[4] Habitus (Power)

• Pierre Bourdieu

  • Best known among sociologists of food and nutrition
  • “Distinction: A Social Critique of The Judgement of Taste”
  • Analyzed how taste is formed and reproduced in relation to class structure (France)
  • Theoretical & methodological approach  that seeks to overcome sociological dichotomies
• Habitus

  A way of…

  1. Explaining the  regularities of behavior associated with social structure (class, gender, ethnicity) without losing individual’s own agency → social structure is not deterministic
  2. Describing the embodiment of social structures and history of individuals
  3. Set of dispositions internal in individuals
  4. Both reflects external social structures and shapes how the individual perceives the world and acts in it
• Primary Habitus (Childhood)

  • Examples: Gender Identity
  • Most durable
  • Not only a product of structures and a producer of practices
  • It is also a reproducer of structures (generating practices related to those structures
• Practice

  • Practice involves more than just habitus
  • Conseptualizes action as the outcome of a relationship
  • Between habitus, capital, and field
• Field

  • Structured spaces
  • Organized around a particular types of capital
  • Has dominant and supodinate positions
  • Examples:
  • Field of Law
  • Field of Art
  • Field of Education
  • Intellectual Field
  • Field of Science
  • Field of Religion
  • Denote arenas of…
  • Production
  • Circulation
  • Appreciation of..
  • Goods, services, knowledge, or status
  • Competitive positions held by actors to monopolize
  • Cannot exist without capital
• Capital

  • Four Types

  1. Economic
  2. Most straightforward, associated with power
  3. Wealth
  4. Social
  5. From netwerks of relationships, especially institutionalized
  6. Network of connections
  7. Symbolic
  8. The form other types take when their arbitrariness in their nature is misrecognized
  9. Prestige
  10. Cultural
  11. Knowledge
  12. 3 Types:
  13. Embodied State → long-lasting dispositions of the mind and body
  14. Objective State → cultural goods
  15. Instritutionalized State → a form of objectification resulting in educational qualifications
• Bourdieu’s Model of Practice

  A 3-step approach

  An analysis of…

  1. The particular field in relation to a broader field of power
  2. The structure of objective relations between the different positions within the field
  3. The habitus (notably class habitus) agents bring to their positions and the social trajectory of those positions