File spoon-archives/bourdieu.archive/bourdieu_2000/bourdieu.0006, message 67


Date: Thu, 08 Jun 2000 22:38:04 +0200
From: Paola Ravaioli <paola.ravaioli-AT-jesi.nettuno.it>
Subject: Re: hexis


>So maybe you or somebody else could point out, why Bourdieu is using the
term "hexis" for the incorporation of dispositions, which could be observed
by the practices (social, symbolical,
>cultural) of a person.
>And how does the term bodily hexis fits in Bourdieus concept of the
habitus? Is bodily hexis the incorporation of the habitus and similar to
the "sense pratique"?
>

I would not identify the encompassing notion of practical knowledge with
the incorporation - or better, in-corporation - of dispositions in the
sense of bodily hexis. As I understand it, bodily hexis is *an aspect* of
the dispositons engendered by the habitus, is the principles of the habitus
made body. In this sense (vs when speaking of the incorporation of
objective structures in the habitus and so in practices) the word
incorporation should be used in its narrow and literal meaning, that is
in-corporation, em-bodyment, put in the body in its purely physical (and
not cognitive) aspect. Nothing seems more appropriate than to speak, in
this sense, of culture turned into nature, an expression which B usually
refers to the habitus as a whole. In short, if the habitus is, in B's
words, a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions, than bodily
hexis is *one of its products* in the form of the em-bodyment of objective
structures or material conditions of existence. But I confess I would not
be able to state the exact relationship between practices and hexis...

>So if  B means with "hexis" just  "the bodily or embodied state of being
", so why is he using the greek term? Does he have any philosophical
understanding and tradition in mind?
>

I don't know enough philosophy even to try to answer it, but somewhere
(maybe in *Responses*?) I have read B's own explanation of his use of this
Aristotelian term. Probably he has adopted it when he has begun to use the
word *habitus* as he uses it now and no longer as Mauss used it (that is in
the sense of bodily hexis). This is to say the he has adopted the concept
of bodily hexis from the very beginning of his theorizing, though he has
given it different names.

>And how does hexis relate to physical capital ?
>
>;-)
>

I'm afraid I don't understand your use of the concept of "capital", as when
I think of capital in B I always refer to the three main types, that is
economic, cultural and social (with these two sometimes referred to as
symbolic). But in a sense, in the analysis of Kabyle society B makes in
*Outline* - so, of a traditional and especially not a class society -
bodily hexis can be considered a sort of cultural capital em-bodyed, so, if
you like, it is possible to speak of "physical capital". It is not so, in
my opinion, in "La distinction", where the emphasis is less on bodily hexis
as a system of orientation and "appropriation of the world", as a
"symbolic-product-conserving technique", and more on its being a signum of
social distinction, so either a positive or a negative (a stigma, as in the
case of French peasants) mark.

Paola

Paola Ravaioli
Communication Student
University of Bologna
Italy

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