Habitus and Beyond Standing On The Shoul

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Chapter 25
Habitus and Beyond

Standing on the Shoulders of
a Giant Looking at the Seams
Claudio E. Benzecry
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they
do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circum-
stances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. he tradi-
tion of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the
living.
—Karl Marx, he 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
Introduction
How do body and biography connect?1 How are our categories to express judgment
dependent on past experiences? How do we make sense of the contradictions between
our past and the potential our future holds? And how is it that our immediate environ-
ment frames our sensual immersion in the world? Moreover, what is the relationship
between the capacities our body supports and our biography? To answer all of these
questions, pointing at the connection between embodiment, cognition, processes of
singularization and temporalization, and the collective, Pierre Bourdieu coined the con-
cept of habitus. Aiming to observe the continuous practical capacities that we have, or
the circumstances or conditions under which these are rendered null, the French soci-
ologist spent 40 years of his career developing, extending, and reining in four diferent
directions what explains the disposition to act.
he irst explanation, developed during his early studies in Algeria, focused on the
agents’ disjuncture between acquired individual dispositions and the objective struc-
tures of the new world they had to inhabit. he second, started ater his work on Erwin
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538 Claudio E. Benzecry
Panofsky, followed later by his studies of Heidegger and Flaubert, focused on the rela-
tionship between the collective and individual dispositions. he third, better suited for
studies of reproduction, focused on the habitus as what accounted for very patterned
ways of acting and judging in disparate realms. And the fourth, the revisit ater Pascalian
Meditations to his studies of Algeria and Béarn, focused on embodiment and how the
body serves as both memory pad and building block.
From the long list of possibilities, this chapter starts by distinguishing the many uses
for which the term has been mobilized, as well as the problems that extending it in so
many competing ways might present. he rest of the chapter is organized with a brief
presentation of the many uses of habitus in Bourdieu’s own work, followed by a discus-
sion of how the concept has been deployed in research by US sociologists. he third and
main section of the chapter looks at the aporias provoked by the concept’s extension,
and the many critical avenues pursued by other scholars. his last section focuses less
on criticisms of Bourdieu’s oeuvre and more on scholarship produced in tension with
dispositional accounts of social action. In it I present six conversations that point to con-
ceptual or semantic connections that are taken for granted in habitus and that have been
opened up for sociological inquiry by scholars such as Lahire, Steinmetz, Wacquant,
Auyero, Elias, and Boltanski.
The Many Meanings of Habitus

in Bourdieu’s Work
he manifold ways in which Bourdieu has deployed the concept of habitus make the
search for an ultimate formula diicult. Recent authors (Decoteau 2013a; Gorski 2013;
Scheer 2012; Steinmetz 2006; Wacquant 2004) have focused on its socio-somatic char-
acter, emphasizing the encounter between a body that knows and a forgotten history,
repressed and unconsciously enacted (to go back to the Marxian reference that opened
this chapter). We can also think of this encounter as the combination of the particular
situation that the agent confronts, the particular dispositions she carries, and the con-
straints that past and collective forces place on her (on this, see Champagne and Christin
2012); or, using an early formula (Bourdieu, 1990), to explain how agents solve external
pressures and internal contradictions, how the social is both externalized and internal-
ized, made into a ield of relationships and into bodies, and how they succeed and fail in
adjusting to the two moments or states.
In a very recent article, Crossley (2014: 107) commented on a problem already dis-
cussed three decades ago by Brubaker (1985, 1993), and which has been a wellspring for
criticism ever since: the number of levels under which the concept of habitus operates.
here are both cognitive and afective dimensions to it. It exists in many forms: primary
(as in our “classed” selves); secondary (as in professional socialization); and tertiary (for
instance, when scholars relect upon themselves as embodiers of a particular practice
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Habitus and Beyond 539
and its acquisition). It exists organized around many principles of social division, some
more codiied and autonomous, like ields; some more difuse and “primordial” like
gender, class, or nation. It can also be mobilized inductively, as a tool for inquiry, and
as a topic, exploring in some cases its relationship to history and in others what it takes
to acquire and master it as a practical sense. It serves to unify the many threads that
make up a self, as well as to give an account of the ways in which an agent invests in him-
or herself.2 Its range of uses, internal complexity, and multi-scalar character have—as
I’ve already noted—forced many commentators to “decline” it (as if it were a verb able
to change according to the many subjects and circumstances) in a myriad of diferent
strands. So, while it is true that it is hard to come out with an ultimate simpliied deini-
tion (as Brubaker [1993] admonished), it is essential to show how Bourdieu himself has
put the concept to work and to organize some of his ideas in series.3
As I established in the opening paragraph, we can envision four periods and modal-
ities for the habitus in Bourdieu’s own work. he irst systematic appearance of the
ideas of homology and disposition as an innovation (albeit without the concept of
habitus) was in the aterword to a 1967 compilation in French on the work of art histo-
rian Erwin Panofsky. In it we already encounter two of the dimensions of the concept
that are going to be part of its long-term purchase: the irst is the encounter of the col-
lective and the epochal in individual practices; the second the role of homologies in
explaining the transposability of dispositions from one ield to another. On the irst,
he writes that the habitus is what transforms the collective heritage in unconscious
structures into speciic behaviors in a myriad of contexts. He does so by focusing on
how even a “creative genius” can be located within his time, understanding how his
acts are oriented by the collective even when they are unique in their appearance.4
Aiming to break with the idea of the “biographical illusion,” he will develop this line of
research, in which the individual and the collective intersect in his work on Heidegger
and Flaubert, showing how the collective modus operandi inscribes itself in the work
of art as a modus operatum. In the opposition between individuality and the collec-
tive, we can already foresee one of the main lines of criticism of Bourdieu’s work: the
tension between reducing the individual to the collective, or inding a new alliance
between the two (Corcuf, 2001).
he concept appears in the 1970s and 1980s under two guises, which can actually be
considered as two sides of the same coin, describing either how the habitus produces dis-
juncture between the individual dispositions and the objective structures where agents
develop their practices, or how it operates as producing the conluence between the two.
