The Habitus Process A Biopsychosocial Conception

Andreas Pickel

Working Paper CSGP 05/1 www.trentu.ca/globalpolitics Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada

Abstract The concept of habitus, popularized in the last two decades of the twentieth century especially by the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Norbert Elias, is frequently employed in the social and biosocial sciences. The concept of habitus seems to offer a fruitful way of dealing with some fundamental problems in social theory today by providing a promising conceptual linkage between cultural, social, psychological and biological dimensions of reality. The task of this paper is to work towards a clearer and more systematic conception of habitus based on a systemic and mechanismic philosophy of science. The paper surveys the various forms in which habitus appears in the social world, presents a systematic account of the structures and effects of habitus, and sketches a dynamic model of how habitus as process in biopsychosocial systems works. The illustrative case to be discussed is that of national habitus and homo nationis as a biopsychosocial system.

The Habitus Process A Biopsychosocial Conception

I agree that cultures are not immutable essences and that they have no fixed contours. I also agree that their content is not self-evident. But to deny the reality of that content altogether and reduce us all, as cultural beings, to members of myriad groups cross-cutting, overlapping, and ever-evolving, means to overlook the central reality. . . no on is more acutely aware of this reality than a bilingual who lives his or her life in two languages and two cultures, and the testimony of bilingual and bicultural writers is loud and clear (Wierzbicka 1997, p.18).

Introduction The study of habitus has both a long tradition and a short history. Matters that fall under the conception of habitus as presented here have been examined in general terms such as customs and cultures at least since Montesquieu, and under the headings of ideology (Marx), milieux (Durkheim) and indeed habitus (Weber) by the classics of modern sociology. Webers famous thesis about the relationship between capitalism and the Protestant work ethic was only one aspect of social reality for which he considered habitus sociologically significant. Others concerned such fundamental matters as political legitimation and modern bureaucracy. Not only Durkheim and Weber, but also Marx, Comte, Tnnies, Simmel and other social theorists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Camic 1986, p.1050) employed the concepts of habit and habitus1 in the broad sense of guiding action. But what is the sociological significance of habitus today? And what does it add to the social scientists toolbox that is not already covered by other concepts of normatively and rationally guided patterns of conduct? The argument to be defended here is that unlike other conceptions, the concept of habitus provides a promising conceptual linkage between cultural, social, pychological and biological dimensions of reality. The concept of habitus, long neglected or ignored, made a comeback in the scholarly literature starting in the 1980s. The contributions of two scholars can be credited for the revival of the study of habitus, Pierre Bourdieu and Norbert Elias.

Bourdieu, whose work has been published since the late 1960s, has been the more successful of the two in terms of frequency of citation of his work. Norbert Eliass key work The Process of Civilization (first published in German in 1936 and in English in 1939) was not widely recognized as a classic until the 1990s. However, there is little doubt that Elias has strongly influenced Bourdieus own work on habitus. The work of both on habitus has found strong resonance in traditional disciplines as well as in a surprising range of applied and multidisciplinary fields. Applied fields include law and management studies, medical anthropology and educational ethnography, the sociology of sports and health psychology, environmental policy and biomedical engineering. Multidisciplinary fields include political economy, social psychology, and historical sociology. I myself have become attracted to this concept in my work on nationalism and national identity for which habitus in this case national habitus seemed to capture important cultural dimensions in political and economic change processes for which I have been unable to find an adequate conceptual framework. When I employed the concept of habitus in a paper on the continuing significance of the national in the age of globalization, some readers rightly criticized that I had not provided an explicit definition, let alone a systematic conception, of habitus. Regrettably, notwithstanding the richness of their contributions, neither Elias (Smith 2001) nor Bourdieu (King 2000) have provided such a clear and systematic conception of habitus. As Crossley (2001, p.81) has put it with respect to Bourdieus concept of habitus, there is more potential for an elaboration and deepening of this concept than his work to date has achieved.2 The present paper tries to make a contribution towards this goal. The paper, however, is not designed as an internal critique or elaboration of Bourdieus and Eliass conceptions of habitus. Instead, it approaches the question of habitus from a systemic and mechanismic philosophy of science perspective based primarily on the work of Mario Bunge (2003).3 The conception of habitus presented here may suggest new ways to approach a number of widely recognized, unproductive divisions, both conceptually and in scientific practice. The conception of habitus to be presented here provides an example of a conceptual linkage between cultural, social, psychological and biological dimensions of reality that have proved difficult to incorporate into one general framework or approach.

The conception of habitus as process to be developed in this paper claims to identify and conceptually bring together crucial cultural mechanisms at work in interconnected social, psychological, and biological systems the linkage of which has not been systematically studied. The paper proceeds in four steps. I begin by discussing the various forms in which habitus appears in the social world. Next comes a systematic account of the structures and effects of habitus. The third section presents a dynamic model of how habitus as process works, along with an empirical illustration. A summary of the major points and arguments precedes the final two sections, a discussion of national habitus and concluding remarks on homo nationis as a biopsychosocial system.

