Date: Sun, 3 Dec 1995 12:03:49 -0800
From: ambrozas-AT-sfu.ca (Diana Ambrozas)
Subject: Re: "BODY"/practice/social agents


Salut Yves,

I'm afraid i'm not familiar with Piaget's practical schemes.  Maybe you
could elaborate a little bit.  Also could you clarify the anthropological
conception of the subject?

>I think on the contrary that it [the equation: PRACTICE= FIELD + HABITUS] does
>add something important, for the
>concept of habitus is a way to reintroduce a subject defined in
>anthropological terms, whereas there is no subject in structuralism.
 

That practices vary with different fields doesn't satisfy me. With the aim
of trying to conceptualize social change, i would like to understand the
subject or social agency in terms of something not completely constrained
by habitus (or habituses if one conceives gender and ethnicity and age etc.
as compounding structures of constraint).  I've been accused of harbouring
out-dated, humanist notions of freedom before but i am not suggesting that
we can free ourselves of all  specific regional, class, gender, ethnic,
etc. biases. Rather  I would like to suggest that  we  can make choices
that are against the grain of the habitus.   In _Distinction_, Bourdieu
speaks of preferences as _amor fati_ or rationalized necessities and this
seems to deny agents not only the freedom to act but the freedom to desire
what they will.  At the same time, one finds that it is a very small
percentage of a given class fraction that prefers, for example, the sport
distinctive of that class fraction.  This may assume a notion of agency but
it is not one that Bourdieu is able to explain very well in my view.

>Habitus is not simple "habitude" that is reproduction, but a SCHEME to
>produce  practices (AND PERCEPTIONS OF PRACTICES) in the local context of a
>field, so that the practice depends on the structure of the field, and thus
>can vary.

I don't think habitus, on its own, can be a scheme. AT least not in the
english sense of scheme which has the subjective connotation of plans of
action.  B. defines the habitus transcendentally as the condition of
possibility for such schemes. I'm thinking of definitions like: "a system
of dispositions" (Distinction p. 6) or "principles of the generation and
structuring of practices and representations" ( Outline for a Theory of
Practice, p. 72).  And i still don't see anything subjective (in the
relatively strong sense I discuss above) here.
  

///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Diana Ambrozas                      
School of Communication, SFU         
Vancouver