While some of the empirical material is already present in his early ethnographic work
on Algeria, as he recognizes in the preface of Algeria 1960 (Bourdieu 1979), as the dis-
juncture between temporal and economic structure, it is not until Outline of a heory of
Practice that Bourdieu develops in full a theory of how disjuncture or adjustment hap-
pens. As Hage (2013: 15) has noted, the habitus “is a principle of homing and building: of
striving to build the space where one can be at home in the world.” So it’s not surprising
that in contexts where that striving is diicult, we get to see the processes of inertia, dis-
junction, and hysteresis that Bourdieu describes in Outline. And in the contexts where
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there is correspondence between the dispositions and the environment in which those
dispositions are enacted, we get to observe the “ish in the water” efect he focuses on in
he Logic of Practice (Bourdieu 1990). In both scenarios, what is developed by Bourdieu
is the implicit, second-nature, doxic character of the habitus, the fact that understand-
ing how agents deploy strategies means to understand the fuzzy logic, the “feel for the
game,” how participation in a ield involves a practical mastery of the worlds we strive
to inhabit, as well as the potential incongruence in new conditions of actualization as “a
past which survives in the present” (Bourdieu 1977: 82). During this period there also
appears a key component for future developments of the habitus: the role of hexis, or
the embodied and somatic character it takes, separating it analytically from ethos or its
moral dimension.
he next series of uses of habitus is that in which actions appear as coherent with the
world that actors inhabit. It is during this period that the “structuring structured struc-
tures” formula appears explicitly, and we can observe Bourdieu’s emphasis on the coher-
ence of action, as dispositions work fully as a generative force that causes actions to be
orchestrated or regulated while feeling improvised and without a conductor/demiurge on
the horizon. his usage appears clearly in his work on cultural structures and trajectories
for self-distinction (Bourdieu 1984), where the connections between subjective structures,
the positions occupied in multiple social spaces, and the dispositions to act in them are
highlighted. he mechanism through which this operates is the analogical transference
of schemas from one realm to another. It is in Bourdieu’s work he Rules of Art where his
idea of positions and dispositions interacting in homologous ways in multiple contexts
appears as opening a realm of freedom, as the dispositions and positions do not produce
naturally just one strategy, but rather a bundle of position-taking possibilities. Moreover,
in works like he Rules of Art, he Logic of Practice, and Practical Reason, Bourdieu incor-
porates illusio as a key concept to understand the connection between habitus and ield,
calling our attention to how the adjustment between the two is predicated on agents feel-
ing invested, driven to, or called upon to participate libidinally in a game.5
It is precisely the concept of illusio that allows me to transition to the last series of
usages of the concept, which highlights the connection between the belief and the body
and what Bourdieu called the “critique of theoretical reason.” In previous works on
intellectual activity the key dimension of the habitus was doxa, and in the works on the
production of professional classiications it was ethos; ater Pascalian Meditations (and
ater the work of Loic Wacquant), hexis becomes a central dimension to understanding
the disposition to act.6 Hexis is a more speciic term for the socially conditioned physi-
cal body, its gestures and postures, and for the investigation of the techniques through
which the body constitutes and is constituted. Bourdieu used it to revisit his ieldwork
in Algeria and Béarn, aiming to explain the mechanisms through which the sedimented
experiences that become embodied shape our ways of thinking and acting, as well as our
encounters with objective structures. In Masculine Domination he moves his analysis
out of the Kabyle house described in Outline and shows how the socio-somatic inher-
itance is present not only in objects but also in bodies, as what becomes inscribed in
the body of the woman works in naturalizing the diference between sexes, producing
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inequality, and, in the reproduction through the body of those diferences, the com-
plicity of women in their own submission. In he Bachelors’ Ball (Bourdieu, 2008b) he
shows how rural bachelors embody the contradictions between the local peasant single
men’s rugged and clumsy bodies (they are “men of the woods”) and the demands they
imagine the single women they used to marry have, who have now taken to other bod-
ily styles and customs, thanks to their employment in the service economy of the cities
surrounding Béarn. If the body reproduced female subjugation in the irst case, here it
serves to impede the literal reproduction of the men. he social order reproduces itself
by inscribing itself on the body as a “memory pad” (Bourdieu 2000: 161), producing
diverging outcomes depending on whether the conditions under which those bodily
dispositions were acquired and naturalized had been actualized or not.
Over 30 years ago, Rogers Brubaker (1985) called attention to the “too many hats” of
the habitus concept. We can see how in the next two decades Bourdieu came back to it,
changed it, picked its use up where he had let it, and extended it in new directions. In
a later piece (Brubaker, 1993) the same author invited readers to think of the concept in
terms of “theoretical dispositions” or as a conceptual element in a meta-theory. Part of
the work of difusion and translation (in Actes de la Recherche, in the new Prefaces for
the English editions of Bourdieu’s books, and in the non-empirical treatises where he
further codiied some of the concepts deployed in the empirical works) meant that the
concept evolved not only in order to solve the conceptualization of new empirical prob-
lems, but also in order to provide instructions of use to readers, especially to authors
who wanted to appropriate it, and to shelter it from previous criticisms.7 To a certain
extent, as Lahire (2001) pointed out, the proliferation of the concept was on a colli-
sion course with the attempt to control it via the attribution of authority to a continu-
ous igure, Bourdieu himself.8 Having Bourdieu as a critic of the biographical illusion
is paradoxical given that this was the rhetorical mechanism utilized to stake a claim and
maintain control over a concept that had extended its reach to the point that, for critics,
the semantic ield it bounded was unclear.
Regardless of these criticisms, sociologists have appropriated the concept and have
produced a wealth of scholarship. In the section that follows I show how US-based
scholars have appropriated this rich inheritance.
How Have US Sociologists Used

the Habitus Concept?
In a much-cited piece, Charles Camic (1986) discussed how the pre-relexive, habitual
character of social action, which had been central to the conception of sociology held
by Durkheim and Weber, had in the United States, thanks to Parsons and the sociolo-
gists from the irst Chicago School, disappeared from sociology, as the discipline came
to highlight the intellectual and relexive character of individual practices. Little did
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Camic know then that dispositional sociology was about to make a comeback in the
United States. As Gorski (2013) has shown, Bourdieu’s early reception in the United
States was anchored around two empirical texts that served to explain the habit-
ual, unconscious, and routine reproduction of inequality in contemporary societ-
ies (Reproduction and Distinction), and two theoretical texts (Outline and he Logic of
Practice) that were read in a way that also asserted the primacy of reproduction over
transformation (on this see also Calhoun 2013).
