2 Habitus

PIERRE BOURDIEU

I must confess that I have a very strong feeling of responsibility as I

contribute to reviving and elaborating the concept of habitus which is at the
centre of discussion in this volume. So I hope that I shall be able to justify
in this Introduction the confidence which the authors have put in this
notion, which is in my view very important and indispensable to understand
truly and adequately human action.
I want to address first a set of questions which were sent to me and
which relate to the use of the notion of habitus, particularly in
contemporary Western cities: in our fast-changing world, demanding from
all of us multiple ‘roles’ and quick adjustments, is habitus still a useful
research tool? Is it possible to use it efficiently in spatial analysis or, more
precisely, in relation to space, meaning both geographic space and social
space? Is it possible to use architecture, and especially the symbolic power
of architecture, in order to restructure habitus and to break up the supposed
vicious cycle obtaining between structures and habitus? In a word, is
habitus a definitely static concept, intrinsically doomed to express
continuities and to repetition, suited to social analysis in relatively stable
societies and stationary situations, and only that? Could we use this concept
to understand and explain situations of rapid change and to account for
social transformation and for the tremendous changes we observe in
contemporary societies, including at the level of daily life?
It is difficult to attempt to answer in a completely satisfactory
manner such questions about habitus in a semi-improvised and very short
Introduction, so I take the liberty of inviting readers to look at the book I
published with my colleague and friend Loïc Wacquant, An Introduction to
Reflexive Sociology, in which you will find a very thorough and precise
discussion of all the problems concerning this concept. Now, I must first
recall the definition of habitus as a system of dispositions, that is of
permanent manners of being, seeing, acting and thinking, or a system of
long-lasting (rather than permanent) schemes or schemata or structures of
perception, conception and action. The word disposition, being more
familiar, less exotic, than habitus, is important to give a more concrete
intuition of what habitus is, and to remind you what is at stake in the use of
44 Habitus: A Sense of Place

such a concept, namely a peculiar philosophy of action, or better, of

practice, sometimes characterised as dispositional. This philosophy is
opposed to the Cartesian philosophy of action which is revived today in the
tradition of homo oeconomicus as a rational agent, who chooses the best
means, the best strategies by a conscious calculation oriented towards the
maximisation of profits and, more generally, in the sociological current
called ‘Methodological Individualism’, which accepts the same
presuppositions concerning the logic of human action.
Now, a brief comment on the other aspect of the definition, that is,
on the word system. As I tried to show in my book Distinction, the habitus
of a determinate person – or of a group of persons occupying a similar or
neighbouring position in social space – is in a sense very systematic: all the
elements of his or her behaviour have something in common, a kind of
affinity of style, like the works of the same painter or, to take a example
from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, like the handwriting of a person who keeps
her style, immediately recognisable, when she writes with instruments as
diverse as a pencil, a pen or a piece of chalk and on media as different as a
sheet of paper and a blackboard. So this example gives a concrete intuition
of this systematicity. It is not a logical systematicity; it is a practical
systematicity. There are discrepancies, there are exceptions, but the word
‘style’ indicates very well this practical unity. When I conducted my survey
about practices in the domain of art, whose results were published in the
book Distinction, I had in mind to break with the tendency of most of the
socio-psychologists to study human behaviour by slices. They have studied
attitudes towards art, attitudes toward politics, attitudes towards sport,
attitudes towards painting and so on, through specialised surveys, directed
only at an aspect of the behaviour of the person/s studied. So using a
questionnaire, which was difficult to elaborate, I tried to study the
behaviour of people in very different domains from what they like in terms
of food, to what they like in terms of music passing by what they like in
terms of sport with the hypothesis that there was some unity. I had in mind
the intention to demonstrate this unity of human behaviour on one side and
on the other side to break down a division which is very important in our
implicit vision of aesthetics. This is the division between noble, noble
practices, music, painting and so on and common practices like things of
sex, of food and so on. And by making visible this unity I wanted to
destroy the dichotomy, which is the basis of a kind of aesthetic racism,
which is very common amongst cultivated persons.
So the best example of the unity of human behaviour of a person,
but also of a group, is the lifestyle – again the word style – of the ‘petty
bourgeoisie’, which may be recognised in their manner (a synonym of
 Habitus 45

