Key Takeaways
- Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus describes the set of skills and social resources that govern how people engage with the world.
- Habitus is largely unconscious, and is experienced as a “feel for the game”
- Different habitus exists for people from different environments, and each habitus comes with its own set of knowledge and skills. This can lead to a perpetuation of inequality.
What is Habitus?
French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “habitus” explains how individuals self-regulate their own behavior to fit social expectations.
Think about how you go through your day: you do things like walk on the right side of the sidewalk or say “Bless you” when someone sneezes without really thinking much about it.
This is habitus: an internal sense of how to behave. Rather than a set of social rules that we feel we must adhere to, habitus is a set of skills and social resources that allow us to integrate with our particular communities.
Bourdieu would say that a shared sense of humor, taste, and disposition in a group of people with the same socioeconomic background is the result of their shared habitus.
Bourdieu was interested in how individual choice is maintained even within social structures that influence our behavior.
He said: “All of my thinking started from this point: how can behavior be regulated without being the product of obedience to rules?”
His concept of habitus explains this possibility and illustrates that socialized behavior does not simply amount to internalizing rigid rules about what to do in every situation.
Rather, habitus gives us a feel for what is beneficial and what is detrimental; for what kind of behavior is allowed. This feeling becomes engrained in who we are and how we interact with the world. As the name suggests, habitus is an embodiment of social habit.
How Habitus Works
To illustrate how this works, let’s think of habitus as something like a language. Everyone speaks one language or another, just as everyone has a habitus.
Language has rules: vocabulary and a grammatical structure that you must follow. However, when talking to a friend, you are coming up with novel sentences; you say new things to address new situations while still sticking to the grammatical rules.
This is how Bourdieu saw habitus functioning. One gains an internalized sense of what is acceptable and unacceptable, a sense that is mainly unconscious, similar to the grammar of a native language.
We exercise autonomy within the range of possible grammatical structures in our language, and we behave the same way within a habitus. In this way, habitus is more of a disposition than a determination.
Certain things would not occur to you to do because of your habitus, just as it would not occur to you to speak a sentence that completely ignores your language’s grammatical rules.
In this way, habitus governs behavior but allows for choice and creativity.
How Does One Obtain a Habitus?
Whatever your native language is, you likely picked up on most of the grammatical rules you follow simply from passively listening to the people around you converse.
Habitus works the same way: we pick up on our sense of what is right, wrong, and possible in our world through passive social osmosis.
We get a sense of what is permissible without anyone having to force us to follow articulated rules. Since we gain a habitus by internalizing what is happening around us, people from different environments internalize different habitus.
The skills and insights that come along with your particular habitus can sometimes be challenging to communicate to others since we obtain them in such a passive way.
For example, having a sense of why it would be uncool to wear a specific outfit to school can only be articulated with difficulty if another person were to ask us why we felt that way.
That is because sociocultural knowledge like this is something other than what we generally gain or exercise with conscious attention. We passively get a “feel for the game,” as Bourdieu would describe it.
Habitus is also the way in which we position ourselves in the social world and make decisions about what we may be capable of. As social beings, we get a sense that society has a particular structure and order.
We also have a sense of our position within that structure, and through internalization of the habitus, we make judgments on what options are available to us.
Habitus and Inequality
Bourdieu theorized that many different variations of habitus exist for people from different environments. Your economic class, race, gender, nationality, religion, and family background—all contribute to the habitus that you embody. Each habitus comes with its own set of knowledge and skills.
For example, someone from an elite background would obtain skills such as networking, negotiation, and refined communication. These would be essential for success in an affluent community.
However, if these people were to find themselves living in an impoverished community, they would not have the skills needed for survival there, such as the ability to navigate violent situations or improvise with limited resources. They would need to embody a new habitus.
It can be challenging to learn a new habitus. Continuing with the language metaphor, native speakers have an intuitive feel for when the grammar is off, but perhaps couldn’t quite explain why to someone else.
Someone trying to learn a new language doesn’t have that intuitive feel, and in fact, may never have an intuition about grammar akin to a native speaker’s, even if they can achieve a high fluency. So, while habitus is not fixed and permanent, it can be difficult to learn a new habitus or unlearn an old habitus.
This could make it quite arduous to move up the socioeconomic ladder. If you have a habitus fit for a low-income neighborhood, it will be more difficult to get a “feel for the game” of unfamiliar affluent neighborhoods.
For Bourdieu, one of the most important things that we internalize as part of the habitus is cultural capital. Cultural capital is social advantages—much like economic capital— that allow for ease of acquisition and maintenance of resources.
In the case of economic capital, it is generally well-accepted that if you had $100,000 dollars in a bank account, it would be easier for you to make $1,000,000 dollars than someone starting with no money at all.
For example, the person with $100,000 could invest that and make return profits or use that as starting capital for a business that could become successful.
Cultural capital works the same way. If you were born into a family where you learned proper table manners, where you were taught about fine art, and where family and friends were well-connected and influential people, it would be easier for you to get ahead economically.
If you know how to talk to well-connected people by getting a “feel for the game” by being around them for so long, it would be easier to get ahead.
For example, if two people both had $100,000 dollars and were trying to make $1,000,000, it would be much easier for a person with cultural capital, such as knowing who to talk to about investing or having some familiarity with the investing process.
Cultural capital like this (as part of the habitus) can be more difficult to point to as an advantage since it is internalized and invisible. Therefore, habitus can legitimize and perpetuate systems of inequality by blurring the lines between what is natural and what is learned in terms of skills.
For example, standardized tests such as the SAT are often viewed as an objective assessment of intelligence. However, tutoring and practice before the exam can boost scores.
Being able to pay for tutoring is an obvious advantage, but what about the cultural knowledge that the SAT is indeed something that should even be studied for? What about the cultural knowledge about how important the SAT is to college admissions?
These are more difficult to trace but are deeply consequential to how successful an applicant is in a round of college admissions.
This leads to a better college, a better job, and higher salaries. In this way, cultural capital, through habitus, maintains inequality. This was essential to the importance of habitus for Bourdieu.
References
Bourdieu, Pierre. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice (Vol. 16). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1977). Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. London: Sage
Bourdieu, P. (2011). The forms of capital. (1986). Cultural theory: An anthology, 1, 81-93.
Bourdieu, P. (2004). Structures and the habitus. Material culture: Critical concepts in the social sciences, 1(part 1), 116-77.
Gillespie, L. (2019, August 6). Pierre Bourdieu: Habitus. Critical Legal Thinking. Retrieved March 3, 2023, from https://criticallegalthinking.com/2019/08/06/pierre-bourdieu-habitus/
Lamaison, P. (n.d.). From rules to strategies: An interview with Pierre Bourdieu. Cultural Anthropology. Retrieved March 3, 2023, from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/can.1986.1.1.02a00060
Power, E. M. (2015, April 27). An introduction to Pierre Bourdieu’s key theoretical concepts. Taylor & Francis. Retrieved March 3, 2023, from
