Habitus

Habitus is an old concept that has an important place in the history of Western thought. Although they have not given it the decisive role it deserves, numerous social theorists—including Aristotle, the Scholastics, Émile Durkheim, and Marcel Mauss—have used it to address the interface between the body and the social order. However, in its current form, the notion of habitus found a nuanced expression in the generative structuralism of Pierre Bourdieu. Habitus is one among many concepts that Bourdieu has coined to overcome the false antinomy between objective and subjective reality that social phenomenology and social physics—as a result of their monodimensional accentuation of either consciousness or voluntarism and rules or social structure—have sustained.

Transcending these shortcomings and consistent with his relational approach, Bourdieu (1992, pp. 26–27) defines habitus as “the durable and transposable systems of schemata of perception, appreciation, and action that result from the institution of the social in the body.” The definition contains three important themes: first, although habitus is primarily a disposition, it should not be merely perceived as a cognitive apparatus of framing and making sense of the social world. Rather, it is an “embodied sensibility” through which individuals simultaneously perceive and generate social practices. Second, habitus is the outcome of a dialectical process in which both the processes of internalization of the external social world and externalization of the internal world are asserted. Finally, habitus is an enduring (but not a permanent) schema that allows individuals to participate in both routine and improvised social practices.

Habitus should not be confused with habit, although there is a close affinity between the two. Habitus, like habit, has acquired characteristics; yet it is a relatively permanent disposition inscribed in the body. These features give habitus the semblance of being inborn when it is actually the outcome of specific social history. Unlike habit, habitus also connotes generative properties. Where habit implies mechanistic repetition, habitus reproduces social reality in a transformative fashion. Although habitus is the internalized form of social structure, there is no one-to-one correspondence between it and that which is produced in social practice. Most importantly, habitus is a capital or a “discapital,” a property, reflecting the position [Page 303]of individuals in the system of social fields. Corresponding to each social field is a habitus made possible through a long process of construction. Habitus, however, is not a closed system; it is exposed to multiple experiences that either buttress or mutate its structure. In the latter case, habitus becomes a misfit that could challenge the fundamental codes of existing symbolic power.