Bourdieu’s hammer: on the relations between habitus and fields

Abstract

The article discusses Bourdieu’s conceptualisation of habitus–field relations. While describing their approaches, Bourdieu focuses on the relation between habitus and an individual field, chiefly stressing their harmonious character. By mainly concentrating on habitus with respect to an individual field, he neglects the social differentiation and autonomisation of fields that create and multiply the possibilities of habitus and fields being in a relationship of a conflict. Relying on Lenski’s concept of status decrystallisation and Leder’s concept of body dys-appearance, we argue that a habitus–fields mismatch may provide opportunities for a temporary suspension of a taken-for-granted attitude to the world and, by extension, for questioning the social objectified, i.e. fields, and their rules of the game.

Keywords

• bourdieu
• habitus
• field
• disposition
• position
• dys-position