Lamont (2012) and Lizardo (2012) give a slightly diferent account of Bourdieu’s
reception in the United States, though they also emphasize the “reproductivist” bent of
the early reception. he orientation was shared in England, where the texts by Bourdieu
and Passeron were closely read and were generative of a body of scholarship in the soci-
ology of education. To a certain extent the divide in the studies of reception of Bourdieu
is symptomatic, since it denotes the diferential relationship to his work in cognitive
and organizational cultural sociology versus scholarship that is either historical, com-
parative, or ethnographic (the students of Wacquant, Eyal, Steinmetz, Emirbayer, and
Calhoun) and that dedicates itself to producing data through the use of Bourdieusian
concepts (scholars like Medvetz, Sallaz, Purse, Hanser, Decoteau, Go, Krause, Buchholz,
Panofsky, McQuarrie, Desmond, and Khan, among others). It is as if Bourdieu’s work in
the United States has been reproduced separately and in parallel by groups that do not
acknowledge each other.
here is a vast corpus using Bourdieu and habitus to advance theoretical positions on
cognition, action, and practice, following the work of translating between Bourdieu’s
habitus and DiMaggio’s (1997) schemata. From that school, Vaisey (2009) has built a
dual cognition model, using habitus to explain how actors are driven primarily by deeply
internalized schematic processes of practical consciousness (what he calls “the ele-
phant” in the driver-elephant metaphor of what constitutes human decision-making).
Later, with co-authors (Longest, Hitlin, and Vaisey, 2013), he went on to reconceptualize
values as transposable dispositions that orient actors toward realizing a range of pos-
sibilities available in social situations. Ignatow (2009) uses the habitus to rethink some
key psychological presuppositions in the sociology of morality, using it to show the
embodied nature of cognition and the pre-discursive character of sociocultural com-
petences. Within this same framework, Lizardo (2009) explored the cognitive origins of
the habitus, showing how one of its key efects, hysteresis, can be traced back to the work
of Piaget; Martin (2011) incorporates the concept in his discussion of how to account for
an actor’s own self-explanations, aiming to show the role of the habitual as a capacity to
“tool” the world, and to provide social scientists with a key element in the pursuit of a
relational and aesthetic explanation of an agent’s actions.
he pages that follow aim to show how this concept has been put to work in actual
research, instead of its discussion in theoretically oriented scholarship. While of course
much of the emphasis is on reproduction, interestingly enough in US sociology the con-
cept has been decoupled from its intimate relationship to ields and capitals (a decou-
pling that Bourdieu advised against; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 96) and has been
used to explain not only the particular ways in which having a disposition deposes
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someone to or prevents someone from acting in a particular way, but also how it is a gen-
erative practice, constitutive of the ontological complicity between the agent, the agent’s
practices, and the environment in which those practices are deployed. To be very brief
and brutal, we could say that most research has either focused on the primary habitus
and particularly on its efects on agents’ practices or on the acquisition of a secondary
habitus. Few exceptions (Desmond 2007; Wacquant 2004) come to mind as connecting
the relationship between primary and secondary habitus and the process of transposi-
tion from one to the other.
Among those using habitus to show the generative character of internalization, the
concept has been used to explore the continuous efect of race (in the United States and
other areas such as South Africa and Brazil), nationalism (in Eastern Europe), class (in
the United States), and its intersection, including also the study of sexuality (also in the
United States). In the following paragraphs I present some exemplary scholarship in
terms of its uses, rather than providing an exhaustive list of habitus-related scholarship.9
For instance, Philippe Bourgois and Jef Schonberg (2007, 2009) have shown how
the disparities in heroin injection between subcutaneous and intramuscular methods
can be better understood if conceptualized as generated by an “ethnicized habitus.”
In so doing, they reconstruct other practices better understood as part of the dialec-
tic between a relatively coherent disposition and the way in which it afects objectiica-
tion: income-generating strategies, kinship, and self-presentation. he authors embed
the dispositional diference in preexisting power dynamics and the memory of racial
oppression, showing how even among people who have shared similar experiences
of destitution for a long time, the intergenerational efects of racial oppression appear
embodied, producing diferences that can then be naturalized and mobilized as a source
of legitimation of inequality.10
Alford Young (1999) extended the possibilities of use of the concept at the time by
exploring how, by building strong emotional support networks based on territorial-
ity, African American men were able to accrue social capital within their own world
and navigate it with relative ease, but in doing so were prevented from both imagin-
ing and entering into paths conducive to upward mobility. Annette Lareau (2002,
2003) explored the dynamic between practices deposing us to act and preventing us
from acting in another realm where race (and class) diferences are salient: educational
practices. Where Young and Bourgois studied the time + 1 of dispositions, Lareau shows
the process through which dispositions are put in place, via the inely tuned descrip-
tion of styles in parental involvement in schooling and leisure activities, showing how
middle-class parents plan extensively their children’s activities both in and out of school,
foster particular kinds of language use, train their children to intervene on their own
behalf, and advocate a particular kind of reasoning—all of which coheres in generat-
ing in the children a sense of entitlement, instead of a sense of constraint, in the face of
family members, professionals, and institutions.11 Unlike Bourgois, she inds that class
produces diferences in a way that race cannot account for.
Two recent ethnographies of South Africa (Decoteau 2013a, 2013b; Sallaz 2010) have
thematized and explored the use of habitus as “past-in-present” racial formation in
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order to make sense of the post-colonial situation, in which blacks and whites continue
to enact practices in a highly diferentiated way, despite the end of legal apartheid. Sallaz
(2010) showed how, despite the world having changed around the white marketers he
interviews, the white/black binary served as the default way to discuss and evaluate a
range of marketing practices. Decoteau scrutinized how and why black South Africans
living with AIDS continue to subscribe to a hybrid health ideology, despite state oi-
cers’ eforts to forge a united health system. In showing the disjuncture between health
production and consumption, she aims to uncover the simultaneous bifurcation and
hybridity of the health ield, depending on whether we are looking at it from a produc-
tion or a consumption viewpoint. In doing so, both authors invoke Bourdieu’s clet habi-
tus (Bourdieu et al. 1999; Bourdieu 2008a): Sallaz to explain the fatalism and despair of
the white marketers in making sense of the disjuncture in which the power relations
between state and market, whites and blacks, have changed; and Decoteau to explain
the hysteresis efect (Bourdieu 1977) that results in agents acting “as if,” still oriented by
strategies better suited for a previous situation.