Phenomenology: What forms does habitus take? Since several elements of habitus are in fact at least partially observable in individual and social behaviour, it might be useful to start the analysis by identifying some of them. [Figure 1 about here] As figure 1 illustrates, a habitus takes a variety of different forms from simple automatic behaviours such as holding open a door to generalized and complex forms of interacting with others in a particular professional setting. The proper handshake in a particular social situation, general ways of identifying and solving problems at a workplace, and even what happiness or the good life means and entails, are other examples. Some of the many forms that a habitus can take in individual persons as represented in figure 1 may suggest that the concept of habitus refers primarily to the characteristics of individuals patterns of thinking, feeling, wanting, doing, and interacting4 in short, that habitus is an individual thing. But the theoretical significance of habitus lies in the fact that habitus is above all a social thing. A habitus emerges in concrete social systems a family, a firm, an artistic subculture, a political organization, or a society. (I use a very broad concept of social system that includes anything from loose social networks and groups to organizations and state-societies.) It is this concrete social system that marks the context in which we can draw up a model (or ideal type) of a system-specific habitus, based on a wide range of observations and conjectures.5 Thus from a macrosociological point of view it does not make sense to conceptualize habitus as the property of an individual. Instead, habitus should be seen as the property of a social system. The habitus of a social system is reflected in different ways in the personalities and behaviours of the individuals comprising the system (i.e. in their unique personalized habiti). But a habitus is generated by the system, i.e. it emerges from the joint activities and interactions of the individuals making up a system, not from the characteristics of its individual components.6 It is a key proposition of this paper that a habitus is the emergent property of a social system. This proposition implies strong structural causation in the matter of habitus, that is, from properties of the social system to the behaviour of its individual components. The process of causation from individual

persons to social and symbolic systems exists, but given the emergent nature of many systemic properties, such properties cannot be explained in terms of individual behaviour. Moreover, the nature of the individual components of social systems is certainly not as unproblematic as many approaches in the social sciences tend to assume. What both individualist and structuralist approaches in the social sciences treat as individuals are in fact biopsychosocial systems. To say that an individual person is a biopsychosocial system means that individual behaviour and action, thought and emotion, can be accounted for only if we know something about each of the systems involved and even more importantly how specific biological, psychological and social systems interact with each other. Neither methodological individualism nor methodological holism in the social sciences approach individual persons in this fashion. They differ mainly with respect to the direction of causation they presuppose as primary in the relationship between individuals and society. For both types of methodology the individual is either unproblematic (holist or structuralist approaches) or subject to a priori assumptions of rationality that ignore the relevant results of the biological and psychological sciences (individualist approaches). The conception presented here does not speak of individuals and society. Instead there is agency in a number of different systems. I have proposed that habitus is the property of a concrete social system a family, a church, a school, a firm, a government institution or an entire nation. Being in large part mediated through social representations in discourse, ritual, everyday practice a habitus is at the same time always part of semiotic or symbolic systems. Of course a habitus is also part of an individual, but I will speak here instead of psychological and biological systems, i.e. minds and brains. This gives us a total of four types of systems relevant for habitus: biological, psychological, sociological, and semiotic. Figure 2 indicates what habiti are, where they are situated, what they do, and what major effects they have. It is important to note that a habitus, although defined here as a property of a social system, exists simultaneously in all four types of systems. In other words, the habitus process occurs and therefore needs to be examined in social systems, symbolic systems, individual minds and brains. Properties of all four types of system can be causally relevant, which rules out social, semiotic, psychic or biological reduction. We will begin by considering

each of the four system types separately and in a subsequent step focus on the major linkages between them.

Statics: structures and effects of habitus What habiti are and where they are situated (lines 1 and 2 in figure 2). Habiti are emergent properties of social systems. These properties are manifested in individual and collective actions and representations by components of the system in question. Put more simply, they are system-specific patterns of behaving: wanting, feeling, thinking, doing, and interacting.7 A simple example is: wanting to make it to the big leagues in the social system of Canadian hockey; feeling good about that dream; thinking that it is a realistic possibility; training and playing hard; using hockey-specific walk and talk. Social systems have their own or shared symbolic systems that depict the habitus of the social system. These are discursive and non-discursive social representations of the system concerning, among others, its origins, functioning, place in the social world, mission, and appropriate ways of behaving. [figure 2 about here] We move next to the biopsychic systems relevant for habitus, i.e. mind and brain. Rather than speaking abstractly of individuals, I refer to persons as biological and psychological systems, with consciousness and a personality as emergent properties (Searle 2000). This, as we will see, facilitates an analysis of the habitus process in all four systems (see next section). The mind as the relevant psychological system reflects a habitus in specific cognitive, emotional and volitional processes. Some psychologists (e.g. Lester 1993, 1997, 2003; Aijzen 2001; survey in Mayer 2001) have proposed that the self is composed of subsystems (subselves). As the social psychologist Pierre Moessinger (1999, p.53) puts it: A subself is an interconnected system of attitudes, values, cognitions, and behaviors. Some subselves are coherent and well-integrated (the cognitive and moral subselves, for example), and others are poorly integrated and not very autonomous, such as the affective subself. (For another, sociological conception of the self compatible with the present argument, see Wiley 1994; cf. also Callero 2003.) Thus habiti at this level can be represented by widely used concepts such as cognitive schemata and cultural scripts (Wierzbicka 1993). While current psychological research on personality is an active field in the discipline with several established and

new approaches, it is far from a consensus on the ontology of the mind (Funder 2001). It is important to note, however, that personality psychology, as well as social psychology, are likely to be the most relevant fields for the study of habitus and mind since they recognize, at least in principle, that individual minds do not only think, but at the same time also act, and that they do so in particular social contexts. That is not the case with many other parts of contemporary psychology, especially cognitive psychology. This is not to say that such approaches do not generate useful insights for the study of habitus. Thus research on reasoning, judgment and choice seems to have settled on dual process models which distinguish between automatic and controlled processing, that is, between immediate affective responses and more effortful cognitive responses (Shafir and LeBoeuf 2002). While habitus might seem to fall into the former, more automatic type of process, it is according to the conception presented here clearly also involved in controlled reasoning and analytic intelligence for which both cultural frames and cognitive schemata play a significant role.8 Marshall (2002 ) and Hammond (2003), for instance, attempt to link the social phenomena of ritual and of solidarity, mainstays of classic, especially Durkheimian, sociology, to neurophysiological and socialpsychological mechanisms. The brain as a biological system is involved in habitus insofar as psychological processes are (also) brain processes, specifically neurophysiological and neuropsychological processes. Neurological research on learning, and specifically on habit learning, for instance has found that two memory systems, in the basal ganglia and the medial temporal lobe, are simultaneously activated in learning processes and under certain conditions competitively interfere with each other (Packard and Knowlton 2002). Recent studies in neurophysiology, neurobiology, neuroimaging, and computation have made progress in modeling the neural basis of the functioning of the prefrontal cortex, which is assumed to play a central role in cognitive control (Miller 2001). The study of brain processes involved in habituation, including in non-primate species (Zaccardi et al. 2001), obviously has implications for the habitus process. Smith and Stevens (2002), for example, attempt to map the neurosociological mechanisms of how activity in core brain systems constrains deep patterns in social life, such as altruism and reciprocity. Having

