Journal for the Study of Food and Society

ISSN: 1528-9796 (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rffc19

An Introduction to Pierre Bourdieu's Key

Theoretical Concepts

Elaine M. Power M.Sc., RD

To cite this article: Elaine M. Power M.Sc., RD (1999) An Introduction to Pierre Bourdieu's Key
Theoretical Concepts, Journal for the Study of Food and Society, 3:1, 48-52

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.2752/152897999786690753

Published online: 27 Apr 2015.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 53

View related articles

Citing articles: 2 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rffc19

Download by: ["Queen's University Libraries, Kingston"] Date: 12 October 2015, At: 07:14
 An Introduction to Pierre Bourdieu's Key Theoretical Concepts

by Elaine M. Power, M.Sc., RD1

At the heart of Pierre Bourdieu's sociological studies is an integrated theoretical framework of relevance to
sociologists offood and nutrition. One of Bourdieu's primary concerns is to overcome dichotomies in social theory,
such as micro/macro, material/symbolic, empirical/theoretical, objective/subjective, public/private,
structure/agency. His other sociological concerns are to understand the practical logic of everyday life, to
understand relations of power, and to develop a rejlexive sociology. The primary objective of this paper is to
introduce Bourdit!U's key theoretical concepts habitus, practice, field, and different forms of capital, such as
cultural, economic, social, and symbolic. While gender, class, ethnicity, culture, education, and the historical time
period all shape an individual's habitus, practice_what one does in everyday life_is dynamic andjluid, like ajazz
musician's improvisation on a theme. Practice is the result of the relationship between an individual's habitus,
different forms of capital, and the field of action. I give an example of how Bourdieu's theoretical framework might
Downloaded by ["Queen's University Libraries, Kingston"] at 07:14 12 October 2015

be used to understand how single mothers on welfare feed their families in a small town, and suggest other areas in
the sociology offood and nutrition to which it might usefully be applied.

Introduction and nutrition will contribute to the growth of

Pierre Bourdieu is perhaps best known among
sociologists of food and nutrition for his
comprehensive ethnography of French culture,
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of
Taste. In Distinction (1984), Bourdieu analyzes the
ways in which taste is formed and reproduced in
relation to the class structure of contemporary
France. However, Distinction is just one piece of
Bourdieu's broader sociological projecCa project of
particular relevance to the sociology of food and
nutrition. Underlying Bourdieu's studies of French
society is an integrated theoretical and
methodological approach that seeks to overcome
sociological dichotomies, including micro/macro,
subjective/objective, material/symbolic,
structure/agency, empirical/theoretical,
public/private, and freedom/necessity. Such an
approach to sociological studies of food_which
involve the material and the symbolic, the public and
the private; encompass issues from micro to macro
levels of analysis; and invoke representative
sociological dilemmas and dichotomies30uld be
particularly fruitful (so to speak). Bourdieu's other
sociological concerns are to understand the practical
logic of everyday life and social action, to understand
relations of power and domination, and to develop a
reflexive sociology. By using Bourdieu's theoretical
perspective to explore food-related issues,
sociologists of food and nutrition could help fulfill
McIntosh's (1996) promise that the sociology of food
sociological theory.
The main theoretical tools Bourdieu uses to explore
his themes are habitus, practice, field, and different
forms of capital, such as cultural, economic,
social, and symbolic. The purpose of this paper is
to introduce these concepts and then to show how
they might be used in a study of how single
mothers on social assistance "feed their families"
(Devault, 1991) in a small town. It is important to
understand these theoretical concepts in order to
appreciate Bourdieu's stance on the broad
sociological concerns outlined in the previous
paragraph.
Habitus
The concept of habitus is central to Bourdieu's
theoretical framework. It is his way of explaining
the regularities of behaviour that are associated
with social structures, such as class, gender, and
ethnicity, without making social structures
deterministic of behaviour, or losing sight of the
individual's own agency. Habitus is a way of
describing the embodiment of social structures and
history in individuals_it is a set of dispositions,
internal to the individual, that both reflects external
social structures and shapes how the individual
perceives the world and acts in it. Although the
social structures embodied in habitus do not
determine behaviour, the individual is predisposed
to act in accordance with the social structures that

