Bourdieu Habitus Analysis

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The term habitus has Latin origins in the works of Aristotle 's works, and then been widely used by different European scholars and philosophers such as Hegel, Husserl, Weber, Durkheim and Mauss (Farnell, 2000: 399). The French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, has many contributions in the field of sociology. He brought up with different concepts to explain the struggle in societies. The main concepts that Bourdieu brought to the field are: field, capital, power, and habitus. Originally it is a Latin word that refers to the typical condition or appearance. For Bourdieu, it is a term that refers to the individuals ' norms and habits which have been acquired unconsciously. Habitus performs as a bridge between individual 's behavior and his/her decision-making, or in other words, it is a bridge between subjectivism and objectivism. He emphasizes that it appears when individuals interact with one another. The term was first used in Bourdieu 's work in 1967 in an appendix of his translation into French of Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism. It is reserved in the individual 's mind and behavior. Bourdieu explains that habitus is either embodied …show more content…

The function of this structure is to represent the human knowledge and experience in the social situation. This structure provokes dispositions. Thus, individuals act according to the nature of habitus. The term "habitus" appeared in the first works of Pierre Bourdieu in the 1970s, but it referred to the habit of social life. It was not until the publication of Outline of a Theory of Practice where he used the term as it is known today (Grenfell & James, 1998: 15-16). Sullivan (2002: 149) postulates that habitus is a messy concept and it is difficult to define, but generally it consists of attitudes and values wherein we can find a dominant habitus depending on the competence in a certain social