style, or in German, Art) of speaking (characterised by hypercorrectness in

their language), of saving (they are thrifty in their manner), of loving (they
have very few children), and so on. For in these things which are
apparently independent, and that common sociology does not study
together, fertility, artistic tastes, political opinions and so on, there is some
unity. By emphasising this unity I am conscious of the danger of being seen
as promoting the idea that human behaviour is monolithic and this is
something that is sometimes said against the notion of habitus. But human
behaviour is not monolithic. It is very open, very diverse, but within limits,
and the idea of lifestyle is suited to express this loose systematicity which
characterises human behaviour.
In that respect, habitus is very similar to what was traditionally
called character, but with a very important difference: the habitus, as the
Latin indicates, is something non natural, a set of acquired characteristics
which are the product of social conditions and which, for that reason, may
be totally or partially common to people who have been the product of
similar social conditions (such as individuals occupying petty bourgeois
positions in different societies or at different epochs). There is another
difference which follows from the fact that the habitus is not something
natural, inborn: being a product of history, that is of social experience and
education, it may be changed by history, that is by new experiences,
education or training (which implies that aspects of what remains
unconscious in habitus be made at least partially conscious and explicit).
Dispositions are long-lasting: they tend to perpetuate, to reproduce
themselves, but they are not eternal. They may be changed by historical
action oriented by intention and consciousness and using pedagogic
devices. (One has an example in the correction of an accent of
pronunciation.) A linguistic habitus, for example, is a product of primary
education and cannot be corrected completely despite all one’s efforts. It is
the same with any kind of ethical habit. Any dimension of habitus is very
difficult to change but it may be changed through this process of awareness
and of pedagogic effort.
The habitus is not a fate, not a destiny. I must insist on this, as I
have done many times before, against the interpretation which was
proposed and imposed by some of the first reviews of my work and then
constantly repeated by most of the English-speaking commentators (as if
they spent more time reading the previous exegeses – according to a
scholastic tradition which dictates that every reviewer reviews all the
previous reviews at the beginning of his or her review). The model of the
circle, the vicious cycle of structure producing habitus which reproduces
structure ad infinitum is a product of commentators.
46 Habitus: A Sense of Place

First, this closed circle is a particular case, namely, the case in

which the objective conditions in which the habitus operates are similar to
the objective conditions of which it is the product. That is not very
common, but it happens even in fast changing societies like ours. For
example in my book Masculine Domination, I try to show that the main
structures of masculine domination are maintained, and survive since the
Neolithic time. The opposition we make between soft and hard, software
and hardware, soft sciences and hard sciences and this opposition, which is
a mythical opposition, according to which everything which is soft, which
is flexible, and so on, is feminine and everything which is hard is
masculine, this opposition is at once an objective opposition, which may be
found in objective structures, like, in universities, the opposition between
masculine and feminine disciplines, for instance physics and economics
versus psychology or art history, and ‘subjective’ cognitive structures
which are dimensions of habitus. When you look at the statistics of the
distribution according to gender between the disciplines for example in
medicine, you will find a systematic difference between male and female
doctors according to the medical discipline they are studying or practising,
surgery or dermatology for instance.
When you look at the statistics you can see that the old mythical
opposition still works. All the natural sciences are more masculine in terms
of students, in terms of professors and so on. Why does it work? Because it
is incorporated in our minds, that is in our bodies, and we act in the world
according to this structure and by so doing we tend to contribute to
reproduce this structure.
Secondly, even in traditional societies or in specific sectors of
modern societies, habitus is never a mere principle of repetition – that is the
difference between habitus and habit. As a dynamic system of dispositions
that interact with one another, it has, as such, a generative capacity; it is a
structured principle of invention, similar to a generative grammar able to
produce an infinite number of new sentences according to determinate
patterns and within determinate limits. The habitus is a generative grammar
but it is not an inborn generative grammar as in Chomsky’s tradition which
is related to the Cartesian tradition. It is a principle of invention, a principle
of improvisation. The habitus generates inventions and improvisations but
within limits.
Thirdly, in all the cases where dispositions encounter conditions
(including fields) different from those in which they were constructed and
assembled, there is a dialectical confrontation between habitus, as
structured structure, and objective structures. In this confrontation, habitus
operates as a structuring structure able to selectively perceive and to
 Habitus 47

transform the objective structure according to its own structure while, at the
same time, being re-structured, transformed in its makeup by the pressure
of the objective structure. This means, that in rapidly changing societies,
habitus changes constantly, continuously, but within the limits inherent in
its originary structure, that is within certain bounds of continuity
(wholesale conversions are very exceptional and, in most cases,
provisional, as one can see with the example of the students of bourgeois
origin who made, around 1968, radical conversions to radical politics
which, for most of them, did not last long – many of these ‘radicals’ were
among the inventors of neo-liberal conservatism). I could take as an
example of such tensions between objective structures and habitus, the
dialectical confrontation between habitus and the place that one inhabits in
geographic space, and correlatively, through housing and living conditions,
in social space (I take the liberty of inviting those of you who are interested
in the dispositional bases and socio-economic conditions of housing in
Algeria and in France to look at my books Algeria 60 and Social Structures
of the Economy).
In other words, habitus must not be considered in isolation. Rather,
it must be used in relation to the notion of field which contains a principle
of dynamics by itself as well as in relation to habitus. This would require a
long demonstration. A few indications will suffice: first, as a space of
forces or determinations, every field is inhabited by tensions and
contradictions which are at the origin (basis) of conflicts; this means that it
is simultaneously a field of struggles or competitions which generate
change. In such fields, and in the struggles which take place in them, every
agent acts according to his position (that is, according to the capital he or
she possesses) and his habitus, related to his personal history. His actions,
words, feelings, deeds, works, and so on, stem from the confrontation
between dispositions and positions, which are more often than not mutually
adjusted, but may be at odds, discrepant, divergent, even in some sense
contradictory. In such cases, as one can observe in history, innovations may
appear, when people en porte-à-faux, misfits, who are put into question by
structures (operating through the positions) are able to challenge the
structure, sometimes to the point of remaking it. It means that it is possible
to understand and explain the most extraordinary intellectual or artistic
revolutions on condition that one takes into account (and accounts for) both
the subversive habitus of the revolutionary agent – as I tried to do with
Beethoven in music, Flaubert in literature, Manet in painting or even
Heidegger in philosophy – and the field to which they were confronted, and
the relation, the tension, the dynamic friction, between them.
48 Habitus: A Sense of Place

