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  • Essay / Pierre Bourdieu - 823

    As a French sociologist, anthropologist and philosopher, Pierre Bourdieu focuses on the role of practice and embodiment in the social dynamics of power relations in life, which oppose to Western traditions. He conceptualizes the notions of habitus and field, which reveal the construction of human society, which, according to him, should not be understood as the application of a set of rules. Echoing Michel Foucault and Michel de Certeau, Bourdieu intends to analyze the interrelation between social structure and social practice. His arguments focus on a reconciliation of both external power generated by social structure and internal power produced by subjective individuality. Bourdieu transforms Max Weber's notion of domination and social orders into his field theory, defining the field as a framework within which agents and their social positions are situated, a system of social positions structured in terms of power relations. The fields, so to speak, “equip themselves with agents equipped with the necessary habitus to make them work” (1980: 67). Bourdieu thus affirms that society can be considered as the sum of objective social relations in the conditions of economic production and that it is the social agent that should be highlighted in society. Bourdieu, although retaining structuralist concepts of social structures, maintains that the reproduction of social structure is not constrained by the logic of social structure. Bourdieu describes habitus as the theory of the mode of generation of practices. The habitus, according to Bourdieu, which is a “product of history” structured from a set of acquired dispositions, is constituted in practice and is always “oriented towards practical functions” (1980: 52-54) . In other words, habitus ...... middle of paper ...... uses construct a practical space that organizes social relations; Calendars structure the practical times that organize social work. The classification system, as the embodiment of the social order, thus encompasses subjective experiences and naturalizes “its own arbitrariness” (1977: 164). Doxa, the state of this naturalization, through censorship and exclusion, preserves a “universe of what is taken for granted” (1977, 170). Bourdieu further argues that practices involve “a logic designed to dispense with concepts” (1977, 116). but should not be described as logical processes. It is more of an abstract logic, but body movements and actual practice should be analyzed with an investigation into the connection between body movements and the classification system. “Body language”, according to Bourdieu, is more ambiguous to analyze than linguistic patterns(1977, 120).