Habitus (sociology)

Habitus is a system of embodied dispositions, tendencies that organize the ways in which individuals perceive the social world around them and react to it. These dispositions are usually shared by people with similar background (in terms of social class, religion, nationality, ethnicity, education, profession etc.), as the habitus is acquired through mimesis and reflects the lived reality to which individuals are socialized, their individual experience and objective opportunities. Thus, the habitus represents the way group culture and personal history shape the body and the mind, and as a result, shape social action in the present.

Pierre Bourdieu suggested that the habitus consists of both the hexis (the tendency to hold and use one's body in a certain ways, such as posture and accent) and more abstract mental habits, schemes of perception, classification, appreciation, feeling, and action. These schemes are not mere habits: Bourdieu suggested they allow individuals to find new solutions to new situations without calculated deliberation, based on their gut feelings and intuitions, which Bourdieu believed were collective and socially shaped. These attitudes, mannerisms, tastes, moral intuitions and habits have influence on the individual's life chances, thus the habitus is both structured by an individuals' objective past position in the social structure; and structuring its future life path. Pierre Bourdieu argued that the reproduction of the social structure results from the habitus of individuals (Bourdieu, 1987).

The notion of habitus is extremely influential (with 400,000 Google Scholar publications using it), yet it also evoked criticism for its alleged determinism, as Bourdieu compared social actors to automata (while relying on Leibniz's theory of Monads).

The concept of habitus has been used as early as Aristotle but in contemporary usage was introduced by Marcel Mauss and later Maurice Merleau-Ponty. However, it was Pierre Bourdieu who turned it into a cornerstone of his sociology, and used it to solve the sociological problem of agency and structure: the habitus is shaped by structural position and generates action, thus when people act and demonstrate agency they simultaneously reflect and reproduce social structure. Bourdieu elaborated his theory of the habitus while borrowing ideas on cognitive and generative schemes from Noam Chomsky and Jean Piaget dependency on history and human memory. For instance, a certain behaviour or belief becomes part of a society's structure when the original purpose of that behaviour or belief can no longer be recalled and becomes socialized into individuals of that culture.

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