SOCIOLOGICAL THINKERS-2 (SEMESTER-6) PIERRE BOURDIEU

Pierre Bourdieu, an eminent French Sociologist wrote in a time when Structuralism and Structural Marxism were the dominating schools of thought. However, Bourdieu was critical of their approach towards humans and their actions. In his ‘The Outline of a Theory of Practice’, Bourdieu brings in the concept of Habitus to elaborate on how individuals act. According to him, an individual’s practices are produced by the Habitus of an individual in a given social structure.

Through his theorization, he claims to bridge the gap between the analyses of the structuralists, who he believes gave too much importance to the structure in defining an individual’s action and too little to the individual actors and between the individualists or behaviorists who gave greater importance to individuality of the actors. His main aim through this theory is to revive the position of the individual in the society and its structure. The three main concepts on which Bourdieu expands his theory are the habitus, the structure and the link between the two, which is practice. In this essay we will first understand the nature of habitus and how it emerges in relation to the other concepts.

Habitus are the internalized social norms and dispositions. They are the tendencies which make individuals act in a particular manner towards a particular end. The actor, as an individual actor or as a member of a collective group can hardly realize the presence of such tendencies and hence they are, in the true sense, internalized. These dispositions do not form a part of the individual's consciousness. They regulate the conscious interactions in the form of guiding principles. So in an interaction between two actors endowed with the same habitus, actor A's action instigates a response from actor B, which further instigates a response to that response from actor A. These series of actions are organized as strategies and put into action without an actor putting in any conscious effort. For the actor, these might be perceived as one in many possible options.

The Habitus is produced by the social structure they are a part of. This social structure produces the conditions of production of the habitus. These conditions are historically located. The social structure gets structured and restructured with every additional experience of the individual placed in a particular social condition. This also means that the differing social conditions which create the social structure result in a habitus that is subjective to those social conditions. This explains the 'Generation gap' that we so often find between two generations of the same family. Since the habitus is generated from different conditions of productions they cannot operate smoothly in conditions that do not fit its context. This is called the hysteresis effect which is caused when a practice receives negative sanctions from its environment. The practices which are approved are produced by habitus and in turn tend to reproduce regularities immanent in the social structure. These practices historically play the role in reproducing social structure over time. Habitus itself is history turned into nature. History is forgotten by the work of history itself by incorporating the objective structure and thus becoming a part of the unconsciousness. Those events that have occurred very recently are not part of the unconsciousness because they are still in a person's consciousness.

Thus these practices can be accounted for only by relating it to the structure and it is the habitus that accomplishes this task. What should be noted is that these practices are also modeled by individual interest and as a matter of fact are its primary concern. But the subjective aspirations greatly correspond to objective probabilities of its fulfillment and dispositions get incorporated in these objective conditions. These dispositions exclude the most improbable practices. Through these practices, every individual becomes a producer of the social structure. However, since individuals are not the masters of these practices, and are constantly guided by the habitus, practices can be thus called the 'intention-less inventions'. Individuals do not recognize the importance of their actions and these only make sense to others because the orchestration of habitus helps create a common sense world where there is consensus of meaning, leading to an objective context for their actions.

The shared conditions of existence result in a style of habitus which is common to all the people sharing the historical condition of existence. This is called class habitus. It includes the dominating tendencies and all the other features of habitus, which are common to that particular class of people. This is how a social class is formed. Individuals from the same class won’t have the same life experiences, in the same order as other, but a situation frequent to a particular class will have more chances of similar experiences to happen to a member of that class than any other. The varying individual trajectories and positions placed inside and outside of that class, result in a subjective version of the habitus which is accounted as a deviant from the given dominant style for that class.

Since this historical past which is turned into nature in the habitus transcends all situations, an interaction never simply an interaction between just two individuals. Bourdieu is of the view that scientific observation cannot take in to account the totality of an interaction based on the behaviour of two individuals by observing their immediate surroundings. The conscious interaction of the individuals is based on the union of their unconsciousness. The present and  past positions of the individuals enmeshed in the social structure marks a social position which creates the basis on which the individuals act. The collective actions are the practices resulting from a dialectical relation between the habitus and the objective event, which combines synchronically along with the causal series of varied structural duration. This results in a conjuncture which however is never completely independent from the social structure that it is a part of, since it is the social structure which ultimately engenders them (the collective action). Thus a structural lag between opportunities and dispositions to grasp them can be observed, which results in missed opportunities.

The Habitus is operational in the real world through symbolic structures and is translated through the practical mastery of practices. This can be elaborated through an illustration; a Kabyle house is constructed in a manner to incorporate several oppositions. Parts of the house are separated in space and roles for males and females, between fire and water, raw and cooked, high and low, light and shade, day and night, fertilizing and able to be fertilized. Males represent more of the outside movement, towards the world while the females represent what moves inwards. The roles assigned to the males are more protective roles and those assigned to females involve more sacred functions. These symbolic structures get internalized through the practical mastery of practices. Individuals grasp these structures and their rationalities and make it their own guiding principle. A child that is growing amid the various oppositions of the house tries to develop its sexual identity which is an important component of his/her social identity while it simultaneously constructs the associated division of social and biological indices.

Practices are institutionalized through ‘deculturation’ and ‘reculturation’ in the society. The very insignificant seeming details like dressing, physical, verbal manners are incorporated into the larger social structure through these practices. The body is treated as a memory that bears the most fundamental principles of the arbitrary content of culture and these principles are placed in its unconsciousness, beyond the grasp of the individual’s consciousness.

Thus we see how habitus, practice and social structure form the dialectic of the externalization of internality and the internalization of externality. Habitus, which is a product of history  produces the individual and collective practices and hence creates history, in accordance with schemes engendered by history. Habitus endlessly produces actions, perception, thought and expressions, however these are set to limit by the social and historical conditions that engender them. They are so operational that it becomes hard to even conceive those dispositions that act as a guiding principle. It is too distant a possibility then to be able to be free oneself of those tendencies.

Although Bourdieu claims to be bridging the gap between the objectivism of the structure and the subjectivism of the individual experiences, he has been criticized for engaging with objectivism more intensely than subjectivism. His theory of habitus is critiqued to be non-compatible with his own ‘Practical Theory'. However, credit is given to his attempt to bridge this gap between the individual and society by situating the individual not as a passive recipient of social forces but as an active investor in the process of change through his engagement with practice.