A Concise Genealogy and Anatomy of Habitus

Chapter abstract The concept of habitus plays a central role in Bourdieu’s dispositional theory of action, itself part of his lifelong effort to develop a science of practice and a correlative critique of domination. Retracing the concept’s philosophical origins and its early uses by Bourdieu clears up four recurrent misunderstandings about the concept: first, habitus is never the replica of a single social structure, but a multilayered and dynamic set of schemata that records, stores, and prolongs the influence of diverse environments successively traversed during one’s existence; second, habitus is not necessarily coherent and unified, but displays varying degrees of integration and tension; third, habitus is no less suited to analyzing crisis and change than cohesion and perpetuation; fourth, habitus is not a self-sufficient mechanism for the generation of action—like a spring, it needs an external trigger—and cannot be considered in isolation from the social worlds in which it operates.