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Habitus, Psychology, and Ethnography : Introduction to the Special Section Henderikus J. Stam Theory Psychology 2009 19: 707 DOI: 10.1177/0959354309350542 The online version of this article can be found at: http://tap.sagepub.com/content/19/6/707

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SPECIAL SECTION

Habitus, Psychology, and Ethnography Introduction to the Special Section Henderikus J. Stam UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY ABSTRACT. Habitus has become a conceptual anchor in work on the social study of the body in a range of disciplines, but also more generally in psychology proper. Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus is one of a “structuring structure” or “system of dispositions” that generates practices by ensuring the presence of the past in experience. The papers in this section discuss issues arising from this notion, particularly its relevance to psychology, the problem of reductionism, and the possibility of freedom, as well as the methodological implications of Wacquant’s work for models of ethnography. KEY WORDS: Bourdieu, ethnography, habitus, practice, Wacquant

In recent years the term “habitus” has been making a routine appearance in various articles published in Theory & Psychology (for a brief sampling, see Adenzato & Garbarini, 2006; Baerveldt & Voestermans, 2005; Brinkmann, 2008; Daniels, 2006; Tucker, 2006). Given its provenance in the work of Pierre Bourdieu, the term has gradually found its way into numerous discussions that range across the abilities, capacities, and understanding of the body to perform, act, enact, and feel the activities in which it engages. In his book The Logic of Practice, Bourdieu (1980/1990) cast the concept as one that attempted to transcend the objectivism–subjectivism dichotomy, The theory of practice as practice insists, contrary to positivist materialism, that the objects of knowledge are constructed, not passively recorded, and contrary to intellectualist idealism, that the principle of this construction is the system of structured, structuring dispositions, the habitus, which is constituted in practice and is always oriented to practical functions. (p. 52)

Bourdieu continued to use this frame throughout his life, although not without critique, for it was not only misunderstood but also viewed with THEORY & PSYCHOLOGY VOL. 19 (6): 707–711 © The Author(s), 2009. Reprints and permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0959354309350542 http://tap.sagepub.com


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suspicion as a way of overestimating similarities between people (e.g., Verdaasdonk, 2003) or of introducing a new structuralism. Nonetheless, it has become a relevant feature of work on the body across the gamut of disciplines contributing to the social study of the body. Bourdieu himself elaborated the concept, and in one of his last books (Bourdieu, 2002/2007) he continues this tradition of searching for a sociological account of practice by means of an analysis of the habitus, in this case the habitus of the peasants of rural France. Contemporary appropriations of the concept have expanded, and one might argue diluted, the original import of the term. Applied widely from the “habitus of hygiene,” the “erotic habitus,” “the military habitus,” to the “dot-com habitus,” contemporary usage has ensured that it has lost some of its theoretical force if not analytic usefulness. Not that such cases aren’t useful as descriptions, but they are often a long way from the original import of the term proposed by Bourdieu. For him, “as an acquired system of generative schemes, the habitus makes possible the free production of all the thoughts, perceptions and actions inherent in the particular conditions of its production” (Bourdieu, 1980/1990, p. 55). One implication of the habitus is its inherent sociality: as Bourdieu argued, “to speak of habitus is to assert that the individual, and even the personal, the subjective, is social, collective. Habitus is a socialized subjectivity” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 126). Elsewhere Bourdieu likens the habitus to that which is characterized in other words as a “transcendental conscience” or a body that “has incorporated the immanent structures of a world” or at least of a sector of that world, and that in turn structures perception and action (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 81). One of the most important contemporary theorists in this tradition is Loïc Wacquant, whose recent work on the comparative structure and experience of urban marginality in the United States and Western Europe (Wacquant, 2008), was rooted in his own investigations on boxing (Wacquant, 2004). In his reflections on the life of an ethnographer-cum-boxer, Wacquant (2009a) notes the multiple ways in which his work on habitus was informed by the practice of boxing or developing a “pugilistic habitus.” The relationship between his sociology and his ethnography is further developed in his various writings on the subject; in short, it “offers an empirical and methodological radicalization of Bourdieu’s theory of habitus” (Wacquant, 2009b, p. 143). The antimonies at work in the pugilistic habitus, argues Wacquant, are, first, the fact that boxing is the complex management of a set of skills of the body in time that is transmitted through a largely implicit pedagogy and, second, that it remains a highly individual sport whose apprenticeship is nonetheless collective (Wacquant, 2004, p. 16). Habitus is crucial to the analysis because the pugilistic habitus is acquired, operates underneath (or perhaps above) the level of consciousness and discourse, depends on a social location, and, finally, is transmitted through a set of pedagogical practices (Wacquant, 2009b).


