Bourdieu and Jean Baudrillard.

Essay by cchipmunk99University, Bachelor'sA+, April 2003

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For Bourdieu, belief and habit are always governed by the social. Bourdieu saw habitus as combining the role of structure (of society) and agency (of the individual) to frame how people come to decide what to do. The internalised norms of the habitus are the result of the subject's exposure to social processes and this ensures that the human subject's habitual modes of thought and action are governed by the social. Further, a person's 'individual habitus', based on their own, unique set of experiences of the world, is never more than a slight structural variation on a 'class habitus' , which consists of structures that integrate all the experiences statistically common members of the same class. In associating an individual's habits with a 'class habitus', Bourdieu relates the formation of habit to an individual's social and economic positioning within society. Bourdieu, therefore, has a concern with how structures shape the human subject.

Bourdieu proposes that, on the one hand, through the body's incorporation of habitus an institution "attains full realization"; and, on the other, in that process of incorporation the physical gesture of the practice potentially, and necessarily, exceeds those habits.For Bourdieu, habitus refers to socially acquired, embodied systems of dispositions and/or predispositions. It is not refering to character, morality, or socialization per se, but to "deep structural" classificatory and assessment propensities, socially acquired, and manifested in outlooks, opinions, and embodied phenomena such as deportment, posture, ways of walking, sitting, spitting, blowing the nose, and so forth.

I think Bourdieu is interesting. I think he makes sense in that structures help shape people. It makes sense to me how the "habitus" in a way tells us how to act like I said earlier about posture and stuff.

I think I can relate him to Marx because...