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 ********************************************************************** Contributions: bourdieu-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu Commands: majordomo-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu Requests: bourdieu-approval-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
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