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surveyed what habiti are and where they are situated, we turn now to some of their major effects. Major effects of habitus in biological, psychological, social and symbolic systems (see lines 3 and 4 in figure 2) I have proposed that habitus is an emergent property in a social system. While some elements of a habitus can remain stable for a long time (e.g. the high value placed on certain behaviours in a culture9), habiti are constantly changing. A social habitus may in fact change more quickly than the personalized habiti in individuals, which seeem to ossify over time (more accurately, there is an age-related reduction in cultural efficacy or efficiency; Baltes et al. 1999). At the same time, carried by individuals and groups, habiti can move to new social systems where they survive (usually in hybrid form) or quickly disappear. Immigrant communities provide rich empirical evidence for such processes (Portes 2001). A habitus can be mapped as a property or set of properties, that is, as a pattern of typical modes of thinking, feeling, wanting, doing, and interacting in a particular social system. Such descriptive maps10 are a precondition for developing models of a habitus, which in turn can serve a variety of explanatory purposes. Such habitus models will be by definition static, since they describe a given pattern under specific spatio-temporal, i.e. historical conditions. Habitus, however, can also be conceived as process, that is, as part of the processes with which typical modes of thinking, feeling, wanting, doing, and interacting are bound up. This process conception is the precondition for making a habitus model dynamic. While habitus as process does not exclude recognizing stability of habitus patterns or stability of the social systems in which it occurs, the theoretical significance of the process view lies in the fact that it allows us to deal with change changing habitus and/or changing systems. In contrast to viewing habiti as sets of properties only, the process perspective creates the precondition for examining theoretically and empirically not simply whether but how such change processes occur. I will present a general model of habitus as process in the next section. In the remainder of this section, let us briefly look at effects that major habitus processes have in the four systems under study.

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At the most basic level, i.e. in biological and psychological systems, processes of habituation and dehabituation play a central role processes that occur in many biological organisms. Specific habiti are bound up with basic needs for food, shelter, and security, though they are not necessarily functional for satisfying those needs. Clearly, a person may be or remain unaware of a particular habitus and its actual consequences. She may fail to recognize its dysfunctionality; fail to mobilize the requisite will to change; miss the more complex cognitive skills to make a change; or be caught in a social situation that severely constrains the room for change. While processes of habituation and dehabituation are biologically grounded, the habitus process in psychological systems also involves certain patterns of thinking, feeling, wanting, doing, and interacting of which a person is conscious.11 It further involves cognitive schemata, specifically cultural scripts, through which reflective action is organized. For instance, certain moral schemata contain presuppositions that guide reflections on such matters as, what is the right route to take in this situation?, or what is my role in this group? There are also evaluative schemata that may lead persons to analyze situations in terms of maximizing personal utility (e.g. rational choice) or in terms of Gods word (religious doctrines). Contrary to the claims of rational choice theorists (e.g. Becker 1992), not all habiti have been adopted or are retained because of their individual utility, nor is it possible to undertake such complex tasks as the calculation of utility in the absence of already existing cognitive schemata that are logically and empirically prior to reflection and domain-specific.12 Since the present conception of habitus encompasses both simple behaviours and complex evaluative schemata, it becomes possible to pose related theoretical and empirical questions rather than adopting one or the other a priori assumption. In the corresponding analyses, the problem of habitus vs reflection, or reason vs passion, or free will vs determination would not be approached as an abstract or general philosophical question, but rather would be placed in a multisystemic context. This means that habitus processes occurring in social and symbolic systems become part of the analysis. While the functional significance of a habitus in biological and psychological systems relates to a persons basic and more complex needs and wants, their functional adequacy will further depend on realities in the corresponding social and symbolic

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systems. Significance and standards of adequacy of habiti, possibly even for the most basic human needs, are themselves defined in the symbolic system which sets relevant constraints and supplies symbolic resources. Needs and their satisfaction are of course not merely symbolic constructs but material realities in particular social systems. The habitus process is centrally involved in the reproduction of social and symbolic systems, and thus in their stability over time. However, the habitus process is also involved in adaptation and breakdown of social and symbolic systems. Think of the changing role and gradual breakdown of Marxist-Leninist ideology, as well as the more sudden regime breakdown, in Communist countries. Both rapid habitus change and long-term habitus stability can be a source of systemic stability or breakdown. The process view of habitus makes it possible to examine the mechanisms underlying such inertia as well as changes in social, symbolic, and psychological systems and their interactions. Having surveyed some of the systemic functions and effects of habitus, it is now time to describe how habitus as process works. Dynamics: How the habitus process works Figure 3 provides a schematic model of the habitus process. Clearly, this is a bare-bones representation of the process, but one that I hope serves to emphasize the potential value of this conception of habitus. The first thing to note is the basic structure of the diagram. [Figure 3 about here] The box in the centre of figure 3 outlines the habitus process, in what I call the habituspersonality complex. The habitus-personality complex is linked (at the top) to a social system. As I have proposed earlier, habitus is an emergent property of a social system. The habitus-personality complex is also linked (at the bottom) to a biopsychic system which generates a personality as an emergent property. Thus there is a bottom-up causality and a top-down causality at work. The habitus-personality complex, while composed of two emergent properties (bottom-up: personality; top-down: habitus), can also be seen as a process. In this view, the habitus mechanism refers to the working of system-specific patterns of wanting, feeling, thinking, doing and interacting, while the