In a series of articles and a book, Brubaker and his collaborators elaborated how eth-
nicity and nationalism can be understood in terms of cognition and practices, or in
Bourdieusian terms, how nation has become legitimated “as a principle of vision and
division.” In a 2004 article (Brubaker, Loveman, and Stamatov 2004), he and his co-
authors use habitus to explain the routine, automatic work that schemas do in repro-
ducing nations and taken-for-granted categories of practice, focusing on how habitus
is generative of a sens practique that regulates practical action. In a previous article
(Brubaker and Cooper 2000), the habitus appears as what helps to explain the self-
understanding of actors, breaking with reiied versions of identity.
he concept has also been taken up by students of sexuality. In a series of papers,
Adam Green (2007, 2008) developed a ield-like approach to sex via the conceptualiza-
tion of sexual ields as consisting of three features:
structures of desire that combine the erotic habitus of sexual actors and its sexually
objectifying propensities (i.e., those aspects of “durable dispositions” that invest a
given object with erotic value and are themselves produced by systems of stratii-
cation), the congealed history of the relations of these actors in the form of tiers of
desirability, and the distribution of erotic capital among the actors of a given physical
site of sexual sociality. (Green 2008: 30)
Doing this allowed him to underscore the structuring, embodied, and stratiied char-
acter of desire, showing the racialized schema derived from historical systems of classi-
ication and power through which white middle-class gay males assign an erotic status
to hypermasculine black men.12
Two pieces of scholarship are also interested in investigating the primary/master
habitus, but they do so more by turning it upside down, treating it as an assemblage
of or a learned enactment/performance of particular dispositions, instead of as dispos-
ing agents to or preventing them from acting in particular ways. Hancock (2005, 2007,
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2013) studies, through the embodied acquisition of lindy hop, how the racial mytholo-
gies embedded and naturalized in our conceptual and mental schemata of the world
are reproduced and materialized through the cultural practices of enacting the dance
through our bodies. Based on this, he proposes an alternative model for explaining
racial identity, grounded in the competencies and embodied types of knowledge that
one enacts in practice. Caputo (2012) entered the world of an agency that provides
employment services to formerly incarcerated men in order to understand how behav-
iors learned in prison (what she deems the carceral habitus) were incongruent with the
new environment in which they found themselves upon re-entry. While the objective
of the paper is to explore how re-entry is complicated by the embodied responses to
interpersonal violence outside of the prison walls, the paper also complicates versions
of what constitutes the primary disposition of a person ater a deep process of bodily
re-education.13
his last paper is a great segue to begin describing the second rich avenue through
which habitus has been used: the routine techniques of the body that build competences
and foster the ontological complicity with the world. Following ater the publication of
Wacquant (2004), there was an explosion of scholarship in the latter part of the irst
decade of the twenty-irst century, with papers and books focusing on secondary and
specialized dispositions like those of politicians, glassblowers, amateur wrestlers, bal-
lerinas, pianists, martial arts specialists, 14 as well as primary ones, such as students of
Muslim prayer routines, prep school students, and “patients of the state.”
Among those seriously engaging not with how the habitus is a creator of practices, but
rather with how practices create the structure of a dispositionality, the work of O’Connor
(2005, 2006, 2007) is especially salient, as it extends the interactions between self and
other, so central to the techniques of the body, to the role of objects qua instruments. In
her work on glassblowing, she shows in detail the phenomenological experience of acquir-
ing and transmitting practical and tacit knowledge. In incorporating how heat also plays a
part, she shows the constraints imposed by the material world on the work of dispositions
and the dialectic between the two. Mahler (2008) reports on a certain kind of world, pro-
ducing a practical understanding of politics and the embodied and background forms of
competence and knowledge, which make possible the politico’s skillful coping. His article
qua bildungsroman on how a campaign staf member learns about politics during the day
before the election is counterintuitive in that we do not tend to think of political knowl-
edge as embodied but rather as only intellectual. His research helps to underscore what he
calls the “tightly knit hermeneutic circle between agent and world.”15
In a series of articles, Bryan Turner and collaborators (Turner and Wainwright
2003) have studied the efects of dispositions in solidifying the spirit de corps of indi-
vidual dancers and the consequences this has in terms of dancers taking bodily injury
as part of the “natural” consequences of their vocation. In a second article, they show
how belonging to particular companies further variegates the styles of embodiment,
forcing professional dancers to relearn their embodied skills in a relexive way when
they move from one company to the next (Wainwright, Williams, and Turner 2006).16
In an earlier piece, Bob Alford and Andras Szanto (1996) used the collusion between the
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professional, pedagogical, and medical world to show the naturalization of pain in the
acquisition of pianistic knowledge. In showing the nascent process of contestation and
the formation of new techniques to retrain without pain, the paper underscores the ten-
sion between the conditions of acquisition and their deployment under conditions in
which they have become de-naturalized.
In order to understand the reconstitution of the primary habitus, Dan Winchester
(2008) explores how a group of adults produced new moral selves through the use of
embodied religious practices. he Muslim converts he studies engage in techniques
like fasting or praying in order to develop moral virtues. In doing so, he shows how his
subjects are reorganized thanks to practicing the embodied social actor’s disposition
toward space and time, changing who they are in a qualitative fashion. he practices he
distinguishes (salat, fasting) serve to show how converts engage in practices that reor-
ganize their bodily memory and its temporal patterns, how this relates to developing a
sense of humility, modesty, and deference to authority, as they need to respond to God’s
time on a regular basis, and in the newly found discipline, the conscious production of a
self that can serve God.
Unlike this case, in which habitus is used to illuminate a process of auto-poiesis, the
work of Auyero (2012) serves to make the opposite point: the insidious techniques
under which state institutions in contemporary Buenos Aires put in place what he calls
“the patient model,” a disposition that forces poor people to wait. he book outlines the
processes through which temporality participates in (re)producing domination. Auyero
asks, what kind of process is subjugation by waiting? To answer this, he provides a cata-
logue and tempography of domination (taking another strain of Bourdieu’s work) that
shows how poor people naturalize the idea that in order to get things from state oicials
they have to wait, but sometimes they do not know why or how they are doing it.