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This special section was the outcome of a conversation following Loïc Wacquant’s recent invited address presented at the American Psychological Association meetings and our discussion of the relevance of the question of habitus for psychology. Loïc Wacquant assisted in recruiting the authors of the articles that make up this special section and we expect to publish a more fulsome paper by him on the topic in the near future. We are grateful for his suggestions and for his contributions to the appearance of the articles that follow. In various ways they engage, develop, and critique a number of important features of his work and, directly or indirectly, the work of Pierre Bourdieu. In the first article, Omar Lizardo (2009) poses the traditional problematic of practice as one of creating an account that requires some form of socialization theory if it is to appreciate how practices come to be transmitted from one person to another. A practice has a lack of explicitness and the tacit availability and malleability of practices make a theory of practice a difficult project. Lizardo rightly notes the problems inherent in the functionalist orientations of 20th-century sociology for a theory of practice. In order to make a theory of practice work it has to address the social and psychological, material and ideal, bodily and mental. For this Lizardo employs plausible neuropsychological mechanisms and then argues that the very kinds of analyses demonstrated by Wacquant can be furthered by using the appropriate neuroscientific findings. These, argues Lizardo, break down distinctions that are unhelpful such as that between action and perception. Mirror neurons are presumably key features of embodied simulation for they are central to understanding how merely seeing an act can also lead to its performance. Lizardo not only discusses the importance of this work for social theory but, in turn, argues that this analysis has implications for the neurosciences and psychology. Rituals of learning in “natural” environments have particular rhythms that may not transfer to artificial, laboratory environments. Taking an entirely different cue from Bourdieu’s work, Mathieu Hilgers (2009) argues that the theory of habitus as derived from Bourdieu and elaborated in Wacquant’s carnal sociology is not incompatible with a conception of freedom—contrary to a view prevalent among sociological and anthropological critics of Bourdieu. According to Hilgers, Bourdieu’s treatment of habitus implies three principles “(1) the production of an infinite number of behaviors from a limited number of principles, (2) permanent mutation, and (3) the intensive and extensive limits of sociological understanding” (p. 730). Like a Kantian Analogy of Experience, Bourdieu’s notion of habitus allows an understanding of the emergence of multiple practices from a limited set of principles. Furthermore, the habitus is made up of multiple layers, but freedom ultimately resides in one’s capacity to objectivize one’s own conditions. By this Hilgers means agents become subjects at the point where they identify and control their dispositions. This reflexive moment, argues Hilgers, allows for a certain degree of self-determination even if the categories of


