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Pierre Bourdieu and thePractices of Language
 William F. Hanks
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley,California 94720–3710; email: wfhanks@berkeley.edu Annu. Rev. Anthropol.2005. 34:67–83First published online as aReview in Advance on May 23, 2005 The
Annual Review of   Anthropology
is online atanthro.annualreviews.orgdoi: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.33.070203.143907Copyrightc
2005 by  Annual Reviews. All rightsreserved0084-6570/05/1021-0067$20.00
Key Words
habitus, field, symbolic power, discourse, linguistics
 Abstract 
 This paper synthesizes research on linguistic practice and critically examines the legacy of Pierre Bourdieu from the perspective of lin-guisticanthropology.Bourdieuwrotewidelyaboutlanguageandlin-guistics,buthismostfarreachingengagementwiththetopicisinhisuseoflinguisticreasoningtoelaboratebroadersociologicalconceptsincluding habitus, field, standardization, legitimacy, censorship, andsymbolic power. The paper examines and relates habitus and field indetail, tracing the former to the work of Erwin Panofsky and the lat-tertostructuralistdiscoursesemantics.Theprinciplesofrelativeau-tonomy,boundedness,homology,andembeddingapplytofieldsandtheir linkage to habitus. Authority, censorship, and euphemism aretraced to the field, and symbolic power is related to misrecognition. And last, this chapter relates recent work in linguistic anthropology to practice and indicates lines for future research.
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Contents
READING BOURDIEU............ 68HABITUS ......................... 69FIELD ............................. 72LANGUAGESTANDARDIZATION ANDCHANGE ...................... 75LANGUAGE, LEGITIMATE AND AUTHORITATIVE ............. 76CENSORSHIP ANDEUPHEMISM .................. 76SYMBOLIC POWER .............. 77CONCLUSION.................... 78
READING BOURDIEU 
 The first challenge for a linguistic anthro-pologist reading Bourdieu is Bourdieu’s ownlanguage. It is terse in papers like “TheBerber House” (1973), dense and reflexivein the
Outline
(1977) and
The Field of Cul-tural Production
(1993), and willfully obscurein
Reproduction
(Bourdieu & Passeron 1977).He argues against theoretical programs andtheirterminologiesbutadvanceshisownpro-gram and terminology. His vocabulary de-rives from fields as diverse as economics, arthistory, literature, linguistics, philosophy of language, statistics, and social theory (partic-ularly structuralist and Marxist), along withthe layers of specific literature bearing onNorth Africa, French society, and history. Yet he rejects critical presuppositions that at-tach to the language in its own field (e.g.,competition,monopoly,supply,demand,cap-ital) (1985, p. 19). Throughout the writ-ings he uses linguistic-semiotic terms, suchas arbitrariness, generativity, invariance, andstructure, but he dismisses much of the lin-guistics and semiotics from which they aredrawn. He was also embedded in several de-bates over such basic topics as reason, inten-tionality, and political thought and was him-self politically engaged. His linguistic wager was that he could absorb selected terms andconcepts from other fields, while excludingmuch of the intellectual baggage they usually carry.Theresultisthatreadersunawareorun-sympathetic to his wager will find Bourdieu’sprose paradoxical, inconsistent, or opaque. Italso opens him to withering criticism such asHasan (1999), who attacks his claims aboutlanguage. To understand Bourdieu’s language, wemust situate it in the conceptual universe of practice theory, including the empirical anal- yses through which the theory was developedand to which it is adapted (Goodman 2003). The attempt was to join theory and analysisinempiricallygrounded“scientific”sociology (Bourdieu 1985, p. 11; Bourdieu & Wacquant1992, pp. 224–47) on the basis of “the re-lational mode of thinking” (Bourdieu 1977). This is well illustrated in the ethnographictreatmentofhonor,kinship,agriculturalprac-tice, domestic space, the body, the calendar(Bourdieu 1977), the use of statistics (1977,1979), survey data on audiences and sales(1993, pp. 85, 88, 98), and historical back-groundtogeneralizationsaboutliteratureandart in nineteenth-century France (1993, partII).Thelanguageofpracticeisfocusednotonfinishedobjects,butonprocessesofconstruc-tion, networks of interarticulation, and vari-eties of reflexivity. This is true whether theobject is symbolic structure (Bourdieu 1973),political action (1991b), Flaubert (Bourdieu1993), the French academy (1988), or the judgment of taste (1979). There is little pointin proposing fixed definitions of his basicterms because they get their sense from therelational work they do in analysis. A student of language can read Bourdieuin at least two ways. The first way is to focuson what Bourdieu says about language andlinguistics, on topics such as performativity and description, censorship, and “legitimatelanguage” (1991b). Similarly, we could con-front him on his readings of Saussure, Chom-sky, Austin, Benveniste, Labov, and otherlanguage theorists (Hasan 1999). The result would be to focus on what Bourdieu claimedabout language and linguistics, usually in the
