Habitus

The concept of habitus is characterised by a useful degree of imprecision that has allowed it to be taken up by a range of very different social theorists, in very different contexts. It addresses the need to think about humans without resorting to the gnomic mysteries of psychoanalysis, on the one hand, or the implausible clarity of rational actor theories, on the other. The closest one might be able to come to a generally acceptable definition of habitus would focus on those aspects of human behaviour and cognition that are inexplicit, less than fully conscious, ungoverned by deliberate decision making, and bound up with and in the embodied encounter with others and the environment. Any lack of conceptual clarity thus arguably has its origins in the indeterminacy of what the notion is attempting to grasp.

Deriving from philosophy—being used by, among others, Hegel and Husserl—habitus, in its original Latin meaning, refers to the habitual or typical state or condition of the body. The notion came to prominence and found its widest currency, however, within twentieth-century social theory. Following occasional mentions by Weber, Durkheim, and Mauss, the first extensive sociological use of the concept can be found in Norbert Elias's work on “the civilising process” during the 1930s. Acknowledging habitus as a concept capable of individual and collective application, Elias talks about our “second nature,” “an automatically-functioning self-restraint, a habit that, within certain limits, also functions when a person is alone” (Elias 2000:117). Rooted in early socialisation, according to Elias, the embodied disciplines of thoughtless habit create the everyday possibility of ordered, complex, and intense social life. This was also later emphasised by Berger and Luckmann in The Social Construction of Reality (1966:70–85). It is, arguably, a key theme that lurks, semiacknowledged at best, [Page 353]below the surface of most interactionist sociology, not least the work of Erving Goffman.

An increasingly common item in the modern social theory vocabulary, habitus owes its popularisation to the late Pierre Bourdieu (so much so that he is often taken to be the concept's originator). A key component in his project of developing a sociological understanding of human practice that transcends the “ruinous opposition” between individualistic voluntarism and structuralist determinism, the notion of habitus is threaded in and out of his extensive and broad-ranging legacy of empirical studies. The concept's outlines and ramifications were developed most thoroughly in his foundational theoretical statements, Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977), and The Logic of Practice (1990).

What Bourdieu encapsulates in habitus are those aspects of human beings that are neither fully conscious nor unconscious, neither collective nor individual (or, perhaps, both simultaneously). Definitively located in embodied individuals, these are inculcated during primary and secondary socialisation, although Bourdieu goes out of his way to avoid the word. In early childhood, the foundations of sociality, from language to morality, are learned, only to be forgotten as the condition of their durability and power. Unreflexively, they are constituted in and through habituation and habit formation.

Habitus is defined by Bourdieu as “an acquired system of generative schemes objectively adjusted to the particular conditions in which it is constituted” (1977:95). This is central to his vision of human beings as internally in tune, albeit perhaps nonreflexively, with the external material conditions of their existence. Habitus comprises both classificatory schema and practical dispositions, both generative of action and each inextricably implicated in the other. They are subject to a continuous, if less than conscious, process of adjustment to the objective realities of the world to which each individual belongs. These schema and dispositions—notably in the case of the fundamental taxonomies that combine classification and disposition most completely—are transposable, applicable across a widely range of social fields. It is partly in these all-purpose bodies of knowing and doing that the collective logic of practice of any group—”culture”—can be said to exist.

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