Iph.D. Candidate in the Social Science and Health Program, Department of Public Health Sciences, University of
Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S lAS

Journal for the Study of Food and Society, Vol. 3, No. I, Spring 1999 Page 48
 have shaped her, because, in effect, she carries
those social structures with her. In Bourdieu's
words':
The conditionings associated with a
particular class of conditions of existence
produce habitus, systems of durable,
transposable dispositions, structured
structures predisposed to function as
structuring structures, that is as principles
which generate and organize practices and
representations that can be objectively
adapted to their outcomes without
presupposing a conscious aiming at ends
Downloaded by ["Queen's University Libraries, Kingston"] at 07:14 12 October 2015
or an express mastery of the operations
necessary in order to attain them (1990, p.
53).
The individual's primary habitus, inculcated in
childhood, tends to be more durable than the one or
more secondary habitus that may be learned later,
as one takes on a profession or trade. The
dispositions acquired in childhood "literally mould
the body and become second nature ... operating in
a way that is pre-conscious and hence not readily
amenable to conscious reflection and modification"
(Thompson, 1991, p. 12-13). For example, gender
identity is an aspect of the habitus that is inculcated
practically from the moment of birth.
Gender identity is a deeply rooted, bodily
anchored dimension of an agent's habitus.
It affects the individual in the most
'natural' parts of his or her identity, as it
concerns his or her body, the vision of the
body, the possibilities of sensual
perception, of feeling and expressing
pleasure and pain ...Relearning another
gender identity ...appears to be almost
impossible (Krais, 1993, p. 170).
, Bourdieu is often criticized for his opaque
language, and difficult, complex sentence structures.
His defence is that social reality is complex and
therefore, we should not expect to apprehend it
easily. This reflects Bourdieu's epistemological
concern that in order to develop an adequate
sociology, sociologists must "break" with the
experience of the everyday social world, "a break
which is made all the more difficult by the fact that
the social scientist is also a participant in social life
and hence is inclined to draw upon everyday words
and concepts in analysing the social world"
(Thompson, 1991, p. 11).
Journal for the SlUdy of Food and Society, Vol. 3. No. I, Spring 1999
The dispositions that constitute the habitus are also
structured, inevitably reflecting the social
conditions in which they were formed. For
example, the habitus of an individual who grew up
in a working class family will tend to be similar to
the habitus of others in a similar geographical
region from working class families, and different,
at least in some aspects, from those of middle class
backgrounds. Like gender, the class disposition of
the primary habitus is very durable. Even if an
individual moves away from the class background
of her childhood, subtle aspects of her accent,
mannerisms, and bodily comportment may betray
her origins.
Habitus is not only the product of structures and
producer of practices, but it is also the reproducer
of structures. The habitus tends to generate
practices that coincide with the social conditions
that produced it. In continuing to act in accordance
with the structures that helped to create their
habitus, people reproduce those structures (though
potentially with modifications).
Habitus shapes and produces practice, but does not
determine it. The flexibility of practice, regulated
by habitus, has been compared to the musical
practice of jazz musicians. Jazz musicians stay
within certain musical boundaries, follow a
particular jazz tradition or style, and are limited by
the physical constraints of their instrument, but
they may improvise almost endlessly on a musical
theme, elaborating different versions that are barely
recognizable. Wacquant (1992) quotes Bourdieu:
'habitus is in cahoots with the fuzzy and
the vague. As a generative spontaneity
which asserts itself in the improvised
confrontation with endlessly renewed
situations, it follows a practical logic, that
of the fuzzy, of the more-or-Iess, which
defines the ordinary relation to the world.'
Consequently, we should refrain from
searching the productions of habitus for
more logic than they actually contain: 'the
logic of practice is logical up to the point
where to be logical would cease being
practical.' The peculiar difficulty of
sociology, then, is to produce a precise
