out the significance of individual endeavour and collective life in agricultural settings?
Pierre Bourdieu's Outline of a theory of practice situates itself in
opposition to contemporary accounts of society and culture. When Pierre Bourdieu wrote Outline of a Theory of Practice, structuralism and structural Marxism were the dominant modes of approach. Bourdieu wrote Outline of a Theory of Practice to offer an alternative to the accounts of human action provided by structuralism and by abstract sociological theory. Bourdieu basically uses fieldwork in Kabyle (northern Algeria) to argue that cultural structures are absorbed into the unconscious structures of our minds, creating a predetermined framework known as Habitus, within which individuals work. Pierre Bourdieu develops a theory of practice which is simultaneously a critique of the methods and postures of social science and a general account of how human action should be understood. Human action is practical in at least two senses of the term. First, action is composed of and conducted through practices; and, second, action is never abstract, it is always oriented to some actual outcome or goal. It is frequent and even conventional in a great deal of social philosophy, anthropology, and sociology to argue that social action is orderly insofar as it is governed by socially shared rules. From this perspective, in any given situation individuals know how to act because they apprehend the situation and recognize the rule, or rules, that direct action in that situation. Bourdieu rejects this perspective as too simple. According to him, rules could not possibly determine social action because those rules and the situations in which they apply (or do not apply) always require active interpretation. Far from having their actions determined by rules, practical actors engage in what Bourdieu describes as the art of necessary improvisation. Thus, Bourdieu contends, norms and rules should be understood as providing interpretive resources for strategic action.
This internalisation of objective possibility as subjective expectation
was theorised by Bourdieu in the concept of habitus, the form by which this relationship was mediated. Habitus is, according to Bourdieu, the means by which the 'social game' is inscribed in biological individuals. As the possibilities and constraints of social action are incorporated by individuals, their 'feel for the game' becomes a kind of second nature. 'Habitus' thus refers to the way in which an individual's instinctive sense of what might be achieved is structured into a pattern of behaviour. In Bourdieu's own words, 'an acquired system of generative schemes objectively adjusted to the particular conditions in which it is constituted'. The modes of behaviour, or dispositions, produced by the habitus, are passed on through the generations, inculcated from an early age and socially reinforced through education and culture. Individuals need not be conscious of how their actions are organizednor need they be wholly aware of how their actions are strategically organizedin order to advance their own interests as individuals and as members of a class. Therefore, the habitus contributes to the production, and reproduction, of the existing social order invisibly, without individuals conscious awareness; even though the habitus exists only through those individuals own actions. According to Bourdieu the idea of a point of view on practice is possible only if one stands back so as to observe. That is, to have a point of view on practiceto be an observer of practiceis to detach oneself from practice itself. Some theories of practice fail to recognize that the objects of knowledge are socially constructed; these theories slip into a form of positivist materialism, in which individuals capacities as sense-making agents are ignored. Alternatively, other theories of practice fail to recognize that insofar as the objects of knowledge are socially constructed, they are constructed in and through practical activity; in this case, the objective character of social structures is ignored, and these theories become a sort of idealist intellectualism. Bourdieus critique that theories of practice that attempt to portray practice in systematic terms can never wholly account for actual instances of practice. The ideal version of the Kabyle calendar that an anthropologist might construct is not, and cannot be, the same as the calendar as it is experienced and used by the Kabyle themselves.
