sociology Sociology is a social science that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. It uses various methods of empirical investigation an ...

, habitus () is the way that people perceive and respond to the social world they inhabit, by way of their personal

habit A habit (or wont as a humorous and formal term) is a routine of behavior that is repeated regularly and tends to occur subconsciously.

s, skills, and dispositions. People with a common cultural background (social class, religion, and nationality, ethnic group, education, and profession) share an habitus as the way that group culture and personal history shape the body and the mind of a person; consequently, the habitus of a person influences and shapes the

social action In sociology, social action, also known as Weberian social action, is an act which takes into account the actions and reactions of individuals (or ' agents'). According to Max Weber, "Action is 'social' insofar as its subjective meaning takes ...

s of the person. The sociologist

Pierre Bourdieu Pierre Bourdieu (; 1 August 1930 – 23 January 2002) was a French sociologist and public intellectual. Bourdieu's contributions to the sociology of education, the theory of sociology, and sociology of aesthetics have achieved wide influence ...

said that the ''habitus'' consists of both the ''

hexis Hexis ( grc, ἕξις) is a relatively stable arrangement or disposition, for example a person's health or knowledge or character. It is an Ancient Greek word, important in the philosophy of Aristotle, and because of this it has become a traditio ...

'', a person's carriage (

posture Posture or posturing may refer to: Medicine * Human position ** Abnormal posturing, in neurotrauma ** Spinal posture ** List of human positions * Posturography Posturography is the technique used to quantify postural control in upright stance in ...

) and speech ( accent), and the mental habits of perception and classification, of appreciation, feeling, and action. The habitus allows the individual person to figure out and resolve problems based upon

gut feeling Feelings are Subjectivity, subjective self-contained phenomenal experiences. According to the ''APA Dictionary of Psychology'', a feeling is "a self-contained phenomenal experience"; and feelings are "subjective, evaluative, and independent of t ...

and

intuition Intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge without recourse to conscious reasoning. Different fields use the word "intuition" in very different ways, including but not limited to: direct access to unconscious knowledge; unconscious cognition; ...

. That way of being (social attitudes, mannerisms, tastes, morality, etc.) influences the availability of opportunities in life; thus the habitus is structured by the person's social class, but also gives structure to the future paths available to the person. Therefore, the reproduction of social structures results from the habitus of the individual persons who compose the given social structure. Moreover, the habitus is criticised for being deterministic concept, because, as ''social actors'', people behave as ''automata'', in the sense proposed in the

Monadology The ''Monadology'' (french: La Monadologie, 1714) is one of Gottfried Leibniz's best known works of his later philosophy. It is a short text which presents, in some 90 paragraphs, a metaphysics of simple substances, or '' monads''. Text Dur ...

of the philosopher G.W. Leibniz.

Origins

The concept of habitus has been used as early as

Aristotle Aristotle (; grc-gre, Ἀριστοτέλης ''Aristotélēs'', ; 384–322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Peripatetic school of ph ...

but in contemporary usage was introduced by

Marcel Mauss Marcel Mauss (; 10 May 1872 – 10 February 1950) was a French sociologist and anthropologist known as the "father of French ethnology". The nephew of Émile Durkheim, Mauss, in his academic work, crossed the boundaries between sociology and ...

and later

Maurice Merleau-Ponty Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty. (; 14 March 1908 – 3 May 1961) was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. The constitution of meaning in human experience was his main interest an ...

. However, it was

who turned it into a cornerstone of his sociology, and used it to address 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 Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky i ...

and

Jean Piaget Jean William Fritz Piaget (, , ; 9 August 1896 – 16 September 1980) was a Swiss psychologist known for his work on child development. Piaget's theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called "genetic epistemolo ...

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.

Loïc Wacquant Loïc J. D. Wacquant (; born 1960) is a sociologist and social anthropologist, specializing in urban sociology, urban poverty, racial inequality, the body, social theory and ethnography. Wacquant is a Professor of Sociology and Researc ...

wrote that habitus is an old philosophical notion, originating in the thought of

, whose notion of ''

'' ("state") was translated into ''habitus'' by the Medieval

Scholastics Scholasticism was a medieval school of philosophy that employed a critical organic method of philosophical analysis predicated upon the Aristotelian 10 Categories. Christian scholasticism emerged within the monastic schools that translate ...

. Bourdieu first adapted the term in his 1967 postface to

Erwin Panofsky Erwin Panofsky (March 30, 1892 in Hannover – March 14, 1968 in Princeton, New Jersey) was a German-Jewish art historian, whose academic career was pursued mostly in the U.S. after the rise of the Nazi regime. Panofsky's work represents a high ...

's ''Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism''. The term was earlier used in sociology by

Norbert Elias Norbert Elias (; 22 June 1897 – 1 August 1990) was a German sociologist who later became a British citizen. He is especially famous for his theory of civilizing/decivilizing processes. Biography Elias was born on 22 June 1897 in Bresla ...

in ''

The Civilizing Process ''The Civilizing Process'' is a book by German sociologist Norbert Elias. It is an influential work in sociology and Elias' most important work. It was first published in Basel, Switzerland in two volumes in 1939 in German as ''Über den Prozeß ...

'' (1939) and in

's account of "body techniques" (). The concept is also present in the work of Max Weber, Gilles Deleuze, and

Edmund Husserl , thesis1_title = Beiträge zur Variationsrechnung (Contributions to the Calculus of Variations) , thesis1_url = https://fedora.phaidra.univie.ac.at/fedora/get/o:58535/bdef:Book/view , thesis1_year = 1883 , thesis2_title ...

