Habitus

Habitus

The concept of habitus is the link between the objective and the subjective components of class, that is, class as determined by largely economic factors, and class as a set of practices, dispositions and feelings. Habitus refers to the everyday, the situations, actions, practices and choices which tend to go with a particular walk of life and an individual"s position in the social world (this includes, e.g. gender and race as well as class). Habitus therefore, can be seen as including a set of dispositions, tendencies to do some things rather than others and to do them in particular ways rather than in other ways. Habitus does not, therefore determine our practices, but it does make it more likely that we will adopt certain practices rather than others. The link with objective class position comes through a consideration of how habitus is acquired. To suggest that it is learned implies a self-consciousness that is absent in Bourdieu"s conception. Here we need to draw on the concept of socialization to capture the way in which, although habitus is learned, this learning is acquired in an unselfconscious way simply by being immersed in a particular social milieu. The dispositions acquired through habitus are the ways of doing things that those sharing a particular social position think of as natural and obvious, common sense, and taken for granted. These dispositions do not prevent us from behaving in other ways, that is, they do not proscribe what we can...