Topic > Pierre Bourdieu - 823

As a French sociologist, anthropologist and philosopher, Pierre Bourdieu focuses on the role of practice and embodiment in the social dynamics of power relations in life, which opposes Western traditions. He conceptualizes the notions of habitus and field, which reveal the construction of human society, which, according to him, should not be understood as the application of a set of rules. Echoing Michel Foucault and Michel de Certeau, Bourdieu intends to analyze the interrelationship between social structure and social practice. His arguments concern the reconciliation of both the external power generated by social structure and the internal power produced by subjective individuality. Bourdieu transforms Max Weber's notion of domination and social orders into his field theory, defining the field as an environment in which agents and their social positions find themselves, a system of social positions structured in terms of power relations. The fields, so to speak, "are equipped with agents equipped with the habitus necessary to make them function" (1980, 67). Bourdieu therefore states that society can be seen as the sum of objective social relations under the conditions of economic production and that it is the social agent that should be emphasized in society. Bourdieu, while maintaining structuralist concepts of social structures, argues that the reproduction of social structure is not constrained by the logic of social structure. Bourdieu describes habitus as the theory of how practices are generated. The habitus, according to Bourdieu, which is a "product of history" structured on the basis of a set of acquired dispositions, is constituted in practice and is always "oriented towards practical functions" (1980, 52-54). That is, the habitus… the medium of paper… uses the construction of practical space that organizes social relations; Calendars structure the practical time that organizes social works. The classification system, as the embodiment of the social order, thus subsumes subjective experiences and naturalizes “its own arbitrariness” (1977, 164). Doxa, the state of this naturalization, through censorship and exclusion, preserves a “universe of what is taken for granted” (1977, 170). Bourdieu further argues that practices imply “a logic made to do without concepts” (1977, 116). but they should not be described as logical processes. This is not abstract logic, but body movements and actual practice should be analyzed with an investigation into the connection between body movements and the classificatory system. “Body language”, according to Bourdieu, is more ambiguous to analyze than linguistic patterns(1977, 120).