Habitus

Habitus is a “socialized subjectivity” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 2002, 126); it is Pierre Bourdieu's way of theorizing a self that is socially produced. The concept is designed to capture the dynamic and mutually constitutive relation between the person and the social world, in which social relations become constituted within the self but also the self is constitutive of social relations. Bourdieu's concept of habitus is key to his analysis of social identity, social practice, and social relations. It represents his attempt to theorize the ways in which the social is literally incorporated.

As such, habitus is central to Bourdieu's sociological analysis. Although used by earlier theorists, from Aristotle to, more recently, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Norbert Elias, Bourdieu claimed—with some justification—to have developed a distinctive use of ...