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Concept
Habitus (sociology)
Summary
In sociology, habitus (ˈhæbɪtəs) is the way that people perceive and respond to the social world they inhabit, by way of their personal habits, skills, and disposition of character.
People with a common cultural background (social class, religion, and nationality, ethnic group, education, and profession) share a habitus as the way that group culture and personal history shape the mind of a person; consequently, the habitus of a person influences and shapes the social actions of the person.
The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu said that the habitus consists of the hexis, a person's carriage (posture) and speech (accent), and the mental habits of perception, classification, appreciation, feeling and action. The habitus allows the individual person to consider and resolve problems based upon gut feeling and intuition. This way of living (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.
The habitus is criticised for being a deterministic concept, because, as social actors, people behave as automata, in the sense proposed in the Monadology of the philosopher G.W. Leibniz.
The concept of the habitus has been used as early as Aristotle. In contemporary usage it was introduced by Marcel Mauss and later Maurice Merleau-Ponty; however, it was Pierre Bourdieu who used it as a cornerstone of his sociology, and to address the sociological problem of agency and structure.
In Bourdieus's work 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 and Jean Piaget regarding dependency on history and human memory.
Official source
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