science of an imprecise, fuzzy, wooly
reality (p. 22-23, italics in original).
Page 49
 Practice
The concept of habitus is Bourdieu's way of
overcoming the subjective/objective dichotomy (as
well as other related dichotomies, such as
structure/agency, and freedom/necessity). Although
habitus has a large role in what people do in their
everyday lives, or their practice, practice involves
more than habitus. Bourdieu's model of practice:
conceptualizes action as the outcome of a
relationship between habitus, capital and
field ...Practices are not to be reduced to
either habitus or field but grow out of the
"interrelationship" established at each
Downloaded by ["Queen's University Libraries, Kingston"] at 07:14 12 October 2015
point in time by the sets of relations
represented by both (Swartz, 1997, p. 141-
142).
Fields are structured spaces organized around
particular types of capital, consisting of dominant
and subordinate positions. Examples of fields that
Bourdieu has analyzed include the field of law, the
field of art, the field of education, the intellectual
field, the field of science, and the field of religion.
Fields denote arenas of production,
circulation, and appropriation of goods,
services, knowledge, or status, and the
competitive positions held by actors in
their struggle to accumulate and
monopolize these different kinds of
capital (Swartz, 1997, p. 117).
Fields cannot exist without capital. As Swartz
points out, there are as many different types of
fields as there are forms of capital. Bourdieu
identifies four main types of capital: economic,
cultural, social, and symbolic. Economic capital is
the most straightforward type of capital, and the
type which we are accustomed to associating with
power (money and wealth). Cultural capital exists
in three forms:
in the embodied state, i.e. in the form of
long-lasting dispositions of the mind and
body, in the objectified state, in the form
of cultural goods (pictures, books,
dictionaries, instruments, machines, etc) ...
and in the institutionalized state, a form of
objectification resulting in such things as
educational qualifications (Bourdieu,
1983, quoted in McCall, 1992, p. 843,
italics in original).
Jownal for the Sbldy of Food and Society. Vol. 3. No. I, Spring 1999
Social capital accrues from networks of
relationships, especially institutionalized
relationships, such as the family. Symbolic capital
is the form that the other types of capital assume
when the arbitrariness of their nature is
misrecognized. For example, the "legitimate" form
of the family_father, mother, and children_has
symbolic capital out of proportion with its social or
economic capital. One of the features of different
types of capital is that they are interconvertible,
though Bourdieu recognizes that it is economic
capital which is most easily converted into the
other forms (e.g. money buys education and
influence) and is the most straightforward to
accumulate and transmit to other generations,
through family relations. Not surprisingly, capital is
also central to Bourdieu's understanding of class.
For Bourdieu, it is the total volume of capital and
the composition of capital, as well as the social
trajectory (upward, downward, or stable social
mobility), which defines the three-dimensional
space called "class" (Swartz, 1997).
Using Bourdieu's Theoretical Framework
One of the key theoretical premises of my proposed
study of how single mothers on social assistance
feed their families in a small town is that single
mothers on social assistance share common values,
needs, and desires with other members of Canadian
society; they are not members of a "deviant
subculture" or underclass with particular values
and practices that separate them from everyone
else. A second fundamental premise is that food
sits at the intersection of the biological or material
and the symbolic aspects of human life. Food is
essential for life because we need its energy and
nutrients as biological creatures. But the nature of
our humanity lies in our social practices, and thus
our ability to sustain ourselves involves more than
nutrients. What we eat is "a sign of membership,
social status and spiritual worth. Eating the same
food as others is a basic mark of belonging"
(Stone, 1988, p. 71).
I am interested in understanding the logic of the
practice of feeding a family under economic and
social constraints, and to show that the logic of that
practice has its own "rationality." This rationality is
derived from the interaction of habitus and field,
and the use and accumulation of various types of
capital. It is not necessarily "rational" as