A third ethnography of instituting selhood, which is in between the self-conscious/
unconscious distinction in acquiring a disposition that one can imagine organizing
the previous two, is the work of Khan (2011). In his study of how prep school forms
elite behaviors, he uses habitus (or, as he calls it, “the acquisition of corporeal skill”) to
explain the ease with which privilege is acquired and performed as a series of embodied
routines. His most important contribution to the understanding of habitus is how the
embodiment of a gendered self and of a privileged one imposes contradictory pressures
on the body of elite women in school.17
While all these works have explored the ways in which a primary habitus either dis-
poses an agent to act or precludes agents from particular strategies, the pedagogical work
necessary for acquiring a practical mastery of a secondary world, or the reorganization
of selhood thanks to the acquisition of a secondary disposition, few scholars have actu-
ally articulated in full the relationship between a primary and a secondary habitus, ana-
lyzing the transposition, refraction, and transformations that happen in that movement.
he best-known study combining these two research strands is Loic Wacquant’s eth-
nography of the pugilistic habitus. In his book Body and Soul (and in multiple articles)
he managed to combine a carnal microsociology of the processes of initiation, appren-
ticeship, and membership through which young African American men from urban
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isolated neighborhoods learn the crat of boxing with a macro-sociological and histor-
ical analysis of how the ghetto operates as an “instrument of racial closure and social
domination” (Wacquant 2011: 85). He used the opposition between the street and the
ring to metaphorically present the sense of contiguity, continuity, and rupture between
the dispositions the young men bring from the ghetto and the discipline through which
they are remade, which harnesses those qualities to the pursuit of a diferent career
(Wacquant 2004: 55). hrough this opposition, he shows how the gym translates the
masculine culture of physical toughness, honor, and bodily violence thanks to a regu-
lated environment, training them in such a way that the agonistic exchanges from the
outside are reconverted into a symbolized and controlled, but still physically palpable,
violence. His work, as has been noted by himself (Wacquant 2011, 2014a, 2014b) and oth-
ers (Body and Society 2013, 2014), serves to extend, reine, and make more concrete the
idea of habitus, both as a topic of research—the study of its generative properties and
how it is acquired—and as a tool for research—as the carnal immersion he advocates is a
key avenue for the study of the acquisition of a secondary practical mastery.
Whereas Wacquant shows how continuity and contiguity are refurbished via dis-
ciplinary practices into something almost completely diferent, the work of Matt
Desmond (2006, 2007) underscores the preternatural it between the two worlds inhab-
ited by the agents he studies, wildland ireighters. His research posits that the general
habitus of what he calls the country boy becomes the speciic habitus of the ireighter,
focusing mostly on how agents manage and perceive risk. Extending arguments made
in Pascalian Meditations, the author makes his work into a case of what is it that agents
bring with themselves, as selves organized by their general habitus, that allows for those
selves to be slightly tweaked and adjusted into a speciic organizational habitus with
little friction. If Wacquant posited a street/gym divide, Desmond shows how his sub-
jects organize the world through the outdoor/indoor, country/city binary oppositions.
Against the illusion of self-determinacy (people who love risk orient themselves toward
attractive professions), the work poses that as country boys—and ireighters-to-be—
they are already better predisposed to confront outdoor risks, though an important part
of the explanation lies also in how the Forest Service manages to produce trust and loy-
alty, inoculating a competence in which ire is not perceived as risky but as innocuous,
and recasts those original binaries.
The Aporias of the Habitus
In this concluding section, I want to take stock of the many uses of habitus I have pre-
sented. I do so by investigating six conversations that have been elicited by the con-
cept. Part of what is at stake in those conversations is how to investigate every one of
the taken-for-granted connections between the several constitutive parts that make up
the habitus (the connections between habitus and how it is acquired, between dispo-
sitions and their genesis, between trajectory and dispositions, between individual and
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collective, between disposition and context); additionally, depending on how authors

engage with the concept, their interventions result in attempts to reine it or specify it, to
further its conceptualization or its abandonment.
he irst of the debates has been about the kind of metatheorical work that habi-
tus does in Bourdieu’s explanations of social action, and in the transcendence of the
problem of structure and agency. his can be better encapsulated by the many claims
of habitus being a black box that moves the micro-macro-level debate one step down,
without much direction for how or why agents choose between the alternative options
set by the habitus (Boudon 1998; Van den Berg 1998), a sort of superimposed mysti-
cal reality inferred instead of observed (DeCerteau 1984), reiied as an explanatory fac-
tor (Crossley 2014), used as a deus ex machina (DiMaggio 1979), or the bête noire of
Bourdieusian sociology (Boltanski in Dosse 1997).18 What all these criticisms have in
common is that they present Bourdieu’s scholarship as taking homologies between dis-
positions and positions, and between positions in diferent ields, for granted, without
providing any empirical description of matrices and dispositions, or any speciication of
how to test them empirically.19
While some of the early critiques failed to see the posterior movement from incul-
cation and reproduction to embodiment and disposition, critiques about the lack of
speciication of the inner mechanisms of the habitus have been mostly answered by the
movement ater Wacquant’s research from habitus as a theoretical construct to habi-
tus as a target to be de- and re-constructed, and as a mode of conducting qualitative
research. hough it is true that some of the scholarship inspired by Bourdieu still uses
the term as a taken-for-granted and homogeneous disposition (see the literature on
racial habitus, for instance), a wealth of recent scholarship, as I have shown, has under-
taken the work of specifying the dispositions of actors via the exploration of their hab-
its of action and thought in situation; that has been achieved in part by following the
movement in Bourdieu’s own scholarship from an early focus on mind and cognition
into the body.20 Moreover, the recent epitextual work by Wacquant (2011, 2014a, 2014b)
seems to take the black box criticism to heart by using some of the ANT vocabulary to
explain the work of the habitus. Wacquant states that he “open[s] the ‘black box’ of the
pugilistic habitus by disclosing the production and assembly of the cognitive categories,
bodily skills and desires which together deine the competence and appetence speciic
to the boxer” (2011: 87). he triple play of Bourdieu’s movement over time, emphasiz-
ing embodiment over cognitive structures, the wealth of scholarship ater Wacquant
exploring the work of acquiring a secondary habitus, and the posthumous publication
of early work by Bourdieu exploring the “assemblage” of his own habitus and those of his
early research subjects in Algeria and Béarn have given a more concrete and observable
character to the concept and the work it does.
he following debates are less about whether it makes sense to think in dispositional
terms, but rather about how those dispositions operate. In the second debate I want to
introduce the discussion regarding how dispositions are transmitted. his can be fur-
ther speciied as two conversations: (1) the primacy of unrelexive acquisition, and
(2) the transpositions of schemas across contexts.
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In the irst, ethnographers interested in secondary habitus have shown moments in

which the acquisition becomes pervious to consciousness and explicit discussion, or
have discussed the relexive work on both the body and the “feel for the game.” Corcuf
(2007) has used the work of Faure (2000), who studied the training of classical dancers,
to show how, along with the implicit corporeal automatisms, there are also moments
of language practices (diferent ways in which the trainers intervene) and moments
of relexivity (looking at themselves in the mirror, “tracing” the forthcoming exercise
step by step), calling attention in each instance to the many practical logics at play that
appeal to diferent degrees of relexivity. Downey (2008), in his study of communities of
the practice of capoeira, similarly points at “scafolding” as one explicit, repetitive, self-
conscious way of acquiring bodily knowledge.
