Habitus

When we talk about the forms of adaptation that people have in a physical space, it is necessary to use the concept of “Habitus”.

What do we call Habitus?

The Habitus according to the definition of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. is: “A dynamic process, through which systems of dispositions are incorporated that are inscribed in the body and the psyche, in the ways of speaking or not speaking, of walking, of eating, which characterize throughout a life the set of attitudes and behaviors of an individual ”. In other words, it refers to the physical embodiment of cultural capital, ingrained habits, abilities and dispositions that the human being possesses due to life experiences.

Habitus was one of the most influential concepts of Bourdieu and ambiguous but as expressed it,  s ccording to the place we occupy in the social corpus will be conditioned in such a way.  In turn, this structuring conditioning of the social world will endow and restrict us with certain ways of thinking, feeling and acting in realities, which will make us similar to others (habitus). This system differentiates and in doing so classifies practices where certain social agents are included and excluded.

Although social classifications differ from each other by accessibility or not to certain services, there is a symbolic, cultural capital that surrounds from the unconscious and makes different ways of acting between one class and another. Social status is symbolic, belonging to a sector of society . Meanwhile, while the economic makes class differentiation, we can argue that the symbolic, social representations, what is transmitted unconsciously and therefore unconsciously reproduced also, generate practices, actions that make us “belong to…” .

Y attitude lives

Bourdieu affirms that we cannot physically occupy a habitat without inhabiting it if we do not have the means, that is, a certain habitus. As the relationship between habitat – habitus is reciprocal, they occur together. And it is here that we want to quote Heidegger who argues that inhabiting is about the search for the meaning of inhabiting .

Continuing along the same lines, we can say that Bourdieu, P. understands the social field as a space of mobilizations and displacements, of conflicts that leaves open spaces for what has come to be called stigmatization. To produce is to live and to live is to produce that is what existence is all about . Faced with the eternal and indecipherable question, Who are we? Today more than ever we answer that we are movement, we are being affections, symbols, links that make up what we call identity.

For Devereux the concept of identity is a box of instruments, where each instrument is one of the infinite mechanisms that the subject chooses depending on the situation, on the social interaction that he has to live in the moment.

Goffman talks about the representation of himself from the theory of social role. For this, society establishes the means to categorize people and the complement of attributes that are considered ordinary and natural for the members of each of these categories. In turn, it affirms that the routines of social relationships in established environments are those that allow the individual to deal with others without attention or special thought.

Asking  ourselves about the acquired-assigned role that is occupied in the social fabric proposed by Goffman, we will arrive at the representation of themselves, which in turn is related to the desire of the other, the role that the other wants us to occupy in the framework. social and the role that we – according to certain vectors of visibility – invisibility – want to occupy. That role can carry the weight of being different, of living differently or better said, different from what we want to be or what others want us to be. We are subjects subject to a context, we are what we are being. We construct and de-construct subjectivities in interaction , in the bond with the other, in symbolic interactionism, in the here and now, according to Moreno, L.

Habitus and social classifications

E l habitus is the product of a life history, internalized actions that are put into action reacting to a situation . And that history is built partly unconsciously and partly consciously, at the same time that it is transmitted from a genealogical chain that determines ways of acting, feeling and thinking.

In the right situations, our habitus enables us to navigate successfully in social settings. For example, if an individual grew up in a tough, crime-ridden neighborhood surrounded by gangs, they likely have the kind of intelligence necessary to successfully survive that environment, that habitat, or else stay out of fighting. violent and avoid police surveillance or harassment. However, if an individual raised in such an environment were one of the lucky few to get a good job or go to college, they would probably find that the skill sets used in their habitat will be useless, and perhaps even detrimental to them. success in your new social setting. To paraphrase Bourdieu himself,

Ana María Araujo , in an investigation on the different social classifications , classifies three subtypes of these, namely: the social, family, psycho-sexual and symbolic-cultural registry. In the first one, he places everything that has to do with the socio-economic context. In the family registry, he introduces the family as a founding institution and producer of ideologies, desires, and a symbolic world. Regarding the psycho-sexual, it implants the oedipal problematic , desire , the configuration of the psychic apparatus, all of which is shaping the various ways of living sexuality. And finally, in the symbolic-cultural register, it is made of Deverux’s conceptualizations of the cultural unconscious as a guideline for behaviors, habits, myths, rituals, and meanings shared by a community.

And precisely when we articulate all these variants we can speak of habitus, and with it of social classifications, genders, generations, aesthetics, academics, body care, eating habits, dichotomies – the beautiful and the ugly, the vulgar and the distinguished, etc. .- and of struggles of places according to Vincent de Gaulejac.