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perception are themselves determined. There is an unconscious or barely conscious freedom that is prior to a true understanding of the social conditions that generate the conditions of life and there is a greater, conscious freedom that comes from knowing the constraints of one’s life. It is the latter that includes an awareness of one’s habitus and that allows for greater self-determination or self-control. Philip Manning (2009) provides a methodological reflection and places the work of Wacquant in the context of the American tradition of the Chicago school of ethnography. He views these as encompassing three phases. The first is the “consensus model,” associated with Herbert Blumer and the Chicago school of symbolic interactionism. It forms the foundation, argues Manning, of all later versions of ethnography in its emphasis on experience and meaning. However, members of a group may not ever totally grasp the full meaning of the activities in which they are engaged and the researcher must be able to spend enough time in the field to uncover complex meanings and methods of interpretation. The second tradition, the key representative of which is Goffman, Manning calls the “comparative model.” Manning claims that Goffman constructed a new genre of ethnographic research that was theoretically innovative and consisted of ethnographies of concepts, not just places. This led to Goffman’s well-known works on “total institutions” and those who inhabit such places, the mentally ill in the case of Asylums (1961). However, Manning argues that Goffman still took to interpreting the mental life of those who inhabit the institutions and sometimes imposed meanings upon that life. The third form of ethnography, according to Manning, is the transferential model, which he attributes to scholars such as Wacquant. In the latter’s Body and Soul the relationship between researchers and those studied becomes indistinguishable. Manning likens this to a version of transference, in the psychoanalytic sense, of a complete immersion. This kind of immersion is different from Goffman’s immersion in the world of the hospital. Goffman never entered the hospital world as a patient, but remained in the observer’s role, whereas Wacquant became an apprentice–boxer. Although Manning’s paper is largely focused on sociological traditions in general and Wacquant in particular, the issues are nonetheless relevant for the understanding of psychological research. Ethnographies do not distinguish psychological from sociological domains; indeed, their function is in part to blur the lines that are created in disciplinary enclaves. For the resurgent qualitative research traditions that are now forming in psychology these issues are both relevant and crucial for they turn on the degree and nature of investigators’ reflexive capacities to address life outside the laboratory as well as their positions in moral realms that often do not allow for the luxury of neutral or distanced observation, if such is even possible.


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Given the implications of these works, we invite responses to these papers and urge our readers to consider the implications of the notion of habitus and its expression in ethnographic research for psychology. References Adenzato, M., & Garbarini, F. (2006). The as if in cognitive science, neuroscience and anthropology. Theory & Psychology, 16, 747–759. Baerveldt, C., & Voestermans, P. (2005). Culture, emotion and the normative structure of reality. Theory & Psychology, 15, 449–473. Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice (R. Nice, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1980) Bourdieu, P. (1998). Practical reason: On the theory of action. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (2007). The bachelors’ ball: The crisis of peasant society in Bearn (R. Nice, Trans.). Cambridge, UK: Polity. (Original work published 2002) Bourdieu, P., & Wacquant, L. (1992). An invitation to reflexive sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brinkmann, S. (2008). Identity as self-interpretation. Theory & Psychology, 18, 404–422. Daniels, H. (2006). The “social” in post-Vygotskian theory. Theory & Psychology, 16, 37–49. Goffman, E. (1961). Asylums: Essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates. New York: Knopf Doubleday. Hilgers, M. (2009). Habitus, freedom, and reflexivity. Theory & Psychology, 19, 728–755. Lizardo, O. (2009). Is a “special psychology” of practice possible? From values and attitudes to embodied dispositions. Theory & Psychology, 19, 713–727. Manning, P. (2009). Three models of ethnographic research: Wacquant as risk-taker. Theory & Psychology, 19, 756–777. Tucker, I. (2006). Towards the multiple body. Theory & Psychology, 16, 433–440. Verdaasdonk, H. (2003). Valuation as rational decision-making: A critique of Bourdieu’s analysis of cultural value. Poetics, 31, 357–374. Wacquant, L. (2004). Body and soul: Notebooks of an apprentice boxer. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Wacquant, L. (2008). Urban outcasts: A comparative sociology of advanced marginality. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Wacquant, L. (2009a). The body, the ghetto and the penal state. Qualitative Sociology, 32, 101–129. Wacquant, L. (2009b). Habitus as topic and tool: Reflections on becoming a prizefighter. In A.J. Puddephatt, W. Shaffir, & S.W. Kleinknecht (Eds.), Ethnographies revisited: Constructing theory in the field (pp. 137–151). London: Routledge. HENDERIKUS J. STAM is Professor of Psychology at the University of Calgary and the founding and current Editor of Theory & Psychology. ADDRESS: Department of Psychology, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, T2N 1N4, Canada. [email: [email protected]]