understood by rationalist social theories (such as
Rational Action Theory). The logic of the practice
of feeding a family involves fulfilling not just the
Page 50
 material but also the symbolic aspects of the
physical need for food. The practice of feeding the
family involves, in part, meeting what Stone (1988)
calls "communal needs," which include
"community, solidarity, a sense of belonging;
dignity, respect, self-esteem, and honor; friendship
and love" (p. 77).
Bourdieu's model of practice suggests a three-step
approach to any sociological study: analysis of (a)
the particular field in relation to the broader field of
power; (b) the structure of objective relations
between the different positions within the field; and
(c) the habitus (notably the class habitus) agents
Downloaded by ["Queen's University Libraries, Kingston"] at 07:14 12 October 2015
bring to their positions in the field and the social
trajectory of those positions (Swartz, 1997).
Bourdieu has only recently turned to the family as a
field of study (notably in La Misere du Monde,
soon to be published in English translation as The
Poverty of Society: A Study in Social Suffering).
The family plays a key role in the maintenance of
the social order and is a primary site of the
accumulation and transmission of different forms
of capital (Bourdieu, 1996). One of the main
focuses of this study will be to describe the
different forms of capital single mothers on welfare
have, and how they use, accumulate, and are denied
capital.
The families in this study are a particular type of
family-mother-Ied families living on social
assistance. As single parent families, they disrupt
the socially sanctioned form of the family as father,
mother, and children. This diminishes their
symbolic capital significantly-in fact, attributes
"negative" symbolic capital, or stigma, to them.
They are also stigmatized by their perceived
violation of the work ethic because of their use of
welfare to support themselves and their families
(Bauman, 1998). Single mothers on welfare have
come to symbolize the anxieties of a society in
which traditional assumptions about "the
work/family/welfare nexus" (Morris, 1996) are
"unravelling. "
Class, gender, culture, and the organization of the
economy (i.e., a capitalistic market economy)
shapes the "food habitus" of the single mothers on
welfare in this study, and will be reflected in their
food preferences; their notions of the
appropriateness of various foods and combinations
of foods for different times of the day and week,
different groups of people (especially men and
children), and different occasions throughout the
year; and their skill in creating meals for their
Journal fortbe Study of Food and Society, Vol. 3, No. I, Spring 1999
families. The practice of feeding the family
involves the food habitus of the mothers, but also
the various forms of capital-they have at their
disposal to use or spend, the different types of
capital which they are seeking to enhance or
accumulate for themselves or their children, as well
as the various fields in which they must interact
and the other agents in those fields.
So, for example, the mundane and apparently
simple chore of packing a child's lunch for school
reflects a complex interaction among habitus,
capitals, and fields, the "rules" and "profits" of
which are mostly intuitively known, without
conscious reflection. What gets packed in the lunch
box depends on the mother's notion of a culturally
appropriate and healthy lunch for her child, the
child's preferences, what is available in the house at
the time (or the ability to buy more groceries to
supplement what is in the house), and the
school/community standards for an appropriate
lunch, all of which are constructed by similar social
structures and forces in a small town, and will
therefore tend to be mutually reinforcing. A single
mother on welfare may buy single portion
packaging, brand names, or types of food that are
more expensive to ensure that her child's lunch fits
the norm for his or her classroom, violating strictly
economic logic. By spending more on groceries to
ensure the symbolic capital of her child's lunch, she
will have to scrimp in the limited areas of the
family's expenditures where further reductions are
possible, such as her own food intake, potentially
compromising her health (bodily capital). But by
making sacrifices in other areas of the family's
expenditures to promote the symbolic capital of her
child's lunch, the single mother on welfare will be
preserving the child's social capital, by preventing
himlher from being ostracized from hislher peer
