).
Key results
There are no data. By section:
- Genealogy (pp. 64–65). From hexis, “an acquired yet entrenched state of moral character that orients our feelings and desires”, through Aquinas, to the classical sociologists and phenomenology. Bourdieu reworked it “to transcend the opposition between objectivism and subjectivism” (p. 65).
- First use was for discordance, not reproduction (pp. 65–66). In Béarn and Algeria Bourdieu used habitus “to capture the discordance between the culturally given capacities and proclivities of people and the requirements of the emerging social system”. Uprooted Algerian peasants carried a “split habitus” (p. 66).
- The anatomy (pp. 66–67). Unlike Chomsky’s grammar, habitus is (i) social and so variable “across distributions of power”; (ii) transferable across domains; (iii) “enduring but not static or eternal”; (iv) “endowed with built-in inertia”; and (v) it “introduces a lag, and sometimes a hiatus, between the past determinations that produced it and the current determinations that interpellate it”.
- Sociation and individuation (p. 67). Shared conditions give “a masculine habitus, a bourgeois habitus, a national habitus” and institutional ones (“a juridical habitus”); at the same time each person “internalizes a matchless combination of such schemata”. Practices are “orchestrated without being the product of the organizing activity of a conductor” (Bourdieu, quoted).
- Misreading 1: one structure (p. 68). Habitus is “a multilayered and dynamic set of schemata that records, stores, and prolongs the influence of the diverse environments successively traversed”. A secondary habitus (school, “a boxing gym, a painter’s studio, a religious sect, a political party”) is grafted onto the primary one, giving “a compromise formation”.
- Misreading 2: coherence (pp. 68–69). “habitus is not necessarily coherent and unified”. Congruent institutions make a cohesive habitus; divergent ones make “unstable systems of dispositions divided against themselves and wont to generate irregular and inconsistent lines of action”.
- Misreading 3: only reproduction (p. 69). Habitus “does not necessarily agree with the social world in which it evolves”, and its misfiring “constitutes a major spring of personal resistance, social innovation and structural transformation”.
- Misreading 4: self-sufficiency (p. 69). “the same habitus will yield different lines of conduct when called out by different strategic opportunities”.
- A research posture (p. 70). Habitus is “first and foremost a stenographic manner of designating a research posture”; “the proof of the theoretical pudding of habitus must consist in its empirical eating”.
- Note 7 (p. 70). There is “no need to ‘supplement’ the theory of habitus” for creative action (Joas), “to capture the multiplicity of temporalities and structures (Sewell, 2005: ch. 4)”, or for the acting subject (Ortner).
Claims
| id | claim | strength | support |
|---|---|---|---|
| C1 | Habitus is a multilayered, revisable set of schemata, not the replica of one social structure | moderate as a reading of Bourdieu; asserted | Bourdieu quoted (1993); Wacquant’s boxing study cited (p. 68) |
| C2 | Habitus need not be coherent; divergent institutions produce dispositions divided against themselves | weak to moderate: asserted with cited cases | Algerian subproletarians, Chicago’s precariat, Manet’s “cleft habitus” (p. 69, n. 6), cited only |
| C3 | Habitus suits the analysis of crisis and change, because it can misfire against its world | moderate as exegesis | Bourdieu quoted (1980a, 1997); the Béarn and Algeria studies (pp. 65–66) |
| C4 | Habitus never generates action alone; the same habitus yields different conduct in different positions | interpretive | Bourdieu quoted (1980b); argument (p. 69) |
| C5 | Habitus is at once a principle of sociation (shared by those similarly conditioned) and of individuation (a unique combination per person) | interpretive | argument (p. 67) |
| C6 | No supplement is needed for multiplicity of structures or creative action | weak: asserted in a note, no argument given | n. 7 (p. 70) |
Concepts
- Habitus: “lasting dispositions, or trained capacities and patterned propensities to think, feel and act in determinate ways” (p. 65), socially acquired and embodied.
- Primary and secondary habitus: the first acquired in the family in early childhood; the second “grafted later onto the latter by the specialized pedagogical labour of the school and other didactic institutions” (p. 68).
