File spoon-archives/bourdieu.archive/bourdieu_1996/96-01-02.102, message 12


Date: Wed, 22 Nov 1995 21:56:17 +1100 (EST)
From: Maude Frances <mfrances-AT-extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU>
Subject: Re: Habitus, Incorporation, and Technology




On Tue, 21 Nov 1995, Alan Liu wrote:

> it has come to me to ask why,
> given B's automatic or mechanistic understanding of habitus as an ontology
> without epistemology--a way of habitually and materially "being" void of
> cognition--he needs to ground habitus in the "organic" and its constant
> correlatives in his discourse, the "uniform" and "durable" (as in the
> thesis that external social factors become durable and uniform across 
> the habitus when imprinted internally in bodily practices)? 
> 

I'm not convinced that habitus is an ontology without epistemology ... 
Bourdieu (in the Concluding Remarks of Calhoun et. al. eds. Bourdieu: 
Critical Perspectives p. 273) uses the term  'historicist ontology' to 
refer to the relationship between habitus and field, in which habitus is 
'linked to the field in which it functions ... by an action of 
ontological complicity ... the action of the "practical sense" amounts to 
an immediate encounter of history with itself.' For Bourdieu the field is 
objectified history and habitus is embodied history - habitus needs to be 
understood in the context of a particular field: a field in which it was 
constituted and which it also is constitutive of ... a structured, 
structuring structure (see Outline. p.72)


Maude Frances
Anthropology
University of Sydney


   

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