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personality mechanism refers to individual forms of wanting, feeling, thinking, doing and interacting. The two simultaneously operating mechanisms produce self-consciousness and identity, and what Elias calls the we-I balance in a personality (Elias 1991). The habitus-personality complex is only one, albeit fundamental process linking social systems and individuals (i.e. biopsychic systems). Another fundamental one is the production-consumption process. For instance, food scarcity affects social systems regardless of particular habitus structures. Of course the specific effects of such economic processes on social systems and their components are in part determined by established habiti. Thus it will make a significant difference whether existing habiti relating to just distribution are peaceful and egalitarian or violent and class-based. A further fundamental process is the political power-authority process. For instance, a political regime conducting war affects social systems above all by killing and injuring people, again regardless of these systems particular habitus structures. The specific effects of such political processes on social systems and their components will however be strongly influenced by established habiti. Thus it will make a significant difference whether or not existing habiti relating to legitimate power can and are likely to call the regimes war policies into question or whether they will impose a patriotic consent. The conception proposed here therefore analytically distinguishes (but does not theoretically separate) the habitus process from other economic, political, and natural (environmental) processes. The theoretical challenge is to identify and explain the working of particular concatenations of habitus mechanisms and other (economic, political, ecological) mechanisms giving rise to specific social phenomena. This paper is limited to discussing the habitus process. The causal relationships in the habitus process flow in both directions, and the general nature of these relationships can now be specified. (1) A system-specific habitus shapes the individuals making up that system (top-down causation). More specifically, the system-specific patterns of wanting, feeling, thinking, doing and interacting reach a persons subselves through social experiences and are processed in affective, cognitive, and moral subsystems (or their equivalents; see above). This processing involves the interaction between subselves (minds) and neural networks (brains). (2) An individual personality affects the social systems of which it is a part (bottom-up causation). More

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specifically, individual forms of wanting, feeling, thinking, doing and interacting shape social systems. Social systems of course have in addition non-reducible, emergent properties and are causally affected by their social environment (i.e. other social systems) and their natural environment. The habitus process therefore, to repeat, represents only one set of mechanisms in large social processes by which most social systems are affected. Before defending the usefulness and relevance of the conception presented here, let us briefly consider an example. At the top of figure 3 there is the category of social system used in the broadest sense to refer to any social formation from families to state-societies, and from fleeting groups such as a crowd of demonstrators to permanent institutions such as the Catholic Church and General Motors. Such a broad conception of social system is not widely used, at least not in the social sciences, and generally elicits skeptical reactions. It should not be confused with systems theories, such as those of Parsons or Luhmann. The best philosophical exposition of systemism can be found in the work of Mario Bunge (1998; 2003). The concept of social system as used here is compatible with other, though sometimes vague concepts such as fields, domains, and games (see e.g. Fligstein 2001) and the concept of institution in the new institutionalism (Hollingsworth 2000). This broad conception is particularly useful for present purposes since any social system thus understood may give rise to a particular habitus process, as the following case of an unstable and short-lived social system illustrates. The habitus of todays crowd of demonstrators was probably not much different from those of other, similar protest events. As people follow the organizers call for a protest march along a predetermined route, most participants will be familiar with the habitus of such an event while others will be familiarized with the habitus by participating in this particular event. Protesters will bring signs and whistles, sing and shout, and generally respect that the event should be peaceful. They feel concerned enough about what they perceive to be at issue to participate, and they expect to feel good by participating. They may interact with other demonstrators, though anonymity will remain the general condition. The crowd may briefly assemble at some point during the march to listen to speakers, but at the end it will quickly dissolve. This rough model of the demonstration habitus will be followed with some variations at every event of this kind that is,

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because of the nature of the social system which the participants see themselves joining. Of course there may be deviations some demonstrations may end in violence, or some groups of demonstrators will refuse to disperse. This does not change the demonstration habitus as such, for most people will continue to join protest marches expecting to take part in a non-violent event and to go home after. Not all deviations from an existing habitus, however, will remain such. Some may turn into lasting innovations (Tarrow 1998). The innovation comes about on the initiative planned and/or spontaneous of some demonstrators (usually themselves concrete groups, i.e. social systems), and it will be replicated in future demonstrations by others depending in part on the perceived success of the new practice. Whether or not the new practice will be adopted also depends on the nature of each subsequent demonstration as a particular social system and event: the number of people who turn up, the weather, police presence, activities of extremists, the current political climate, etc. It will therefore not be fully explainable in terms of the behaviours of all the individuals at one of those subsequent demonstrations, let alone their preferences. Ultimately the changed habitus (i.e. the addition of the new practice to the repertoire) will be an emergent property of a particular social system under all of those specific conditions (though other conditions or configurations might have had the same effect, a fact referred to as multiple realizability (e.g. Sawyer 2004)). Fundamental innovations are those that at some point become part of the standard demo habitus, i.e. when they no longer depend on all those contingencies but are now routinely practiced. It is obviously much easier to ascertain such habitus changes than to explain them in terms of individual actions and context. This is of course true for all systemic properties that are not reducible to individual components (Bunge 2003). An unstable and short-lived social system like a demonstration provides a good example of habitus as an emergent property of a particular type of social system. What makes a demonstration a demonstration rather than a riot or a leisure walk is the expectations of the participants, and thus the appropriate habitus informing their actions. These expectations are part of a larger knowledge system which contains the description of a demonstration and its corresponding habitus. The mass demonstration has become a global form of collective action, though national and other specificities remain central (Tarrow 2001). When demonstrations turn into riots, as is

