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Pierre Bourdieu Habitus Analysis

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Pierre Bourdieu is a very influential social theorist within the 20th century and his work spans many disciplines. Bourdieu was very concerned with social order and the dynamics within society, he was interested in the power held and the structures of society. Although the term habitus was a term used before by other sociologists it was Bourdieu’s work on the topic that truly delved rihght into contemporary society to look at the way it was structures. Bourdieu defines habitus as “A structuring structure, which organises practices and the perception of practices.”(Bourdieu, 1984: 170). The habitus emphasises the socially formed power of taken for granted practices. The habitus is both an objectively structured structure and also a generative, or structuring, structure through which new distinctions can be made. “The social field is the structure of organized social relations in which an individual is situated and is …show more content…

“Pierre Bourdieu claims to show at great length and detail (in reference to 1960s/70s France) how the knowledge and use of cultural artefacts and the body, and the taste which people develop for culture (everything from food, clothing and life-style to preferences in painting and music) constitute multiply sublimated transformations of a single relation of dominant to dominated class, moderating the myriad of struggles between classes and class fractions in modern capitalist society and teaching people to tailor their expectations and their own view of themselves to their place in a hierarchy of political power and their share in the social product, at the same time as providing vehicles to contest the place a class fraction has in that hierarchy and for an individual to claim a place in a given class fraction.” (Blunden,

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