. Mauss defined habitus as those aspects of culture that are anchored in the body or daily practices of individuals, groups, societies, and nations. It includes the totality of learned

habits A habit (or wont as a humorous and formal term) is a routine of behavior that is repeated regularly and tends to occur subconsciously.

, bodily skills, styles, tastes, and other non-discursive knowledges that might be said to "go without saying" for a specific group (Bourdieu 1990:66-67)—in that way it can be said to operate beneath the level of rational ideology. According to Bourdieu, habitus is composed of:

Non-sociological uses

Literary criticism

The term has also been adopted in literary criticism, adapting from Bourdieu's usage of the term. For example, Joe Moran's examination of authorial identities in ''Star Authors: Literary Celebrity in America'' uses the term in discussion of how authors develop a habitus formed around their own celebrity and status as authors, which manifests in their writing.

Use in literary theory

Bourdieu's principle of habitus is interwoven with the concept of structuralism in literary theory. Peter Barry explains, "in the structuralist approach to literature there is a constant movement away from interpretation of the individual literary work and a parallel drive towards understanding the larger structures which contain them" (2009, p. 39). There is therefore a strong desire to understand the larger influencing factors which makes an individual literary work. As Bourdieu explains, habitus "are structured structures, generative principles of distinct and distinctive practices – what the worker eats, and especially the way he eats it, the sport he practices and the way he practices it, his political opinions and the way he expresses them are systematically different from the industrial proprietor's corresponding activities / habitus are also structuring structures, different classifying schemes classification principles, different principles of vision and division, different tastes. Habitus make different differences; they implement distinctions between what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is wrong, between what is distinguished and what is vulgar, and so on, but they are not the same. Thus, for instance, the same behaviour or even the same good can appear distinguished to one person, pretentious to someone else, and cheap or showy to yet another" (Bourdieu, 1996). As a result, habitus may be employed in literary theory in order to understand those larger, external structures which influence individual theories and works of literature.

Body habitus

Body habitus (or "bodily habitus") is the medical term for physique, and is categorized as either endomorphic (relatively short and stout), ectomorphic (relatively long and thin) or mesomorphic (muscular proportions). In this sense, habitus has in the past been interpreted as the physical and constitutional characteristics of an individual, especially as related to the tendency to develop a certain disease. For example, "

Marfanoid Marfanoid (or Marfanoid habitus) is a constellation of symptoms resembling those of Marfan syndrome, including long limbs, with an arm span that is at least 1.03 of the height of the individual, and a crowded oral maxilla, sometimes with a high a ...

bodily habitus".

Scholars researching habitus

– a sociologist and ethnographer who studied the construction of the "pugilistic habitus" in a boxing gym of the black ghetto of Chicago in ''Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer'' (2004) and in "Habitus as Topic and Tool" (2009). * Bernard Lahire – a French sociologist who suggested that the habitus is not (or no longer) a system shared by a class, but rather an eclectic set of dispositions that are often contradictory, due to non-typical socialization paths in late modernity. * Gabriel Ignatow explored how the notion of habitus can contribute to the

sociology of morality Sociology of morality is the branch of sociology that deals with the sociological investigation of the nature, causes, and consequences of people's ideas about morality. Sociologists of morality ask questions on why particular groups of people hav ...

. *

Philippe Bourgois Philippe Bourgois (born 1956) is professor of anthropology and director of the Center for Social Medicine and Humanities in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles. He was the founding chair of the Department of ...

– an anthropologist who incorporates the concept of "habitus" into much of his work with injection drug users in the San Francisco Bay Area. * Saba Mahmood – an anthropologist who suggested that the habitus can be shaped and transformed not only through unconscious mimesis but also through pedagogic process, whole reverting from Bourdieu's account to that of Aristotle. * Stephen Parkin – a sociologist who considers the "habitus" construct as an explanatory mechanism for the production of drug related harm in drug using environments located in public settings in "Habitus and Drug Using Environments: Health Place and Lived-Experience" (published by Ashgate in August 2013). * Heinrich Wilhelm Schäfer �
Center for the interdisciplinary research on religion and society (CIRRuS)
at Bielefeld University (Germany) * Ori Schwarz – a sociologist who studied the "sonic habitus", schemes that organize the production of sounds, their classification (e.g. as "noise") and the reaction to them. * Loren Ludwig, US – a musicologist researching the way tha
instrumental chamber music allows for the cultivation and experience of habitus by its players
*

– In The Civilizing Process, Elias illustrates how the habitus is determined on our culturally accepted manners. His theory is also extended to a 'national habitus' of Germans, used to justify the Holocaust. * Dov Cohen and Hans IJzerman, who studied the habitus in social psychology, examining ho
Latinos and Anglos embody honor differently
* Victor J. Friedman and Israel J. Syke
likens
the idea of habitus to the idea of theory-in-action developed by Chris Aryris and

Donald Schön Donald Alan Schön (September 19, 1930 – September 13, 1997) was an American philosopher and professor in urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He developed the concept of reflective practice and contributed to the theory ...

. * William Cockerham, American

medical sociologist Medicine is the science and practice of caring for a patient, managing the diagnosis, prognosis, prevention, treatment, palliation of their injury or disease, and promoting their health. Medicine encompasses a variety of health care practices ...

, uses Bourdieu's habitus as a basis for his health lifestyle theory.