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sometimes the case, this is usually in spite of the expectations and goals of most participants. It is the result of police action and/or small groups of demonstrators setting off an escalation mechanism. With the nature of the event having changed from demonstration to riot, demonstrators can then decide either to leave or to join the riot with its own particular habitus.13 More stable social systems tend to have clearer enforcement mechanisms for their habitus established processes, rituals and routines that are usually difficult or costly to challenge or ignore. An example in most contemporary modern families is the increasing rejection of elements of the family habitus, especially the specific authority structure, as children become adolescents a normal part of the individualization process on which modern culture places such emphasis. While certain modifications may be negotiated between parents and children, no one expects the working out of a new family habitus as grown-up children establish their own households and families. In social systems such as organizations with written rules and bureaucratic procedures, habitus also matters greatly (which is why it is not enough to analyze formal institutions and procedures), a fact that is reflected in such phrases as organizational culture, political culture, economic culture, etc. Most social systems overlap with others some hierarchically, some horizontally. The same applies to system-specific habiti. The more powerful and socially significant a social system, the more important its habitus for its members (functionally and/or symbolically) relative to other social systems to which they belong. Especially in larger social systems, a dominant habitus is usually confronted by challengers. The relationship of different habiti with each other is of course crucially important but will remain a loose end in this paper. My hunch, and my hypothesis in the last section of this paper, is that there are first-order or meta-habiti in and through which other, more minor habiti are integrated (see also Frank and Meyer 2002). What is the point of this model? Most important, it sheds light on processes that in most approaches end up in a black box. The habitus-personality complex models psychocultural and sociocultural processes that both social science and psychological approaches find difficult to account for. In psychology, the psyche-culture linkage is recognized as of fundamental importance only in somewhat marginal subfields such as

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social psychology and personality psychology. In the social sciences, the basic significance and the methodological implications of studying cultural variables have always been controversial. Mainstream approaches in sociology, political science, and economics have tended to steer clear of psychocultural and sociocultural dimensions of reality, leaving the field since the 1980s to postmodern approaches and cultural studies, which have little sympathy for scientific standards. However, the widespread use of such psychocultural and sociocultural concepts as discourse, identity, meaning and reflexivity by many social scientists underscores the perceived importance of the cultural dimension. The argument presented here is a philosophically and methodologically self-conscious effort to conceptualize sociocultural phenomena by specifying key systems and mechanisms as well as emergent properties and processes (Bunge 2004). The biopsychosocial model of the habitus process proposed here establishes explicit conceptual links between types of processes that are under the jurisdiction of different disciplines and their specialized approaches. How, then, does this conception improve on those of other basic approaches? Rational actor models, for instance, rest on a priori assumptions that cut them off from cultural dimensions of reality in two directions. Upward by denying methodologically and sometimes even ontologically the existence of social systems, hence ruling out the explanatory significance of sociocultural macroprocesses in principle. Downward by postulating a rational actor as a methodological device and sometimes as an ontological fact an ideal type that is immune from the findings of psychology and in effect denies the explanatory significance of psychocultural processes in principle. The model of the habitus process proposed here links up at both severed ends of the rational actor model, i.e. to sociocultural and psychocultural dimensions. The model thereby does not deny the explanatory significance of rational action in principle, but problematizes this dimension by contextualizing it in the habituspersonality complex (see figure 3 above). The framework of rational individual action under constraints is replaced with a biopsychosocial conception of a habitus process that provides an alternative framework allowing us to search for rather than assume major mechanisms underlying social life.

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Structuralist approaches, by contrast, are all about social systems but often do not take the system components sufficiently seriously. The causal efficacy of individual actors, for example, is considered low in structuralist models, shifting the major weight of the explanation on the logic (in my terms: on the emergent or systemic properties) of social systems. But what is rarely spelled out are the processes and mechanisms by which social structures shape individuals without at the same time depriving them of their agency. While structuralist approaches are in principle open to examining sociocultural processes, they are not conceptually equipped to link up to psychocultural processes. The habitus conception presented here provides this conceptual link with the view of individuals as biopsychosocial systems as well as the dynamic or process connection in the form of the habitus-personality complex. If habitus as conceived here encompasses neural networks and brain processes; feelings, thoughts, and actions; a range of psychological dispositions; as well as social systems, power, economics, institutions, cultures, and languages, isnt this conception of habitus much too broad? It is important to note that only a broad, philosophically tenable conception of this major dimension of social processes allows us to move beyond the confines imposed by disciplinary boundaries and methodological conventions such as those of rational actor and structuralist approaches discussed above. The systemic perspective underlying this broad conception of habitus as a process running both ways between social and biopsychosocial systems via symbolic systems provides a transdisciplinary framework within which to relate and integrate known neurobiological, biopsychological, psychosocial and social habitus mechanisms and formulate problems leading to the discovery of new mechanisms. The point is not to work towards some general social theory of habitus but rather to develop a general framework within which to handle biopsychosocial processes and mechanisms. Far from an exercise in abstract theorizing, such a framework responds to the needs felt perhaps most strongly by those studying practical problems such as health, mental disorders, or substance abuse (e.g. Leukefeld/Leukefeld 1999; Kordon/Hohagen 2000; Egger 2001) problems that require a broad biopsychosocial conception of habitus. At this point it may be useful to review some of the major results of the discussion so far before discussing how they apply in a concrete case.

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Summary The conception of the habitus process presented here has distinguished between systems of different kinds, the most basic distinction being that between social systems and biopsychosocial systems. The following propositions recapitulate the major points made for each, and one (proposition 7) still to be made in the next section. Social Systems 1. A habitus is a property of a social system. 2. To each concrete social system may correspond a particular habitus. If there is more than one habitus, there will be a dominant one, since habitus is closely related to power. 3. Lower-level social systems (e.g. households, schools), in addition to having their own habiti, will share the habitus of higher-level social systems (esp. statesocieties/nations) to which they belong. 4. Since most people simultaneously belong to several social systems, habiti overlap and intermix. 5. There are more and less significant social systems and habiti defined in power, authority and functional terms in relation to particular individuals and groups. 6. Habiti strongly shape but do not exlusively determine individual personalities. Put differently, habiti loosely structure personalities. 7. The single most important habitus in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is the national habitus, corresponding to the significance of statesocieties. Pervading most other social systems, the national habitus can be described as a meta-habitus (see the following section).

