Structures, habitus and practices

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[edit] Highlights and Key Points

  • “The habitus produces practices which tend to reproduce the regularities immanent in the objective conditions of the production of their generative principle, adjusting to the demands inscribed as objective potentialities in the situation, as defined by the cognitive and motivating structures making up the habitus.”
  • These practices can only be accounted for by relating the objective structure defining the social conditions of the production of the habitus, which engendered them to the conditions in which the habitus is operating.
  • What has occurred previously dominates who we are.
  • We are products of the past (history).
  • The past is a part of our unconscious, which we are not aware of, but we are aware of the present because it has not yet moved to our unconscious.
  • We produce and reproduce objective meaning because we behave according to patterns and habits that we have not created nor have consciously mastered.
  • We behave not knowing exactly what we are doing and all of the meanings associated with the behavior.
  • The habitus then allows our practices to be reasonable and sensible and allows us to live in a world that makes sense with objectivity attained by agreement on the meaning of practices and the world.
  • The homogeneity of habitus causes practices and works to be immediately understandable and predictable, and thus taken for granted.
  • The practices and the members of the same group or class are more and better harmonized than the members know because they are in agreement.
  • Every member of a particular class does not have the same experiences in the same manner. However, it is more likely that members of the same class have been involved in similar situations.
  • We carry with us our present and past positions in the social structure

[edit] Overall idea

  • The “habitus results from history, produces individual and collective practices and hence history.” The system of dispositions we employ come from our past and move into the present and are perpetuated in the future in present practices

[edit] Questions

  • When are we more or less aware of what we are doing?
  • Are the class differences that Bordieu speaks about as distinct today?
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