File spoon-archives/bourdieu.archive/bourdieu_1996/96-01-02.102, message 4


From: Jeffrey David Feldman <jdf4e-AT-darwin.clas.Virginia.EDU>
Subject: Bourdieu's Standards
Date: Tue, 21 Nov 1995 19:05:00 -0500 (EST)


I am also new to this server, but will take a stab at the
question.

As I understand it, Distinction constitutes Bourdieu's position
on standards.  All forms of capital (cultural, educational or
otherwise symbolic, etc.) function within constraints roughly
contiguous with the notion of class.  The standard is not so
much recognized as incorporated, and by corporate I mean not
the contemporary business connotation, but the definition
offered by anthropology (from Maine) that a corporation is an
enduring group.  

Along these lines, on habitus Bourdieu suggests:

"Since the habitus, the virtue made of necessity, is a product
of the incorporation of objective necessity, it produces
strategies which, even if they are not produced by consciously
aiming at explicitly formulated goals on the basis of an
adequate knowledge of objective conditions, nor by the
mechanical determination excercised by causes, turn out to be
objectively adjusted to the situation." (In Other Words, p. 11)

So, what we have is an objectified set of dispositions.  I
think Roy Wagner's concept "obviation" (Symbols that Stand for
Themselves) is helpful here--particularly since Bourdieu over
uses the word objective so as to strip it of meaning.  Habitus
is a product of its own making.  That's the dialectical trick
we are supposed to pick out.  Yet, the actor does not have full
access to the set of dispositions, for to have such access
would imply that those set of dispositions had changed.  Again,
it's a dialiectical problem.    

I would have to say that habitus provides its own standards,
which are beyond the recognizable sphere of possibilities to
those whose social world is constituted by that set of
dispositions.  

In his own context, therefore, (Distinction is about France)
Bourdieu couches habitus within a class framework.  You must
find the framework--or standards--if you choose to introduce
habitus into a different context.  

Having considered this, the question then becomes:  does
habitus provide the tools to discover limiting factors other
than those offered by the discourse on class (both in the
materialist and symbolic sense)?  


-- 

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Sender:

		Jeffrey David Feldman
		Department of Anthropology 
		University of Virginia
		303 Brooks Hall 
		Charlottesville, VA  22903

tel:	(804) 977-8128 		email:	jdf4e-AT-Virginia.Edu


   

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