Date: Tue, 07 Dec 1999 13:06:07 -0500
From: Ziggy Rivkin-Fish <ziggy-AT-princeton.edu>
Subject: Re: habitus


I believe Kent's and Debbie's questions are quite different. But they both 
point to some interesting questions around the notion of habitus.

1) Kent's question around automatic vs rational/cognitive actions: many 
respond that B "solves" the situation by denying the dichotomy between the 
two. Indeed habitus as a concept is an effort to avoid this dualism. But 
that is hardly a satisfying response. Recall that B was forced to develop 
the notions of Doxa, Orthodoxy, and Heterodoxy to account for when 
taken-for-granted notions of the social environment would be challenged, 
and thus the conditions for non-habitual actions to take place fulfilled. 
But B still does not adequately explain how we would go to an actual change 
of habitus based on reflective behavior. Although he suggests in his 
article on Masculine Domination that a collective consciousness-raising 
effort is needed: in other words forge an autonomous field within which a 
new habitus can be nurtured as a social project.

2) Debbie's question is excellent and, despite Kent's gripes, does point to 
postmodern sensibilities (she is not describing a simple conflict in role 
sets and definitions, but a complex situation in which different forms of 
habituated expectations and behaviors associated with different contexts 
collide and inform each other within the same context, a situation our 
classical and current sociologists have virtually nothing intelligent to 
say about). B's notion of habitus seems to escape the problematics of role 
theory in which roles perfectly match institutions (teacher in school, wife 
at home etc), because it isn't perfectly matched to institutions at all. 
Instead it is matched to fields, but that simply moves the problem to a 
different level. We still don't understand how people negotiate different 
habituated behaviors when they are associated with conflicting expectations 
(Woman and CEO for example).

In short, I have no solutions, only questions. However, it does seem to me 
that:
1) Habitus is not a thing, but a network of loosely connected networks of 
expectations and habituated behaviors. Any social situation provide lots of 
cues that "trigger" particular networks of the habitus as particularly 
salient. This formulation allows seemingly incongruent behaviors (from a 
role theoretical and institutional point of view) to take place, and also 
allows for creative uses of "less salient" aspects of habitus in response 
to various situational flows. Think of a male CEO making a sexual innuendo 
to a female senior manager during a business meeting:
Multiple reactions are possible, including ignoring the remark as not 
fitting the situation, challenging it for undermining her as manager, using 
a standard rejection strategy identified with more casual social 
interactions etc. The combinations are endless, but nevertheless will draw 
on some habitual logics, even if they are not strongly identified with the 
business meeting as a setting or business as a field.


2) Habitus's multiple networks are associated but not determined by 
different fields. However, social interaction never takes place in a field, 
but at most an interactional setting that is heavily associated (and 
reinforced) by field specific forces.
Again, the business meeting might be heavily determined by business logics 
of profit, investment, etc. As well as institutional props ranging from 
attire, furniture, codes of ethics, to language. But anyone who has been to 
any kind of meeting of any sort knows that they never "succeed" in 
filtering out "non-business" elements. Indeed, if they could succeed, real 
business would probably be impossible in the first place (But the illusion 
might serve its own functions though: to legitimate for example that gender 
discrimination does not occur, since it's strictly business).

I know this wasn't particularly straightforward, and I apologize in advance 
for my limited abilities to write clearly.

Ziggy Fish
Sociology, Princeton
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