In the second, we ind sociologists of culture and education interested in the taken-
for-grantedness and universality of schemata transposition. Some have called atten-
tion to the multiple guises under which analogy and transposition appear in Bourdieu’s
work, reorganizing a multitude of practices not always coherent into a overlying logic
(deCerteau, 1984). Others have called attention to the circularity of objects and selves
anchored around the idea of homologies, precluding the possibility of multiple deviat-
ing trajectories (Benzecry 2011). Relatedly, Bernard Lahire has discussed the speciicity
of what elements from preexisting models of socializations can be transferred; Lahire
(2011, 2006, 2003), focuses on the case-by-case need to study, for instance, what elements
from educational socialization become transferred into professional millieux: interper-
sonal relationships, the uses of “universal” knowledge, or other aspects?
It is precisely in the dispositional sociology of Lahire that we can ind a key interlocu-
tor within the third debate initiated ater Bourdieu’s habitus: What is the genesis of the
habitus? What from the past becomes privileged in the logic of repetition that we some-
times encounter in agents’ actions in new scenarios? Is that early scenario something
that works like a birthmark or a scar? Authors as diverse as Lahire himself, 21 Green,
Steinmetz, Widick, and Decoteau have all advocated to move beyond a cognitive under-
standing of habitus and its logic of habituation, trigger, responses, and environments,22
noticing the psycho-dynamic language that Bourdieu himself adopted in his latter work,
aiming to bring back into the discussion terms like libido, object-relations, investment,
cathexis, desire, fragmentation of the self, repression, denegation, repetition, the ten-
sion between symbolic and the imaginary, and so on. All authors explore seriously what
it means to think of the unconscious as a key dimension in providing explanations for
how bodies operate, how they are symbolically articulated, and their trajectories and
possibilities. Steinmetz (2006, 2013) and Decoteau (2013a) look at the work of unify-
ing the subject that the habitus performs, and how issues of fragmentation—not usu-
ally acknowledged given the taken-for-granted unity of dispositions—could be better
explained by marrying Bourdieusian concepts with the Lacanian tension between the
subject being constituted (and organized) within a symbolic order, or in an imaginary
fashion, in which disjointed realms and events are taken as uniied.23
Similarly, aiming to build a sociology of desire, Green (2007, 2008) interrogates how
the notion of a gendered habitus can help us in understanding how sociological factors
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are accounted for in the constitution of sexual fantasies, exploring the parallels between
object relations and how social relations are somatized in order to depart from sociolog-
ical concepts so dear to gender theory, such as scripts and role enactment. He explains
the internalization of social objects via the habitus, which unconsciously objectiies the
individual’s perception of the potentially existing bodies, including her own, and oper-
ates in consequence, resulting in the somatization of gender. Widick (2003) instead aims
to ind parallels with Freud, complementing Bourdieu’s habitus with a theory of gen-
dered identiication, in which the masculine ego-ideal of stock exchange traders (the
Super Trader) is what helps us to better understand their attachment, and the “second
nature” and “trading instinct” they develop as they learn to practice their trade.
Lahire (2001, 2011) proposes a psychological sociology aimed at joining disposi-
tional accounts with a Freudian (via Laplanche, its French disseminator) explanation
of how individual intravariation happens. To Bourdieu’s emphasis on the habitus as a
matrix that holds past experiences in the body of the individual, Lahire adds two cave-
ats: irst, a question about why some of our dispositions operate in some contexts but
fail to actualize themselves in others; and, second, given the various socializing experi-
ences that coexist inside the same body—and their unconscious character—how do we
know which ones are privileged? How do we know how they intervene later in the life
of an individual (see Frére 2004)? To the taken-for-granted homogeneity of the habitus,
Lahire opposes a postulate: individuals respond to a myriad of contexts and experiences
with a heterogeneous set of dispositions, so how do we adjudicate when each one oper-
ates and why?
his leads us into the fourth debate opened up by the study of the habitus (in this
case, the work of Bourdieu on Heidegger and Flaubert): How can we get to the singular?
How can we illuminate an individual trajectory within a group or epoch and account
for it with the tools of a dispositional sociology? Some of Bourdieu’s critics (Corcuf
2001; Lahire 2001) have championed the work of Elias on Mozart, as they feel it does the
work of illustrating the kind of psychosocial irst relationships that orient agents later in
life to invest themselves in their practices in a particular way. hey oppose Elias’s anal-
ysis of Mozart’s life (Elias 1993)—in which he emphasizes Mozart’s relationship to his
father, the interplay between intimacy and distance within court society because of his
role as a musician, his posterior departure and work as a freelance artist, how much of
his personality structure was anchored in the contradiction between his fame and his
lowly position at home—to the analysis Bourdieu performs of Heidegger. In Bourdieu’s
account, the focus is instead on putting together a dispositional nested-dolls model, ask-
ing irst about the German philosopher’s class, then his class fraction, aterward his crat
as a philosopher, and his place in the restricted ield and the ield of ideas at large. But
all this happens without Bourdieu saying much about his familial and academic social-
ization, or his sentimental, political, and religious orientations—once again taking for
granted that the studied dispositions (and not the others proposed) are the explanatory
key to the genesis of Heidegger’s habitus.
his research program has not conined itself to a critique of Bourdieu; rather, it
attempts to rethink what intra-individual variation would look like. What they critique
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from Bourdieu is that he can explain what the individual has from the collective, but not
the detailed departure of an individual from a group, or how agents change over time,
given diferent and competing spaces of socialization; they also point to the assumed
homogeneity of family socialization. To analyze this, Lahire (2011: 32) formulates the
idea of stock, calling attention to the embodiment of multiple schemas of action and
habits, organized around many repertoires of action and the contexts in which they are
pertinent and deployed; he also points to the phenomena of cultural dissonance (2008)
as the best place to observe the tension between diferent embodied modes of socializa-
tion and taste. To distinguish the former from the idea of ield, he (Lahire 2006, 2010a,
2010b) brings in examples inspired by the analysis he conducted on the “double life” of
literature writers, showing how little of what they do is actually within the conines of a
professional ield, and is explained to a greater extent by things outside of it, and by the
adjustments they need to partake in as they leave the “game” and enter into other rel-
evant contexts of action (family, teaching, non-literary work, translations, etc.).24
A related line of research has started to explore how we can take into account agents’
self-deinitions, senses of soi meme, projects of the self, outside of their immediate dis-
qualiication as biographical illusions. Authors like Dosse (1997), Lahire (2003, 2006,
2008, 2011), and Corcuf (2007) in France, and Neil Gross (2003) in the United States
have all noticed how, while the work of Bourdieu is great at answering what explains
the continuity over time of the character of a person (thanks to the individual habitus),
it has been less forthcoming in exploring the second part of what constitutes a subject’s
identity: the senses of self that agents have (as in, who am I?) and how that also contrib-
utes to the understanding of how agents orient their actions.
