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Bourdieu's concepts Field and Habitus explained by Kalyani Vallath

Cultural Studies Terms 3
Bourdieu's Terms Field and Habitus

So, we now know that Cultural Capital denotes your skills and tastes, your cars and other material possessions, and your University degrees.

Your Cultural Capital (which you share with a group in the form of Collective Capital) takes the form of your habits, attitudes and dispositions. For example, people belonging to certain groups wear ethnic clothes like sarees, while others wear modern, Western clothes; certain people enjoy classical music, while others enjoy pop music; and some members of the same family might like vegetarian food while others enjoy non-vegetarian food... all because their Cultural Capital is different.

These deeply ingrained habits and attitudes of people (that is the physical embodiment of their Cultural Capital) is called HABITUS.

We often think our habits and attitudes (Habitus) are objective and natural, but they are actually subjectively and culturally developed, based on past experiences.

With our habits and attitudes (Habitus) we enter fields of practice such as Art, Education, Religion, Law and so on.  These constitute what Bourdieu called FIELD, which means an arena where production, circulation and exchange of goods, services, knowledge, etc take place.

These Fields have some features:
  • Here there is the struggle to monopolize power and dominate (For example, that is why in the Field of Education or Law there is so much competition and backbiting. 😬 Who wins in this competition depends on people's ability to adapt their Habitus to the Field!)
  • The Fields are interconnected and they overlap, but they have their own unique sets of rules, knowledges and forms of capital.
  • Fields are not strictly dependent on social class and are in relation with various factors. For example, in the Field of Politics, it is not necessary that the powerful people are those who belong to the powerful classes.

The importance of the terms Cultural Capital, Habitus and Field is that it helps us to understand power as culturally created, and as created by an interplay of agency and structure.
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Comments

  1. Krishna PriyaNovember 19, 2019 at 11:36 AM

    Dear ma'am,
    You always turn tough nuts into doughnuts.These notes are precise & priceless. Thank you ma'am��

    ReplyDelete
  2. Richa RastogiJuly 10, 2021 at 10:24 AM

    Hi ma'am,

    Can the concept of Habitus be linked with Naturalism?

    ReplyDelete

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