Note-taking for Learning of Culture with Lisa Stulberg
This week’s reading was the second chapter of Pierre Bourdieu‘s Outline Of A Theory Of Practice, on Structures and the Habitus. Bourdieu writes the worst, most opaque prose of any social theorist. The second paragraph of this chapter includes the phrase “structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures.” Later: “the habitus, which at every moment structures in terms of the structuring experiences which produced it the structuring experiences which affect its structure…” Bourdieu. What are you doing. Why do you write like this.
Bourdieu wants to know how we internalize the external, and externalize the internal. We don’t just mechanically react to the external world, and nor are we totally free to do whatever we want, regardless of the situation. Instead, we’re guided by the habitus: “the durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisations” (78). The habitus is the embodiment of social capital, and it’s accumulated from social history. It’s those norms and practices we’re so used to that we’ve forgotten about them. By contrast, anything novel enough that we’re conscious of it hasn’t yet settled into the habitus.
The habitus guides our behavior via intentionless invention of regulated improvisation, like “a train bringing along its own rails” (79). (This is how it’s possible to make a joke that surprises yourself.) 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. Habitus is embodied: it doesn’t live in conscious awareness, but rather in reflexes and motor memory. It’s more like throwing a ball than doing differential equations. Like catching a ball, habitus is learned, but learning of habitus is social rather than individual. Totalitarians are concerned with seemingly trivial details of clothing and manners because they know that attitudes of the body are powerful mnemonic devices.
Agency is our capacity to act independently and make free choices. Structure is the menu of choices available to us. Our behavior simultaneously reflects and reproduces social structure. A behavior or belief becomes part of a society’s structure when no one can remember the original purpose of that behavior or belief, when it becomes automatic and implicit. Power is constantly re-legitimized through an interplay of agency and structure.
How does the habitus change? By one habitus bumping up against another one, for example when your existing habitus enters a new situation. For example, you bring your family habitus into school, which has its own habitus.
BTW, here’s an attempt to apply Bourdieu to musical improvisation. Does this help?
To help us make sense of Bourdieu, we also read Ann Swidler, Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies.
Anthropology leans too hard on the idea that culture is a set of plans or rules. It’s better to think of culture as a toolkit for improvising your way through unexpected situations.
In unsettled cultural periods, explicit ideologies directly govern action, but structural opportunities for action determine which among competing ideologies survive in the long run (273).
Swidler says that culture consists of “symbolic vehicles of meaning.” Some of those are formal beliefs, ritual practices, art forms, and ceremonies, and some are informal language, gossip, stories, and habits of daily life. She distinguishes between interests, which motivate our actions, and ideas, which define the destinations we’re trying to reach and our paths for reaching them.
Culture shapes action by defining what people want. What people want, however, is of little help in explaining their action (274).
Consider the much-debated “culture of poverty.” Lower-class people have the same aspirations as upper-class people: education, friendships, stable marriages, steady jobs, and high incomes. If there’s a culture of poverty, it’s not in poor people’s values; it’s in their social toolkits and habits. If you don’t have the skills to pursue a line of action, you look for another line where your cultural competencies are going to be more useful.
People will come to value ends for which their cultural equipment is well suited. To return to the culture of poverty example, a ghetto youth who can expertly “read” signs of friendship and loyalty, or who can recognize with practised acuity threats to turf or dignity, may pursue ends that place group loyalty above individual achievement, not because he disdains what individual achievement could bring, but because the cultural meanings and social skills necessary for playing that game well would require drastic and costly cultural retooling (277).
Culture is not rules. Cultural traditions only make sense if we see the ways they unfold and evolve over time.
People do not build lines of action from scratch, choosing actions one at a time as efficient means to given ends. Instead, they construct chains of action beginning with at least some pre-fabricated links. Culture influences action through the shape and organization of those links, not by determining the ends to which they are put (277).
So culture isn’t so much a set of rules that we agree to; it’s more like the unconscious association between one behavior and practice and another. We can’t understand culture by looking at people’s actions; we have to look at the links between their values and their predispositions to certain actions.