his serves as a segue into the ith debate opened up thanks to Bourdieu’s disposi-
tional sociology: the question about what from the local or immediate context activates
or inhibits dispositions, or the extent to which having a capacity determines what agents
do. Here I want to go beyond reference to Lahire’s work (who has theoretically concep-
tualized it) to three examples from Auyero and Swistun (2009), Hirschkind (2001), and
my own work (Benzecry 2011).25 While for Bourdieu one of the causes of the transfor-
mation of dispositions is when the conditions of operation of the habitus are incongru-
ent with the condition of its acquisition, and should cause change or transformation, as
they become “denaturalized,” so a transformed environment should also result in the
eventual transformation of how it is represented, what these three works emphasize is
how those discrepancies are the source of social continuity instead of social change.
Passionate fans at the opera house draw on a lost past to partially reproduce an attitude
toward opera born in that past but persisting through and in present-day action and
discourse. Instead of inding an almost automatic adjustment between circumstances,
disposition, and practice, what we have learned from the empirical analysis is that com-
munity resources, in-group sociability, and isolation from competing interpretations
are all key factors in mediating the production of adjustment or discrepancy between
resources and practice.
My work also calls attention to two further critiques to dispositional accounts of
cultural consumption: (1) that variance in attachment to the same cultural product
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or practice can only be accounted for by preexisting trajectories—in the case of opera
fans in Buenos Aires, they internally distinguish themselves with categories created
through the practices of attachment, which are hard to it into preexisting positions or
to exchange for anything meaningful in other contexts; and (2) that the circularity of
homological explanations that make up the conditions of production of a cultural object
are necessary and suicient to explain its consumption. While those conditions of pro-
duction produce a conditional efectuality, how that gets actualized (or not), how the
horizon of meaning inscribed in the work is mobilized, is not a given.26
In the same vein, Auyero and Swistun (2009) studied the relationship between habi-
tus and habitat, observing the poisonous world of the Flammable shantytown and how
people make sense of their lead-loaded environment. hey convincingly show how the
perceptions of those involved in the world are caused by a concerted “labor of confu-
sion” by outside actors. he work of anthropologists like Hirschkind (2001) shows how,
instead of an automatic transformation and abandonment of the relationship between
ethical discipline and Islamic argumentation, because of the demands of work and the
geographical dispersion of its practitioners, what we see in the creation of a counter
public in Egypt reveals how the actors themselves, thanks to the technology of sermon
in cassettes and the group sociality produced by it, actively make themselves blind to
the transformations of the conditions under which those ethical dispositions were sup-
posed to operate. his adds an extra mediation to the relation between schemas and
resources, which calls our attention to the role that groups play in maintaining the pro-
ductive and reproductive power of dispositions.
While the sixth debate is a tributary of the prior conversation, it brings to the fore
another one of the French schools that have come ater Bourdieu: 27 the sociologists of
conventions. What they want to know is, if explaining social action is indeed about ig-
uring out the encounter between the multiple potentialities of the body and the multiple
potentialities of the immediate environment, what do we do with the plurality of dispo-
sitions? What do we do with the multiple spheres of activity in which our practices are
deployed and honed? he work of Boltanski and hevenot (1999, 2006) and Boltanski
(2012) addresses these issues by posing the plurality of modes of commitment and the
adjustment of action, and exploring this in terms of “repertoires” of cultural resources
that become mobilized in diferent scenarios. In order to move beyond Bourdieu’s the-
ory of social reproduction anchored in the interaction between dispositions and ields,
he substitutes both terms. Instead of dispositions, he presents us with the actor’s criti-
cal competences, made up of both mental and corporeal elements, which are deployed
and “tested” as competent in quotidian conlicts; skills and capacities are not potentially
determining, but elements that might be used or not, depending on the encountered
situation.
What distinguishes competences from dispositions is that actors mobilize diferent
forms of justiications over time, and that in a given situation actors may have a plural-
ity of justiications at hand. Instead of a ield, he poses the existence of multiple, mac-
rostuctural orders of worth, though these do not predeine or determine the conlicts.
Given how conlicts are open to diferent forms of justiication, and through which he
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recognizes the tensions between the diferent orders of worth, the actors are actually
those who base their justiications on those orders of worth, to either conirm or reject
opposing statements. Much like in Lahire’s work, we ind here another version of the
argument about how and when dispositions are activated or inhibited, and another ver-
sion, too, of the idea of the agent as both multi-socialized and multi-determined, though
in this case the onus is on how certain situations might correspond better with a certain
disposition over another, canceling the idea of a unitary dispositional logic, transferable
across every and any context of action.
Conclusion
As Frére (2004: 95) has called attention to, thanks to the work of psychological sociology
and French pragmatist sociology we know more about the subjective functioning of the
habitus. his should actually help us reine and reinvigorate dispositional accounts, as
the opening of the black boxes allows us to move beyond approaches in which the habi-
tus has been taken for granted, or—because of that—dismissed.
he chapter has also a more modest ambition, to be able—thanks to an exploration
of its many uses and criticisms—to further specify how and when people use habitus,
and in order to pursue what kinds of research questions (what Abend [2008] called a
semantic therapy). he concept has extended itself—thanks both to the work of people
within Bourdieu’s constellation, and of those who had appropriated it partially—to the
point at which it has now become something to be called upon without speciication, as
other major concepts in sociology with a fraught history, be it “structure,” “culture,” or
“agency.” Achieving this amorphous status has had as a consequence that dispositional
accounts of social action have become so central that few scholars are ofering explicit
alternatives when conducting empirical examinations. he fact that there is a lack of
debate among the many competing parties using it (scholars interested in cognition,
comparative historical formations, the somatic reproduction of the self, the intersec-
tion between the multiplicity of the self and its unity of action) should call attention to
how much habitus has become a quasi-object (Latour 1993) that enlists people who are
otherwise talking about very diferent things into some semblance of a dialogue. While
in this lies its “functional” strength, we do have to worry about whether those scholars
are talking at all about the same thing. It seems that, at this point, going beyond habitus
is not just a matter of criticism and reconstruction—as in the case of the most sophisti-
cated programs—but also of specifying what we mean when we talk about dispositions.