- Split, broken or cleft habitus: dispositions formed by incompatible worlds and divided against themselves (pp. 66, 69, n. 6).
- Hysteresis (not named so): the “lag, and sometimes a hiatus” between the conditions that formed a habitus and those that now call on it (p. 67).
Connections
A gloss on Bourdieu’s Outline (1972), Logic of Practice (1980a) and Pascalian Meditations (1997), against two foils: Bourdieu read as a “reproduction theory” (p. 66) and the rational and symbolic actors of economics and interactionism (p. 68). It names its critics in note 7: Joas, Sewell and Ortner. Sewell’s 1992 essay, LIT-1383, read in the same batch, is the earlier form of the critique the note dismisses: there Bourdieu’s habitus is “agent-proof” and “unrealistically unified and totalized”. The two readings of habitus disagree, and Wacquant answers by assertion, not argument.
Bearing on the record
- CLAIM-417 (selves as organizational perspectives). The claim maps TERM-045’s dispositional sense onto “a perspective’s dispositional repertoire”, habitus in the sociology it leaned on. The reading supports the borrowing, and sharpens its defeater. Habitus, as Wacquant states it, already does three things the claim credits to the perspective vocabulary: it is layered and can be split (C1, C2); it is shared as a kind and unique as a token (C5); and it is distinct from the positions that call it out (C4). The last is close to the claim’s separation of a perspective from its carrier’s situation. So the defeater “habitus … explain[s] the same transitions as well with fewer assumptions” is live, not hypothetical. What habitus does not supply is the claim’s lineage and its distributed realization: habitus is always “deposited inside persons” (p. 65), and its sharing is a matter of similar conditioning, not of one organization spanning several people.
- Habitus and repertoire are cited together for something they disagree about. CLAIM-417 cites this paper and Swidler (LIT-1367) side by side for sense 2. Swidler says culture does not work “via enduring psychological proclivities implanted in individuals by their socialization” (her p. 283); Wacquant’s habitus is exactly such dispositions. The claim should say which it means.
- CASE-130 (Gracie against luta livre). The case says trained practitioners “may perceive different affordances in the same movement, which Wacquant’s account of habitus … and his boxing ethnography already hold.” This essay supports the general point, a secondary habitus grafted by “a boxing gym” (p. 68) that works as “a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions” (Bourdieu, quoted p. 66). It does not use the word affordance, and it gives no martial-arts material. The boxing ethnography itself was not read.
- A40’s point, as the LIT records it, is in the text. Dispositions can be “multilayered” and “divided against themselves” (pp. 68–69).
- TERM-072 (perspective). Wacquant’s sociation and individuation (C5) is the token and kind distinction the term’s vocabulary note draws between a realization and a kind, solved inside one concept: “a bourgeois habitus” is a kind, each person’s habitus a token. It has no lineage object and no distributed realization.
- CLAIM-416 (competition over tests). Indirect. C4 says the same habitus yields different conduct “when called out by different strategic opportunities”, which is the claim’s relativity of competence to a regime, stated for dispositions. Nothing on who sets the test.
- THEORY warranted? None filed. The essay is exegesis, and its claims are Bourdieu’s, asserted rather than shown.
- No instruction for machine-learning practice; nothing for the anthology.
Limitations
- Seven pages of exposition. The empirical cases (Béarn, Algeria, the hyperghetto, Manet) are named and cited, not presented.
- It is a defence of Bourdieu by his collaborator; critics appear only as misreadings to be cleared, and note 7 dismisses Sewell, Joas and Ortner in one sentence.
- “Not necessarily coherent” and “can misfire” make habitus fit both stability and change. The essay does not say what observation would show a habitus account wrong, beyond the closing call for “empirical eating”.
Open questions
- How is a split habitus told apart from two habitus in one person, or from a person moving between positions that call out different parts of one? The essay gives no criterion, and the same question is CLAIM-417’s for a carrier with several perspectives.
- Is a shared habitus ever more than similar conditioning? Bourdieu’s “orchestrated without … a conductor” suggests coordination without organization; whether that is a distributed realization in TERM-072’s sense, or only a kind, is not addressed.