Biopsychosocial systems (individuals) 8. Individuals are biopsychosocial systems.

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9. Individuals develop personalities, that is, typical forms of feeling, thinking, doing, and interacting. A personality can be conceived as a biopsychosocial system at a particular point in time. 10. Individuals are subject to biological, psychological and sociological laws of personal development (re: age, socialization into and appropriation of particular habiti) and personality change (voluntary and involuntary).14 These processes of development and change strongly shape how habiti are acquired (both actively and passively). 11. A personality is composed of subsystems (or subselves), such as cognitive, emotional, and volitional subsystems. While the activity in the subsystems is shaped by particular habiti, a person is capable of adopting/reshaping/abandoning parts of a habitus. The degree to which this is possible depends in part on the significance of the habitus and social system in question, in part on individual characteristics of the person. 12. An individual person has a unified consciousness, that is, one psychic space (Searle 2000) in which feeling, thinking, and wanting occur, i.e. in which the subsystems operate. 13. A unified consciousness (a self) is an emergent property of brain activity, that is, of neurophysiological processes in and between particular areas (subsystems) of the brain. National Habitus as Meta-Habitus In this section of the paper, I will try to strengthen and further illustrate my conception of habitus as process in social and biopsychosocial systems by discussing the case of national habitus. Since there is a great deal of interest in questions of national identity, nationalism, etc. in numerous scholarly literatures employing a variety of different approaches, the area is particularly useful for demonstrating the potential relevance of the habitus conception that so far in this paper has been presented in mostly general and abstract terms. The phrase national habitus is not common currency in the social sciences. In fact, most social scientists would probably be either skeptical or simply dismissive in

21

response to the suggestion that national habitus is a useful concept referring to a powerful social reality. It is perhaps no coincidence that Bourdieu, the most well-known and influential theorist of habitus, nowhere speaks about national habitus. In fact, outside the specialized and somewhat insular nationalism literature15, related concepts such as national culture and national character are eyed with suspicion as politicized, essentialized, and theoretically questionable. The concept of national identity is taken more seriously and is more widely used, though many argue that the significance of national identity should not be overrated. In postmodern, globalizing times national identity is at best one among other basic collective identities, and perhaps one that is being quite rapidly eclipsed by larger global and transnational identities, on the one hand, and more particularistic collective identities, on the other. In this section of the paper, I will argue that conceiving the national as simply a collective identity misses important dimensions of social reality that a conception of national habitus is able to capture. National habitus does indeed exemplify all the manifestions of habitus presented in figure 1. The following discussion of national habitus will stay as closely as possible with the major points summarized above, noting where I believe this conception has the potential to add something to the debate. If, as proposition 1 asserts, a habitus is an emergent property of a social system, then what are the social systems that give rise to a national habitus? My conception of habitus as process rejects what is widely taken for granted, i.e. that nations are concrete social systems in their own right. The fact that the nationalism literature has failed to reach anything approaching a consensual definition of nation (Smith 2001) suggests that the ontological status of nation remains essentially contested. Rather than adopting one or another contested definition of what the nation is, the habitus model reconceptualizes the nation as a process. This means that the nation is not a social entity, but a property of certain social systems (real social entities), a property generated by a nationalizing process. Which systems are in question? The widely used phrase nation-state suggests that there are two systems, a state and a nation, that come together in the nation-state. Since however most contemporary states contain more than one national group while numerous national groups do not have their own state, the phrase nation-state has been increasingly considered problematic. Analytical distinctions such as those between

22

Staatsnation, Kulturnation and Volksnation or between state-nations (i.e. nations dominant in a particular state) and stateless nations or state-seeking and non-state seeking illustrate the complexity of the problem. But they are unsatisfactory conceptual solutions since they presuppose that, whatever their relationship to a particular state, nations are concrete social systems. The habitus process approach to the nation, by contrast, rejects this view. Modern societies bounded by a territorial state are real social systems, they are state-societies in which nationalizing processes occur. But they are not the only ones. Nationalizing processes also occur in educational institutions, political organizations, economic organizations, clans, families and social networks from the global level to the local level. Thus to say that a national habitus is an emergent property of a social system makes it possible to avoid the problem of having to define a nation as a real social entity while at the same time taking account of the fact that not only modern state-societies, but also many other social systems, are part of nationalizing processes. This, perhaps surprisingly, includes social systems that are referred to as international, transnational, and global. For instance, a multinational/transnational/global corporation is to a significant extent shaped by the national habitus of the originating country (Doremus et al. 1998). Of course such a social system is also shaped by other habiti, such as a firm-specific habitus, an industry-specific habitus, or the habiti of specific groups and networks within the corporation. So-called transnational migrants, to take another example, can be best understood in terms of a combination of nationalizing processes: the national habitus of the home country in its interaction with the national habitus of the receiving society under specific conditions with creolization as an emergent property. The concept of transnational communities is merely an analytical category; real communities are subject to specific nationalizing processes. The point is that the habitus process approach does not need to pose the question whether a particular system is national, transnational, or global but asks which particular habiti shape the behaviour of particular concrete social systems. Proposition 2 asserts that to each concrete social system may correspond a particular habitus. If there is more than one habitus in a system, there is likely to be a dominant one since habiti are closely related to power. The overriding importance of national habitus leads me to suggest that national habitus is a meta-habitus. This should