The calendar plays an important role in Kabylian society, and it is
heavily codified and made explicit as a system of rules to govern social life -- when to plant, when to hold religious festivities and so on. There are some variants among the members of society over matters such as when the year starts, and when exactly different periods start and finish, and this has puzzled anthropologists interested in getting the 'true' picture. Some start their year with autumn (lakhrif), for some the season starts around 1sept and for some first day of ploughing is the beginning of the year. The tillage period begins with the first day of ploughing when an Ox is sacrificed and its meat is shared among the community. For some people winters begin on 15 nov while for some it begins with 1 December. The heart of winter is called lyali the nights, "a period of forty days, which is further divided into two equal parts Black and White. Confusion regarding the beginning of winter shows that opposition between winter and autumn are not strongly marked. Once the autumn is over, the peasants keep themselves busy in repairing tools; basically its a period free from rigorous activity which is contrasted to slack period of the dry season which includes intense activity. First day of January is known as ennayer which is marked by set of renewal rites and taboos. Lyali ends in January and it is celebrated through ritual manners. The farmer goes out into the fields and sets up oleander branches, which have the power to drive away maras. This is a long transitional period or time of waiting, its a passage from winter to spring. It includes a patchwork of moments which are ill defined, almost all malign, and variously named. Term thimgharine, is used for this transition phase and it is also used for old women. Once spring arrives cattles are brought to the field and its a time for celebrations. Women abandon the taboos of the ploughing period and dye their hands with henna and make brooms. Days grow longer, there is not much work to be done and all waits for the end of the period. With Natah transitional period comes to an end. It is a season of blossoming of crops, season of celebration as opposed to husum. April is a downward slope and a trouble free period. Work of all sorts starts up again in the fields, where the critical period of growth is over, the men can start the hoeing, inaugurated by the abduction of
Mata or bride of field. During the period of nisan whose beneficent
rain, bringing fertility and prosperity to every living thing, is invoked with all sorts of rites, the sheep are shorn and the new lambs are branded. From the period known as izegzawen the green days comes to an end. The last traces of greenery fade from the landscape and cereals begin to turn yellow. The crucial tasks of wet season, tillage and sowing are banned from the period known as the yellow days, only concern is to protect the ripening crops from predators. Bourdieu relates this agrarian cycle with other process and develop a series of homologies. The act of ploughing can be seen as an act of destroying. From the gender role man is supposed to be destroyer and who carries out violence. Act of harvesting is also seen as men oriented. On the other side women are accorded by gender to liminality dictated by rhythms of nature. Women are seen as liminal or profane because of her association with labour, menstruation. They are always seen as passive receiver and play role of nurturer. But without the support of women, men are not capable of doing work and in the cycle agriculture brings them to partnership with men. The idea of partnership between men and women can be seen in agrarian cycle, seed is seen as semen which is placed into the soil which is imagery of an act of penetration between men and women. Earth is symbolised as women womb or the receiver which are roles accorded to women. The nascent shoot or an emerging child both show that nurturing is required to develop or for growth and it is again done by women. In this way whole act of making the crops fertile is an imagery of reproduction and sexuality. Thus agrarian cycle also becomes a reproductive and sexual cycle. Such homologies between the cycle of seasons, the scheduling of labour as differentiated by gender, and other symbolic universes, would certainly be emphasized by any structurally oriented analyst. Bourdieu, however, is concerned to highlight the partial nature of the integration of such domains as these homologies are mobilized to deal with particular situations, whether the situation involves the appropriate time to transact marriage, weave cloth or cook spicy food. Although loosely interconnected, these schemes depend on emphasizing certain oppositions to generate practices or symbols
that cannot be produced directly from the oppositions that are
foregrounded by other schemes. Because no more than one particular sector of the system of partially autonomous schemes is mobilized at any one time, the products that result from applying these schemes are only partially congruent and roughly equivalent for anyone with "practical mastery" of the system. Kabyle calendar is seen as prototype of doxa, where the world of tradition maps directly onto the natural world, so that it can be taken for granted. This enables reproduction of that social world, without disputes. There is no place for opinion, the doxa is unanimous. The doxa can weaken and undergo practical questioning as a result of contact with other cultures or via various political and economic crises 'correlative with class division'. Self-evidence is destroyed, and the social world ceases to be a natural phenomenon. However, the crisis may not lead to schism. In particular, dominant groups may impose orthodoxy, a weaker version of doxa, because it has to be consciously managed, and it implies alternatives, heterodoxy. An important activity here is to try and preserve a 'universe of that which is taken for granted, but again this can be maintained only by censorship and exclusion.
Bibliography Bourdieu, Pierre 1977 outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge, University of Cambridge press http://www.arasite.org/bdieuprc.htm
Anarchism, Libertarianism and Environmentalism: Anti-Authoritarian Thought and The Search For Self-Organizing Societies Damian Finbar White and Gideon Kossoff