File spoon-archives/bourdieu.archive/bourdieu_2002/bourdieu.0205, message 1


Date: Wed, 1 May 2002 00:23:37 -0400 (EDT)
From: ziggy-AT-princeton.edu (Sigmund Rivkin-Fish (ziggy-AT-Princeton.EDU))
Subject: in defense of habitus


Dear Bob

Maybe you should read Bourdieu before commenting on his work...?

1) What do you mean by "pomo jargon"? There are few contemporary social
theorists more hostile to "pomo" than Bourdieu. He ranted and railed
against scholars who would construct theories out of their armchairs and
insisted that theory must be build up from pain-staking empirical work. He
also insisted that the constructs that derived from such an empirical
enterprise triangulate local representations, actual practices, and the
scholar's intellectual "toolkit" so that they be as objective as possible.
To push objectivity even further, Bourdieu insisted that the scholar's own
social position be critically examined, so unintentional bias will not
creep in. And this is of course his departure from positivists: he is not
attacking objectivism, but false objectivism that relies on methods that
automatically transform practices into "data" that magically fit the
preconceived structures and constructs that the scholars usually work with
(and are sometimes reflections of their own experiences and class
position).

2) I am perplexed!!?? Surely anybody who has read even a short article of
Bourdieu would recognize that his contributions far exceed the concept of
habitus (his notion of field, very different from other "field theorists",
his notions of cultural capital, and symbolic capital, his revolutionary
model of how social class can be reproduced through the socializations of
tastes and behaviors, his reintroduction of time into social relations (see
his discussion of exchange and marital strategies in Outline of a Theory of
Practice and you get a sense of the enormous challenge to Levi-Strauss and
exchange theories his model offered. His explanation of first-cousin
marriage strategies is brilliant). And I could go on and on....

3) As for the actual concept of habitus: There are legitimate
epistemological grounds for challenging the concept. However, challenging
his coinage of a new use (and no, it does not correspond to any concept
used by anyone before, Mead or no Mead) is what good social science is
about: uncovering social dynamics and giving names to them. Bourdieu would
have been happy to use a term that would be readily available, but at the
time none was forthcoming. Cognitive scientists have begun to use terms
such as schemas and scripts that begin to approach what B. had in mind, but
they are poor substitutes for what he had in mind. Habitus (to offer my
definition) are enduring cognitive structures that offer directions for how
to behave and what to expect in certain social situations. As general
'schemas' they are generative in the sense that unfamiliar situations can
still be made comprehensible by the use of such cognitive structures. My
suggestion is to read Outline, or Distinction to get a sense of how it
works. I personally believe that B. faced a problem going from the Kabylie
house and the Berber House structuralism to the much more multi-faceted and
complex reality in Distinction. While the notion of a habitus may work well
in a socially flat society (in a Simmelian sense of few unique intersecting
social circles). It begins to break down somewhat when people engage in
multiple roles and contexts each with its own social expectation ("do we
have more than one habitus?", "how do we know which to use?", "what are
their interrelations?"). These are legitimate questions, but it is actually
possible to address such questions within B. own theoretical framework (by
elaborating the notion of intersecting fields and their relative autonomies
which B. did write about, and also strengthening the ethnomethodological
and Goffmanian aspects of B. theory of language and strategy (unfortunately
underdeveloped by B. himself)). And of course you are welcome to contribute
to this debate by carefully demonstrating the problems with B.'s notion of
habitus and what a better alternative would be to understand (class-)
conditioned social expectations and values at the cognitive level. But you
may want to read B. first.

Respectfully yours,

Ziggy Rivkin-Fish




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