23

not be surprising since modern states are among the most powerful sets of institutions, controlling with more or less success all other social systems in the state-society. Nevertheless, some supporting arguments for this claim are called for. The long-term historical trend towards increasing social differentiation and integration into ever larger social units culminated in the creation of a global system of nation-states in the twentieth century. This has given rise to a historically specific personality structure, homo nationis: the individual who is born and raised in a particular national culture, and who lives most of her life in a nation-state of which she is a citizen. As a product of the emerging global order composed of nation-states, homo nationis became a truly global phenomenon in the second part of the twentieth century after two world wars and numerous anti-colonial struggles, all fought in the name of the nation. While it is not necessarily the dominant habitus in every contemporary state-society some societies have little national coherence and strong regionally, religiously or linguistically based subcultures the nationalized personality structure is fundamental in most state-societies today. Homo nationis is driven, like homo oeconomicus, by individual interests and, like homo sociologicus, by social norms. However, a particular nationality or national identity in a broad sense gives a crucial and distinct psychocultural specificity and political and economic context to peoples individual interests and societys social norms at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The fragmentation of identities described by postmodern theorists16 would suggest that all-encompassing collective identities and habiti, especially national ones, are similarly being weakened and undermined. Individuality, it appears, is increasingly becoming a unifiying characteristic and source of common identification for many people of different nationalities.17 While at one level this commonality is real,18 it does not follow that it occurs at the expense of or transcends the framework of the national culture. Norbert Elias, one of the few sociologists who uses the concept of national habitus, writes:
Powerful as the advance of individualization has been in recent times, in relation to the nationstate plane we-identity has actually strengthened. One often finds that people try to overcome the contradiction between their self-perception as a we-less I, as a totally isolated individual, and their emotional involvement in the we-group of the nation by a strategy of encapsulation. Their selfperceptions as an individual and as a representative of a we-group, as a Frenchman, Englishman,

24

West German, American, etc., are assigned to different compartments of their knowledge, and these compartments communicate only very tenuously with each other (Elias 1991, p.209).

This radical separation diagnosed by Elias is facilitated by the taken-for-grantedness or second nature that national habitus represents for most people most of the time.19 Much the same seems to hold for individuality as a part of habitus. The timeless, placeless self, personally experienced by a growing number of people the subjective part of individualization processes is however firmly tied to its national culture as source and reference point.
The deeply rooted nature of the distinctive national characteristics and the consciousness of national we-identity closely bound up with them can serve as a graphic example of the degree to which the social habitus of the individual provides a soil in which personal, individual differences can flourish. The individuality of the particular Englishman, Dutchman, Swede or German represents, in a sense, the personal elaboration of a common social, and in this case national, habitus (Elias 1991, p.210).

The concept of national habitus highlights that, in addition to formal and informal institutions and abstractly rational individuals, the modern order rests on psychosocial foundations. These foundations may be strong and evolving, or they may be brittle and dissolving. In either case, they exist in every modern state.20 They cannot be reduced to individual choices or systemic structures, though both are involved. The development of national habitus is structurally favoured by the global state system.21 It is functionally significant since national habitus plays a fundamental role in many social processes. A social process like the development of a national habitus is a cultural fact, produced for the most part not by design but the result of unintended consequences of human action. Propositions 4 and 5 underscore that since most people belong to several social systems, habiti overlap and intermix. However, the power, authority, and prestige of a particular habitus derives from the political, economic or cultural significance of the social system in which it emerges. The national habitus provides a common cultural basis for the different habiti and their configurations. Proposition 6 acknowledges that habiti loosely structure personalities rather than fully determining them. The national habitus process is perhaps the single most powerful and pervasive structuring process in the world today. (Obviously, there are significant variations among particular state-

25

societies and other social systems in this respect.) What is new in these arguments? There are two major points that may perhaps add something to the debate. First and most important is the process conception of habitus. A habitus process needs to be studied with reference to the social system in which it emerges. Habitus is an emergent property in any social system. Some habiti are more important than others in political, economic or cultural terms. This is not a reduction of habitus to the social system but rather indicates the material basis from which habiti emerge. The systemspecific patterns of feeling, thinking, doing and interacting loosely structure individual personalities. How (top-down mechanisms), to what extent etc. are empirical questions. The second point of importance is the argument that a national habitus is a meta habitus. Not all habiti are of equal explanatory significance for social processes. The national habitus is one that has not been conceptualized as such, and its significance has not been widely recognized, especially in the globalization debate.22 Homo nationis as a biopsychosocial system In addition to social system-specific patterns of behaving that loosely structure individual persons, the conception of habitus presented here also has a bottom-up causal flow. For individual persons are not just loosely structured through habitus processes from above. They possess personalities, which means individual forms of feeling, thinking, doing, and interacting. That is because the individual actor or individual member of a social system is at the same time a complex system itself, i.e. a biopsychosocial system. This implies that in addition to social mechanisms, individuals are subject to biological and psychological mechanisms shaping personal development and personality change. These processes of biopsychic personality development and change shape how social habiti are acquired and applied. It may seem that this renders individual agency so hopelessly overdetermined that it makes no longer sense to speak of individual actors. This, however, is not the case. The phrase loosely structured with respect to the social mechanisms of the habitus process suggests the opposite, i.e. underdetermination. But does including biopsychic mechanisms in personality development lead to the feared overdetermination? I will conclude that it does not, but that it may well undermine conventional conceptions of the individual.