68 Hanks 
 
course of a polemic. Important though itis, the problem with this way of reading isthat it reveals more about Bourdieu thanabout language. A more productive approachiswhatcanbecalledasecond-degreereading:BracketwhatBourdieuclaimsaboutlanguagedirectly, and focus instead on what he saysabout other aspects of social life. The fact isthathistreatmentofarangeofsocialphenom-enaapartfromlanguagebearsthetraceoflin-guistic reasoning, sometimes filtered throughstructuralismandsometimesnot.Hisintellec-tual debt to linguistics and semiotics as a way of thinking is greatest perhaps when it goesunexplored, for instance in the symbolic anal- ysis of the Berber house (1973), the develop-mentofthefieldconcept(1985,1991a,1993),the principle of autonomy applying to fields,thearbitrarinessofclassification,andthegen-erativecapacityofhabitusandthecompetenceof those who have it. Moreover, when talk-ing about language, Bourdieu seldom if everapproaches the level of empirical specificity needed to assess his claims, whereas on othertopics he does. To borrow his own terms, thefirst degree of reading defines language as theobjector
opusoperatum
aboutwhichclaimsaremade, whereas the second degree of readingtreats linguistic reasoning as a
modus operandi 
,partlyindependentofwhatheistalkingabout. Although both are important, we are con-cerned here about the latter.
HABITUS
One of the widely cited concepts developedby Bourdieu was his idea of the habitus. Atbase, habitus concerns reproduction insofaras what it explains are the regularities imma-nent in practice. It explains regularity by ref-erence to the social embedding of the actor,the fact that actors are socially formed withrelatively stable orientations and ways of act-ing. The stability of the habitus is not ex-pressed in rules, which Bourdieu rejects, butin habits, dispositions to act in certain ways,and schemes of perception that order individ-ual perspectives along socially defined lines. Through the habitus, society is impressed onthe individual, not only in mental habits, buteven more in corporeal ones. Citing Mauss(1973, p. 117), social embedding is realized in waysofmoving,gesturing,gazing,andorient-inginlivedspace(Csordas1994,Enfield2005,C. Goodwin 2000, Hanks 1990, Haviland2000, Kendon 1997). For language, the habi-tus bears on the social definition of thespeaker, mentally and physically, on rou-tine ways of speaking, on gesture and em-bodied communicative actions, and on theperspectives inculcated through ordinary ref-erential practice in a given language (Ochs1996). We can distinguish three lines of thought joined in the concept of habitus. The firstis the Aristotelian idea of the hexis, whichBourdieu treats as the individual dispositionthat joins desire (intention) with judgment(evaluation). This idea will become the
modus operandi 
of practical action, the guiding frameof reference that aligns intention with judg-ments of good and bad, appropriate and in-appropriate. Speakers have hexis insofar asthey enact through speech expressive inten-tions and the metalinguistic evaluations thatguide both themselves and their understand-ing of others. The second strand in habitusis the phenomenological ideas of habitual-ity and “corporeal schema” (Bourdieu 1985,p. 14; Merleau-Ponty 1962). The critical shifthere is from disposition to embodiment. Thecorporeal schema of Merleau-Ponty (1962) isneither a representation of the body, nor asheerlyphysicalunderstandingofit.Rather,itis the
prise de conscience
, the momentary graspthat the actor has of being a body. This in-cludes, grasped jointly, both the actual postu-raldispositionofthebodyandthebackgroundhorizon of other postural arrangements thatare possible but not actual. At this point,Bourdieu, like the phenomenologists, is con-cerned with the familiarity and immediacy of corporealexperience,bothofwhichareinher-ited by the habitus. For language, the ques-tion is how speakers grasp their own engage-ment in communicative practice, both verbal
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