In the 17th century the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz asks us to ‘imagine two clocks or watches in perfect agreement as to the time. This may occur in one of three ways. The first consists in mutual influence; the second is to appoint a skilful workman to correct them and synchronize them at all times; the third is to construct these clocks with such art and precision that one can be assured of their subsequent agreement’.

How is it that we co-ordinate our activities as humans like clocks? Our language, our humour, our culture, our expectations; in many ways they come together so that we can interact.

For the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, born in 1930 and died in 2002, Leibniz was onto something.

Bourdieu’s lifelong concern was how we interact sociologically; what glues society together.

He was particularly interested in how we’re both free and constrained by the rules of society; how those two phenomena interact.

What determines our tastes, for example, or our sense of humour, and where’s the space for freedom, in choosing our own path.

He wants to think about how theory and the objective facts about society that affect us all, in practice; how we live that theory and embody those objective facts in our own subjective ways – interact.

The result is an influential mix of sociology and philosophy that’s had an impact across many disciplines.

His key concepts are habitus, field, and cultural capital, and while it’s important to understand how all three fit together, the key to understanding them all and the focus here will be the habitus.

The philosophical context of the second half of the 20th century is important for understanding Bourdieu.

Structuralists like Claude Levi-Strauss argued that there were universal, rigid rules to all societies that provided the foundation of all social life, while postmodernists and existentialists emphasised individual, subjective outlooks that could never be pinned down.

Bourdieu called this the ‘absurd opposition between individual and society’.

Both perspectives, he thought, were necessary and in some way worked together.

His answer to how is the habitus.

Bourdieu writes, ‘all of my thinking started from this point: how can behaviour be regulated without being the product of obedience to rules?’.

The habitus explains how our likelihood to act in a certain way is dependent on how we expect others to respond. How the social world becomes objectified into a range of probabilities and expectations that make us more likely to choose certain actions rather than others.

The habitus organises us, it’s a ‘predisposition, tendency, propensity, or inclination’.

We know that society is ordered in a certain way and that our own position in that society presupposes a range of options, some of which we might be likely to achieve, others not. Qualifications, universities, career paths, etiquette, different regions, subcultures, musical genres; they all have different ways of doing things, different styles.

There are rules of the game that aren’t necessarily written. Life is about getting a ‘feel for the game,’ Bourdieu writes. There is a way in which social life is ‘collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor’.

‘Should one talk of a rule? Yes and no. You can do so on condition that you distinguish clearly between rule and regularity. The social game is regulated, it is the locus of certain regularities’.

In this way objective social life presents itself as a kind of pattern that becomes encoded in how we act, how we build our buildings, what we show on television.

The habitus is the underlying structure of social life that becomes ingrained into how we physically move or talk in the world. How we behave is conditioned by these objective possibilities.

Bourdieu calls this the ‘subjective expectations of objective probabilities’.

Objective meaning is, for example, the chance of getting a certain job or being able to buy a certain car. Subjective meaning is the behaviour we adopt in setting out to do so.

We respond, unconsciously most of the time, to the mathematical probabilities of the social world.

You know, for example, that if you’re not good at maths the probability of becoming an astronaut is slim, so this conditions your subjective decisions.

You might think you’re an incredible singer but live in a village in Siberia and so not pursue that particular talent.

The range of objective possibilities are what Bourdieu calls the field. The habitus is the way we enter it with the knowledge we have about ourselves.

Another word Bourdieu likes to use is strategies. Again, these are not necessarily conscious.

We create strategies depending on what we think the right balance is between, for example, likeliness of success, along with appropriate challenge. The habitus is the way these social likelihoods become codified within our heads, within our psychologies.

Different cultures, different classes, different careers have a different habitus. They determine what is reasonable and unreasonable action within their fields, which then guides or restrains personal thought and action.

We develop, consciously or unconsciously, different strategies for organising our future actions. Language, interests, fashion, ways of speaking, walking, our routines.

And a lot of this is transmitted from parent to child at an early age.

This all means that behaviour isn’t just rational. It’s conditioned by the possibilities that are presented to us. It’s determined. But this doesn’t mean we are only determined.

We adjust the habitus depending on the uniqueness of our position in the world. We can move location, change what we wear, learn new skills.

Our emotional response to certain situations might be conditioned by the habitus.

Where we live – our culture and social rules – privileges certain emotions or virtues over others. Stoicism or openness, for example, or maybe religious reverence. This is something I’ve talked about in my video on the social construction of emotions.

In this way the habitus shapes physiological responses – the release of chemicals in the brain, our muscles’ response to stress under certain conditions.

A certain emotional style might be more socially profitable in the army say – cold, stern, disciplined – than that of a theatre actor. The boardroom demands a different habitus to the beach. Boys are told not to cry.

For Bourdieu, the habitus is the result of history being codified into practice.

‘in each of us, in varying proportions, there is part of yesterday’s man; it is yesterday’s man who inevitably predominates in us, since the present amounts to little compared with the long past in the course of which we were formed and from which we result’.

So how is the concept useful?

Gareth Wiltshire and others have argued in a paper that Bourdieu’s theory can help us understand health inequalities at an early age. Overcoming the disparity in life expectancy and healthy lifestyles between the rich and the poor is usually framed as either structural – access to healthcare, finances, etc – or individual – encourage changes through intervention, advertising etc. This dualism is something Bourdieu wanted to overcome as we’ve seen.

Following Bourdieu, they look at how class differences are reified into physical habitual practices. Living in some areas it might be important to look strong, for example, while in others to look smart. Accepting or aligning oneself to the habitus brings cultural capital that might lead to gains in contacts, respect, etc.

Their research was conducted at different schools, interviewing different children with different socio-economic backgrounds in England.

Children towards the middle or upper class tended to be pushed towards Rugby because football wasn’t ‘posh enough for the school’, which some of the children complained about.

Kids from a working class background tended to talk disparagingly about sport in general, preferring activities like free running.

Each activity carries with it certain expectations about the people you will associate with and the social capital that will be acquired.

So what’s the difference between habitus and habit?

Bourdieu writes that, ‘One of the reasons for the use of the term habitus is the wish to set aside the common conception of habit as a mechanical assembly or preformed programme’.

The habitus is more flexible and precedes the physicality of the habit. Gambling might be a habit, an urge, but the habitus is the social and economic conditions that structure the games, the locations, and the likeliness of a person gambling.

And habitus doesn’t refer just to the instinct of habit. Rather than just the physical, the way we think, rationalise, strategise about a situation – where we should build the casino, for example – is dependent on the habitus. We can see how similar habiti affect both the gambler and the bookmaker.

Some have argued that the concept of the habitus can be, and is, overused, and, because of its wide applicability, can become ambiguous and lose its usefulness.

But I think it’s most useful when we use the concept to think about what might be arbitrary in the way we act, when we might be acting that way for the sake of other people, in a way that is limiting for ourselves, and others.

Sources

Ed by. Michael Grenfell, Pierre Bourdieu: Key Concepts

Richard Jenkins, Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice

Gareth Wiltshire, Jessica Lee and Oli Williams, Understanding the reproduction of health inequalities: physical activity, social class and Bourdieu’s habitus

Nick Corssley, Habit and Habitus

The Partially Examined Life, Episode 137: Bourdieu on the Tastes of Social Classes