Notes
1. hanks to Dan Winchester, Claire Decoteau, Blackhawk Hancock, Matt Mahler, Javier
Auyero, Andrew Deener, and the editors for comments on previous drats of this chapter.
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2. For a thorough, well-explained, and organized list of habitus, see Wacquant (2011, 2014a,
2014b).
3. Since there are speciic entries on habitus in this volume, what I present here is not as
detailed as it would deserve to be; this section is here to explain some of the limits and apo-
rias critics have pointed to.
4. It would be in his next projects, on the French elite and its reproduction through cultural
and educational realms (Bourdieu 1974, 1984, 1998), that he develops the tension between
primary socialization, the role of schooling, and the role of professional esprit de corps
that appears in nuce in his commentary on Panofsky.
5. So only those who have incorporated the speciic habitus of a ield are able to play the game
properly.
6. In his dialogue with Wacquant (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 172–173, referring to his
work on masculine domination published in Actes de la Recherche) he anticipated the rela-
tionship between body and socialization but did not fully develop it.
7. One has to wonder whether the lack of volume of Bourdieusian monographs in the United
States, despite the large citation of his concepts, is due to both the extension of the concept
and the restriction of the conditions under which its use is deemed appropriate.
8. As Foucault (1969) explained, the author-function “allows a limitation of the cancerous
and dangerous proliferation of signiications within a world where one is thrity not only
with one’s resources and riches but also with one’s discourses and their signiications. he
author is the principle of thrit in the proliferation of meaning.”
9. Wacquant (1993) is still a great reference to take stock of the shortcomings of the US trans-
lation of the early “reproductivist” reception of Bourdieu. I’ve aimed to work in this sec-
tion with work produced ater his review essay.
10. Bonilla-Silva, Embrick, and Perry, among others, understand racialized habitus, not as the
result of practices observed in situ upon research, but as presupposed in advance as what
explains an already established diference between whites and blacks in the United States.
he habitus is considered something that explains the homogeneity of white behaviors, based
on the white-only interaction networks produced by residential segregation, but not that of
African Americans. In doing so, they also go against the highly diferentiated account of social
space, positions, and trajectories implicit (and sometimes explicit) in Bourdieu’s work.
11. Other research on education, class, and status, like Stevens (2007), recognizes the implicit
Bourdieusian character of his ethnography, but does not use its conceptual framework
directly.
12. I discuss his article on erotic habitus as object relation theory later in this chapter.
13. While inspired by the work of Wacquant (2004), it difers in its emphasis on how the re-
education alters (in an unrelexive not-thought-ater way) every pattern of interaction
outside of the prison (or in Wacquant’s case, the ring and the gym).
14. here are in fact two full issues of Body & Society (in 2013 and 2014) dedicated to this.
15. Other scholars from the same generation, Tyson Smith (2014) and Michal Pagis (2010),
have extended the study of corporeal knowledge acquisition into conversations with phe-
nomenological sociology and social psychology.
16. Sarah Delamont and Neil Stephens (2008) used the variation in how capoeira is embodied
to illustrate the continuity in time of Brazil in the body of the practitioner, aiming to con-
ceptualize it as a diasporic habitus.
17. A trio of other scholars also worth noting who have studied the intersection between
habitus, status, and class are Ryan Centner (2008), who used the concept to explore the
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production of spatial capital and how it resulted in the appropriation of spaces by “dot
comers” in San Francisco; Amy Hanser (2008), who utilized habitus to explain how sales
clerks were able to re-establish trust with customers in a changing market environment by
reconstructing the classed dimension of their shared past socialist experience; and Rachel
Sherman (2007: 254–255), who studied the interaction between workers and guests at
luxury hotels. hough Sherman is more focused on boundaries, she uses habitus/dispo-
sitions to explain how wealthy consumers recognized themselves as interpellated by the
hotel as individuals who are in and of a class position through their consumption of luxury
services.
18. I’m leaving out of the discussion critiques like those of Olivier Mongin, who, following
Sartre, rejected “Bourdieu’s determinist sociology” which continuously reduced the sub-
ject’s margin of freedom (Mongin and Roman 1998)
19. Even former disciples like Claude Grignon participated in that criticism, stating that hav-
ing the habitus work as a black box allowed Bourdieu to “explain with one single, deinitive
word why social groups, and the individuals who constitute them, reproduced identical
behaviors” (Grignon 1996: 96).
20. One of the most frustrating elements of reading Bourdieu is that though he claims to
reject establishing a general framework and underscores how concepts have to be put to
work, a vast part of his work is dedicated to discussing those concepts in a general way
(for instance, Practical Reason, Pascalian Meditations, he Logic of Practice, Masculine
Domination, etc.).
21. Lahire (2011: 51) aims to think of dispositions as conditional, aiming to reconstruct dis-
positions via the description of practices, the reconstruction of the circumstances under
which they are deployed, and the key elements from the practitioner’s history.
22. Lizardo (2004) has called attention to the cognitive, Piagetian origin of some of the key
concepts in his sociology. Lahire (2001: 147) has noted the tension between those cognitive
origins and the psychological sociology that can be extended from the idea of dispositions.
Widick (2003) has addressed the tension between the cognitive language and the dynam-
ics Bourdieu is interested in describing and explaining.
23. Steinmetz (2006, 2013) has called attention to the fact that in Bourdieu’s work the combi-
nation of the particular situation that the agent confronts, with the particular dispositions
she carries, and the constraints that the past and collective forces place on her can be found
under three main forms: integrated, disjunctural, and split. he irst iteration of the mul-
tiple modalities appears in he Weight of the World (Bourdieu et al. 1999: 383), the second
in his Sketch for Self Analysis (2008a: 99–101).
24. In his book ([2011] 2001: 46) he actually describes seven potential maladjustment scenar-
ios, including a couple that could also be understood with Bourdieu as split habitus with
the hysteresis efect.
25. In his study of circuit training in Manchester, Crossley (2004) has also explored the role
of sociability and relexive techniques in the acquisition of a disposition, focusing on its
interactional and processual character.
26. Numerous authors in France (DeCerteau 1984; Ranciere 1987; Grignon and Passeron
1989) had already criticized him on this point ater the publication of Distinction.
27. In the triple meaning of the phrase: to follow chronologically, to recognize their rela-
tionship to his work (as Boltanski was at irst a student in his laboratory), and to try to
challenge him.
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