group, and supporting the child's accumulation of
cultural capital, by making school attendance
easier.
This one example illustrates how using Bourdieu's
theoretical framework can help point to the logic of
a practice, logic which may not otherwise be
readily apparent. Ianticipate that a Bourdelian
theoretical orientation will help me understand how
the dynamics of a small town affect the struggles of
single mothers on welfare to feed their families. I
am particularly interested in the impact of
stigmatization in a place where it is difficult to hide
one's status as a single mother on welfare and the
role and impact of family and friends (social
capital) in the process of feeding the family. I will
PageS I
 also be examining the impact of the mothers'
habitus on their practices of feeding the family and
their efforts to shape the habitus and capital
accumulation of their children.
Conclusion
I have presented a brief introduction to Bourdieu's
sociological concerns and his key theoretical
concepts, and one example of how Bourdieu's
theoretical framework might be used in
understanding the practice of feeding the family. I
hope this introduction gives a flavor of the
richness, depth, and complexity of his work. While
Bourdieu's conceptual framework may have to be
Downloaded by ["Queen's University Libraries, Kingston"] at 07:14 12 October 2015
extended in some directions, it holds potential for
application to many other areas of interest to
sociologists of food and nutrition, including studies
of the body, social stratification, agricultural
systems, eating behaviors and food practices,
nutrition professions, and food industry. I believe
that a thoughtful, critical engagement with his
theoretical and methodological perspective has
much to offer the emerging field of the sociology
of food and nutrition, including ways of thinking,
questioning, and researching that are empirically
grounded and informed by rigorous social theory.
Acknowledgements
This paper is a revised version of an earlier one,
presented at the The Agriculture, Food & Human
Values Association (AFHVS) and The Association
for the Study of Food and Society (ASFS) Joint
Annual Meetings, San Francisco, California, June
4-7,1998. I deeply appreciate the ongoing support
of Ann Robertson and Steven Stewart, and their
thoughtful comments about this paper, which have
greatly improved its quality. I would also like to
thank the members of the Bourdieu Reading Group
in the Department of Public Health Sciences,
University of Toronto, for their encouragement and
provocative discussions, and Patricia McKeever,
who first introduced me to Bourdieu's writings.
References
Bauman, Z. (1998). Work, consumerism, and the
new poor. Philadelphia: Open University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1983) Homo academicus. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Journal for the Study of Food and Society, VoL 3, No.1, Spring 1999
Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique
of the judgement of taste. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1996). On the family as a realized
category. Theory, culture & society, 13 (3), 19-26.
DeVault, M. (1991). Feeding the family: The social
organization of caring as gendered work. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Krais, B. (1993). Gender and symbolic violence:
Female oppression in the light of Pierre Bourdieu's
theory of social practice. In Calhoun, c., LiPuma,
E., & Postone, M. (Eds.). Bourdieu: Critical
perspectives. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, p. 156-177.
McCall, L. (1992). Does gender fit? Bourdieu,
feminism, and conceptions of social order. Theory
and society, 21(6). 837-67.
McIntosh, W. A. (1996). Sociologies offood and
nutrition. New York: Plenum Press.
Morris, L. (1996). Dangerous classes: Neglected
aspects of the underclass debate. In Mingione, E.
(Ed.) Urban poverty and the underclass: A reader.
Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, p. 160-175.
Stone, D. (1988). Policy paradox and political
reason. Glenview, Illinois: Cott, Foresman/LittIe
Brown, College Division.
Swartz, D. (1997). Culture and power: The
sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press.
Thompson, J. B. (1991). Editor's introduction. In
Bourdieu, P. Language & symbolic power.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, p. 1-31.
Wacquant, L. (1992). Toward a social praxeology:
The structure and logic of Bourdieu's sociology. In
Bourdieu, P. & Wacquant, L. An invitation to
reflexive sociology. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, p. 1-59.
Page 52