honor exchanges (pp. 10-15)

It can be seen that the typical hermeneutic paradigm of the exchange of words is perhaps less appropriate than the paradigm of the exchange of blows used by George H. Mead (1934: 42-43). In dog-fights, as in the fighting of children or boxers, each move triggers off a counter-move, every stance of the body becomes a sign pregnant with a meaning that the opponent has to grasp while it is still incipient reading in the beginnings·of a stroke or a sidestep the imminent future, i.e. the blow or the dummy. And the dummy itself, in boxing as in conversation, in exchanges of honour as in matrimonial transactions, presupposes an opponent capable of preparing a riposte to a movement that has barely begun and who can thus be tricked into faulty anticipation.

To make someone a challenge is to credit him with the dignity of a man of honour, since the challenge, as such, requires a riposte and therefore is addressed to a man deemed capable of playing the game of honour, and of playing it well. From the principle of mutual recognition of equality in honour here follows a first corollary: the challenge confers honour. ... Thus, not to salute someone is to treat him like a thing, an animal, or a woman. The challenge, conversely, is a high point in the life of the man who receives it. ... A second corollary is this: he who challenges a man incapable of taking up the challenge, that is incapable of pursuing the exchange, dishonours himself. Thus elbahadla, extreme humiliation publicly inflicted, recoils on the man who provokes it (amahbul) : even the man who merits elbahadla possesses an honour; that is why elbahadla boomerangs. Hence the man who finds himself in a strong position must refrain from pushing his advantage too far, and should temper his accusation with a certam moderation, so as to let his adversary put himself to shame. ... The third corollary is that only a challenge (or offence) commg from an equal in honour deserves to be taken up; in other words, for there to be a challenge, the man who receives it must consider who makes it worthy of making it. An affront from a presumptuous inferior rebounds on its author. ... Likewise, dishonour would fall on the man who dirtied his hands in an unworthy revenge ... It is therefore the nature of the riposte which makes the challenge a challenge, as opposed to mere aggression.

habitus: one definition

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" (p. 14-15).  

against an early objection to ethnomethodology (and more on these)

Our approach is thus radically opposed, on two essential points, to the interactionism which reduces the constructions of social science to "constructs of the second degree, that is, constructs of the constructs made by the actors on the social scene ”, as Schutz does, or, like Garfinkel, to accounts of the accounts which agents produce and through which they produce the meaning of their world. One is entitled to undertake to give an "account of accounts ”, so long as one does not put forward one ’s contribution to the science of pre-scientific representation of the social world as if it were a science of the social world. But this is still too generous, because the prerequisite for a science of commonsense representations which seeks to be more than a complicitous description is a science of the structures which govern both practices and the concomitant representations, the latter being the principal obstacle to the construction of such a science. ... Moreover, the constitutive power which is granted to ordinary language lies not in the language itself but in the group which authorizes it and invests it with authority. Official language, particularly the system of concepts by means of which the members of a given group provide themselves with a representation of their social relations (e.g. the lineage model or the vocabulary of honour), sanctions and imposes what it states, tacitly laying down the dividing line between the thinkable and the unthinkable, thereby contributing towards the maintenance of the symbolic order from which it draws its authority. (p. 21-22)

another definition of habitus

 

(p. 82-83)

Saturday, March 9, 2002