File spoon-archives/bourdieu.archive/bourdieu_1996/96-12-01.092, message 57


Date: Tue, 1 Oct 1996 10:40:43 -0400 (EDT)
From: George Free <aw570-AT-freenet.toronto.on.ca>
Subject: Re: Info Request: Geneology of "Habitus" -Reply


On Mon, 30 Sep 1996, Shawn Lindsay wrote:

> I have run accross "habitus" in German writings (Adorno is the only name 
> that springs to min), ,but the sense of the word is rather different from 
> Bourdieu's, who was clearly borrowing from Mauss.   Shawn.
> 
> On Fri, 13 Sep 1996 R.Kahn-AT-derby.ac.uk wrote:
> 
> > Genealogy of Habitus
> > 
> > One earlier use of Habitus is in Marel Mauss' essay on "Techniques of the
> > Body", I think he also says something about where he took "habitus" from.
> > 
> > 
	A good source on this is Bourdieu's "The Genesis of the Concepts 
of Habitus and of Field" _Sociocriticism_ Vol. 2, December 1985, p. 11-24.

	A quote:
	"I introduced this notion [of habitus], on the occasion of the
publication in French of two articles by Panofsky which up to that point
had never been looked at together; one on gothic architecture where the
word habitus was used as an <<indigenous>> concept, to explain the effect
of scholastic thinking in the area of architecture, the other article on
the abbot Suger, where one could also make it work. . . . By taking up the
old aristotelian notion of hexis, converted by scholasticim into habitus,
I wished to react against structuralism and its odd philosphy of action .
. . I did this by removing Panofsky from the neo-Kantian philosophy of
<<symbolic forms>>, in which he had remained imprisoned . . ."
		
	As well as in Mauss, Bourdieu indicates that the term has a very
long history. It can be found in Hegel and the German idealist tradition
generally as well as in the phenomenological philosophy of Heidegger and
Merleau-Ponty.
	I believe Max Weber used the term on occasion as did Karl 
Mannheim as I recently discovered. In Mannheim the term habitus is 
translated as "global outlook."

		regards,

		George Free		aw570-AT-torfree.net
		Toronto, Ontario
		Canada

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