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As proposition 11 maintained, a personality is composed of subsystems (or subselves), such as cognitive, emotional, and volitional subsystems. While the activity in the subsystems is shaped by particular habiti from above, a person is capable of adopting, reshaping, and abandoning parts of a habitus. The degree to which this is possible depends in part on the significance of the habitus and social system in question, in part on individual characteristics of the person and the situation at hand. The individual forms of feeling, thinking, wanting, doing, and interacting that make up a personality are emergent properties of the underlying biopsychic system (i.e. brain/mind). What is left for the active agency of the individual? As propositions 12 and 13 suggest, a unified consciousness (a self) is an emergent property of brain activity, that is, of neurophysiological processes in and between particular regions or subsystems of the brain. An individual person has a unified consciousness, that is, one psychic space in which feeling, thinking, and wanting occur, i.e. in which the subsystems operate. It is this psychic space or unified consciousness that perhaps corresponds most closely to our conventional view of individual actors. Be that as it may, the objective of this paper has been to rethink habitus as process by conceptualizing individuals as biopsychosocial systems. The promise of this kind of conception is to facilitate linkages between the various disciplines and applied fields in which conceptual problems of the sort discussed here arise.

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Figure 1: Individual manifestations of habitus from: simple and circumscribed . . . simple automatic behaviours, e.g. facial expressions, social touching perceiving, speaking, writing, evaluating, task execution, problem solving interpersonal interaction, economic, political, religious, domestic behaviour freedom, obedience, restraint durable and generalized predispositions in a domain of life, or in all of life (e.g. national habitus) . . . to: generalized and complex

Figure 2: Systems and processes in the study of habitus

Brains 1.What? 2.Where? 3. How? 4. Effects Minds Social Systems individ +collective behaviour Symbolic Systems habitus models social representations

neurophys.+neuropsych. processes cultural scripts diff.areas of brain

personality subsystems individual and collective actors

indiv.patterns of feeling, individual strategies thinking, wanting basic needs complex wants

social institutions/norms reproduction, adaptation, breakdown

Note: Some of the systems and processes in this figure do not fall neatly into one of the categories of brains, minds, social systems, or symbolic systems since they seem to me better represented as overlapping. This is no problem for the conception of habitus as process in biopsychosocial systems proposed here, which does not depend on demarcations of this sort.

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Figure 3: Habitus in systemic perspective: How the habitus process works

social system

state-society (nation) family, workplace, etc.

emergent property: process:

habitus system-specific patterns of behaving, feeling, thinking, doing, interacting self-consciousness, identity (we-I balance) individual forms of behaving, feeling, thinking, doing, interacting (automatic and reflective) personality at t (the individual)

process: emergent property:

bio-psychic system: biological system:

subselves: affective, cognitive, moral neural networks

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Endnotes
1

Camic speaks only of habits, not of habitus. In the present analysis, the concept of

habit is rarely used and subsumed under the concept of habitus. A sharp distinction between the two is not necessary or useful, as the conception presented below (see esp. figure 1) will suggest.
2

Crossley himself has subsequently presented several contributions towards this goal.

See e.g. Crossley 2004; 2003). For an analysis of the cognitive origins of Bourdieus habitus in the work of Piaget, see Lizardo 2004.
3

A recent symposium in the journal Philosophy of the Social Sciences (2004) on systems

and mechanisms debated the significance and usefulness of Bunges philosophy of science for the social sciences.
4

I follow the Natural Semantic Metalanguage developed by Polish-Australian social

linguist Anna Wierzbicka (1999; 1997; 1992) as a tool for cross-cultural analysis to define the basic components of habitus.
5

Methodologically highly sophisticated analyses of aspects of habitus can be found in the

works of Michele Lamont (2002) and Anna Wierzbicka (1999; 1997).

6 7

For a clear discussion of emergence and systems, see Bunge (2003). For the sake of brevity, though at the risk of being misleading, I will occasionally use

behaviour in quotation marks to refer to thinking, feeling, wanting, doing, and interacting.
8

As McGrew (1998) in his discussion of culture in nonhuman primates suggests, more

sophisticated habits (and thus habiti) are not confined to the genus homo.

34

For the to my knowledge most advanced approach to the study of culturally specific

emotions and cognitions (cultural scripts) and fascinating empirical studies, see the work of Anna Wierzbicka (e.g. 1999; 2002; 2003).
10

Some of the work produced in the humanities, as well as some fictional literature, can

provide significant material for the construction of such maps.

11

In a recent discussion in Annual Review of Neuroscience, Searle (2000) uses a broader

conception of consciousness a unified field theory that would include the whole range of habitus behaviours described above (see figure 1). However, the problem of consciousness is not central for the present analysis.
12

Thus in the context of cognition, Markman and Gentner (2001) report that, in contrast

to traditional approaches that focus on abstract logical reasoning, a number of current approaches in psychology posit domain-specific [in our terms: habitus-specific] cognition.
13

May 1 demonstrations in (West) Berlin, for example, have developed their own

particular habitus since their beginning in the early 1980s in which violence has become an expected part of the event (cf. Rucht 2003).
14

Voluntary: entering and exiting a particular social system; overcoming an addiction.

Involuntary: Belonging to a system subject to radical change.

15

For a useful analyis of the relationship between sociological theory and nationalism

studies, see Spillman and Faeges 2004.

16

For a critical assessment of these positions from a viewpoint similar to the one

presented here, see Billig (1995), esp. ch. 6-7. A different view examining the

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relationship between Foucault and Bauman, on the one hand, and Elias, on the other, can be found in Dennis Smith 2001.
17

The EU as the leading case of transnational integration provides an ideal testing ground

for whether and how strong postnational identities can emerge. See e.g. Cederman 2001; Soysal 2002.
18

I.e. in terms of similar values as measured, for instance, in the cross-national surveys of

Inglehart (e.g. 1997).

19 20

The best recent treatment of this banal nature of nationalism is probably Billig 1995. Note that the claim here is not that national habitus works everywhere as the only, or

necessarily major, psychosocial foundation of modern order. Such generalizations would be untenable given the diversity of nation-states.
21

There are other structural features of a state-society, such as internal linguistic or

religious divisions, that do not favour the development of a national habitus, though they dont necessarily exclude it (cf. Switzerland).
22

For conceptualizations similar at least in part to the one proposed here, however, see

Brubaker et al. 2004; Brubaker 2002; van Dijk 1998.

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