The Cognitive Origins of Bourdieu's Habitus

Abstract

This paper aims to balance the conceptual reception of Bourdieu's sociology in the United States through a conceptual re‐examination of the concept of Habitus. I retrace the intellectual lineage of the Habitus idea, showing it to have roots in Claude Levi‐Strauss structural anthropology and in the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget, especially the latter's generalization of the idea of operations from mathematics to the study of practical, bodily‐mediated cognition. One important payoff of this exercise is that the common misinterpretation of the Habitus as an objectivist and reductionist element in Bourdieu's thought is dispelled. The Habitus is shown to be instead a useful and flexible way to concep‐tualize agency and the ability to transform social structure. Thus ultimately one of Bourdieu's major contributions to social theory consists of his development of a new radical form of cognitive sociology, along with an innovative variety of multilevel sociological explanation in which the interplay of different structural orders is highlighted. In keeping with the usual view, the goal of sociology is to uncover the most deeply buried structures of the different social worlds that make up the social universe, as well as the "mechanisms" that tend to ensure their reproduction or transformation. Merging with psychology, though with a kind of psychology undoubtedly quite different from the most widely accepted image of this science, such an exploration of the cognitive structures that agents bring to bear in their practical knowledge of the social worlds thus structured. Indeed there exists a correspondence between social structures and mental structures, between the objective divisions of the social world . . . and the principles of vision and division that agents apply to them (Bourdieu, 1996b[1989], p. 1).