I should develop this at length, but I want to come back to what

seems to me the main epistemic function of the concept of habitus. I want
to analyse briefly the case of artistic practice, especially painting or poetry
(leaving aside architecture which is in some respects a very intellectual or
intellectualist art, but which can anyway be understood according to the
schema I propose to describe literature). The tradition of aesthetics is
interested in the work of art as such, as opus operatum, work already done,
finished, that it comments to great lengths (observing how such artwork is
constructed, its composition, the equilibrium of colours, etc.). It does not
analyse as such the ‘work in progress’, as James Joyce said, and the mode
of production of that work, that is the modus operandi, the manner of
acting, the art in the etymological sense, that the artist brings into play,
‘met en œuvre’, as we say in French, that is literally, brings into work. This
art, this manner of doing, this modus operandi, this style, is his habitus, his
métier, his craftsmanship, that is, a practical mastery without theory,
without theoretical mastery of practical mastery. The notion of habitus, and
the idea of practical mastery, practical logic, and so on, necessitate and
effect a radical break with the scholastic bias that threatens most of the
analysts of art, as teachers, that is lectores, scholars (as analysed in my
book Pascalian Meditations). The scholastic bias is the tendency, very
common among scholars, to put a scholastic mind, a scholar’s mind into
everyone’s head – for instance to treat an artist like Manet or Flaubert, or
any common person, including the scholar himself when he or she acts in
everyday life, as a rational agent, an homo calculans. The most
accomplished example of this illusion is homo oeconomicus, an academic
man (of academic situations only) put into the head of any economic agent.
If it is so difficult to impose this dispositional theory of action, it is
in my view because we have incorporated (as a part of our habitus of
cultivated persons) a scholastic principle of vision and division, a
scholastic unconscious in which we find a prefabricated series of
oppositions, mind vs. body, subject vs. object, ego vs. alter ego, reflection
vs. action, reason vs. emotion, etc., which prevents us from understanding
practice and the logic of practice, that is, for example, the practical
reflection which is very practically, and invisibly, involved in the countless
minute choices, perfectly improvised and perfectly necessary, that one is
able to operate instantaneously at every moment of life and whose achieved
product one discovers, at the end, almost like a spectator. This logic is in
one sense very simple, but in another sense very difficult to express,
because one has to be a professional of reflection (that is, a scholar socially
inclined to scholastic bias as well as distanced from the practical
experience of practice, such as artistic practice) to produce a reflection on
 Habitus 49

the limits of the scholastic mode of thinking, of the scholastic habitus and
to make explicit the practical reflexivity which is traditionally ignored (and
despised) by theoretical reflection (in part, because, especially in artistic
domain, there is a quasi-mystical and mystifying exaltation of ‘creation’
which obscures yet even more the logic of artistic practice). As I tried to
show in my book Pascalian Meditations, a genuine reflection able to go
beyond the limits of the scholastic illusion, the true Maïa veil of the ancient
Buddhist tradition, will discover that most of the objects of the
philosophical tradition exist as such only by an effect of scholastic
reflection – e.g., the lived body (Leib or corps propre) is not, in ordinary
experience, an object for us, but an integral part of the perceiving subject;
likewise other humans are not objects but alter egos.
So, to answer the question sincerely, and in a manner that I hope
will not appear too arrogant, I hold that the concept of habitus is a very
useful tool, indeed an indispensable instrument for social analysis. But to
realise this, one must first rid it of all the misinterpretations it has received,
and use it carefully, with theoretical rigour or, better yet, with a practical
mastery of its properties – for sociology, too, is an art …

References

Bourdieu, P. (1979) Algeria 1960, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, (Algérie 60,
Paris, Minuit, 1977).
Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: a social critique of the judgement of time, Cambridge,
Mass, Harvard University Press. (La Distinction, Minuit, Paris, 1979).
Bourdieu, P. (2000) Pascalian Meditations, Cambridge, Polity Press, (Méditation
pascaliennes, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, collection Liber, 1997).
Bourdieu, P. (2001) Masculine Domination, Cambridge, Polity Press, (La Domination
Masculine, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, collection Liber, 1998).
Bourdieu, P. (2001) Social Structures of the Economy, forthcoming, (Les Structures Sociales
de l’Économie, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, collection Liber, 2000).
Bourdieu, P. and Wacquant, L. (1992) An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, Cambridge,
Polity Press.