- an early version :
- 3.1. Insofar as it is a prolonged process of inculcation producing a durable training, i.e. producers of practices conforming with the principles of the cultural arbitrary of the groups or classes which delegate to PA the PAu needed for its establishment and continuation, PW tends to reproduce the social conditions of the production of that cultural arbitrary, i.e. the objective structures of which it is the product, through the mediation of the habitus, defined as the principle generating practices which reproduce the objective structures. (Reproduction in education, society and culture. Tr. By R. Nice. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. 1977 [1970] )
- the most classic version:
- disposition inculcated in the earliest years of life and
constantly reinforced by calls to order from the group, that is to say, from
the aggregate of the individuals endowed with the same dispositions, to whom
each is linked by his dispositions and interests" (Outline of a theory of practice Tr. by R. Nice.. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1977 [1972]. p. 14-15).
- and still another:
- The habitus – embodied history, internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history – is the active presence of the whole past of which it is the product. As such, it is what gives practices their relative autonomy with respect to external determinations of the immediate present. This autonomy is that of the past, enacted and acting, which, functioning as accumulated capital, produces history on the basis of history and so ensures the permanence in change that makes the individual agent a world within the world. The habitus is a spontaneity without consciousness or will, opposed as much to the mechanical necessity of things without history in mechanistic theories as it is to the reflexive freedom of subjects 'without inertia' in rationalist theories. ( The logic of practice Tr. by R. Nice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1990 [1980].
Michel Foucault on the effects of the Panopticum (a related argumentation to that made by Bourdieu)
Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need in fact of being so. In view of this, Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so. (Discipline and Punish. 1978 [1975]: 201 [234-5])
Albert Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, one of the many unacknowledged precursors to Bourdieu and Foucault
Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior
acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement
of human groups, including their embodiment in artifacts; the essential
core of culture consists of traditional (i.e. historically derived and
selected) ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems
may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other
as conditioning elements of further action. (Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. 1963 [1952]: 357)
The basic critiques of Bourdieu:
- de Certeau, Michel The practice of everyday life. Berkeley: University of California Press. (First published in 1980) 1984. Chapter IV
- Rancière, Jacques The philosopher and his poor. Tr. by J. Drury, C. Oster, and A. Parker. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. (First published in 1983) 2004. Chapter
- Varenne, Hervé and Ray McDermott Successful failure 1998. Chapters 6 & 7