Decoding the Socialisation Process: Bourdieu's Theory of Practice
Eminent French Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu grounded a robust understanding of biases and beliefs involved in the socialisation process. He postulated an integrated theoretical framework by conceptualising habitus in his work. His fundamental concern during his intellectual career was to resolve the dichotomies in social theory concerning micro-macro, material-symbolic, objective-subjective and other areas that require interpretation. One of his primary sociological interests entails understanding practical logic in daily life involving the socialisation process to interpret power's varied relations while fostering reflexive sociology's development.
His Theory of Practice introduces the analytical concept of habitus, amongst other elements of field, practice, culture, and forms of capital. While Bourdieu posits that gender, ethnicity, class, education, culture and the historical period cultivate an individual's habitus, the practice of what one performs in everyday life is dynamic, with varied themes that play out in the background. Consistent improvisation in one's role and performance prevails. He construes that practice is the outcome of the relationship between the different forms of capital and an individual's habitus, along with an association with the field of action.
At the very outset, Bourdieu introduces the relevance of methodological objectivism and the construction of objective relations corresponding to the realm of structure and the systems of objective relations from statistical regularity to construct a theory. He scrutinises the preconditions required in the process, developing a dialectic internalisation of externality and externalisation of internality.
Bourdieu demonstrates that an environment produces habitus through systems of durable and transposable dispositions to adapt to goals and express operations to orchestrate actions objectively. He provides a teleological description via the action-reaction relations between two entities that incorporate a strategic intention to formulate objective structures of product and function based on past practices.
Sartarian anthropology is consolidated on its 'passive syntheses' of the universe and rigorous dualism between pure transparency of the subject and mineral opacity of the object. Consequently, an objective interpretation of social groups corresponds to the 'sociality of inertia', which construes the class as seriality and the meaning made by the body. Here, the materialisation of the recurrence of events in cultural objects is highlighted, and an intervention of the individual praxis is involved in 'reason' to understand the content of relationships when they are taken in totality.
Hence, Bourdieu posits a strategic calculation of habitus, which he believes quasi-consciously enables past-effect to derive an expected objective in the forthcoming reality. This is supported by the cognitive and motivating structures incorporated into the practice principle. The correlation between scientifically constructed objective probabilities and subjective aspirations is drawn to calculate probabilities instead of spontaneous dispositions.
Bourdieu highlights a tendency for objectivism, scientific theory of probabilities, and negative descriptions of implicit logic in statistical interpretation. He takes the methodological approach of science, wherein controlled experiments are performed to hone the principles of ethos in the learning process. Consequently, the hysteresis effect and the logic of the constitution of habitus are highlighted for the concept of habitus to understand the modes of generation in experiences.
The role of actions as a product of modus operandi is explained by Bourdieu, in which an 'objective intention' is ordained, and structures and practices influence habitus via consistent improvisations in performance. The element of the 'unconscious' is involved, too, with objective meaning and coordination. Correspondingly, Bourdieu sheds light on the meaning of subjects engaged in adjusting practices and structures of the production principle. He asserts that the orchestrations of habitus in the production of common sense are backed by objectivity and meaning in practices, robustly reinforced and programmed to generate homogeneity in groups and facilitate tacit inquiry into variances.
Harmonised practices in the habitus involve the element of 'unconsciousness' without direct interaction. Mutual influences prevail, and the synchronises in actions foster the cultivation of systematic practices of a class or group. The habitus becomes a product of dispositions, with internalised objective structures and the language of interaction embodied in the form of competence.
According to Bourdieu, the class habitus and the 'interpersonal' relations concerning the classifications of social psychology, ethnomethodology, and interactionism often tend to negate the conjunctural structure. Class homogamy is believed to be internally transferred. As stated by Bourdieu, collective actions and the production of events to conjuncture transformation practices directly shed light on the dialectical relationship between habitus and the matrix of perceptions, appreciations and actions. Say, in awakening a 'class consciousness on the ground of economic foundation and social formation. Historical practices foster the creation of the dialectical relationship between objective structures and the cognitive, motivating structures involved in articulating practices with respect to the habitus.
Thus, habitus is a product of inculcation and appreciation concerning the collective history and objective structures that rest on material conditions. It involves a social trajectory of internalised structures and schemes of perception, conception and so on; nevertheless, systematic differences arise. The individual system of dispositions suggests a structural variant of class habitus to trajectories and positions. Individual differences and structuring determinants are everyday experiences of the same class members and constitute the transformation of habitus via restructuring.
The debate of objectification and embodiment involved in the habitus deems education as an institutionalised specific and pedagogical action, which fosters the internalisation of patterns and a system of techniques that include social meanings and values for mechanical learning through trial and error. The Kabyle illustration is posited, wherein the assimilation of the product of the systematic application corresponds to the experimental analyses of a concept, involving consciousness recognition in the patterns of the habitus to comprehend the debate of objectification and incorporation concerning systematic dispositions. There is an acquisition of transformational schemes concerning the system of dispositions in silent observations and discussions, such as in the case of the sexual division of labour and the division of sexual labour. The dialectical relationship between body and space is structured concerning the mythico-ritual product conserving methods and cultural capital to clasp the male versus female spatial division for the practices and representations governed. These involve schemes of perception, thought and action. A structural analysis is presupposed to the affinity between objectivism and structuring structures. A symbolic meaning in homologous oppositions involves the internal organisation's relationship with the external world.
Space is rendered as a qualified symbolism and function of structural exercises via the practice of fundamental schemes that entail objective allegory. The mental structures involved in the habitus are constructed concerning structured operations. Male relation to sublimation is drawn, with a modified manifestation of 'manly' prowess, along with the affirmation of female potency through the lens of the psychoanalytic perspective incorporated by Bourdieu. He deems it a 'disenchanting' product that entails mythical overdetermination and the perception through symbolic categories of interpretation. He asserts that the construction of 'sexual identity' by a child in social identity involves the understanding of the child of the nature of the division of work between the two sexes that bear social and biological indices, such as the sexual division of labour. The self-image and the world image are consequently made. The bodily hexis is of political mythology and the feeling and thinking of assurance and restraints, which surfaces in gestures and mannerisms of binaries created. As Goffman interpreted it, the 'new man' is made via deculturation and reculturation, wherein the body remains a mere 'memory'. It constructs a logic of scheme for the habitus.
Through habitus, the structure constructed dictates practice through the manners of mechanical determinism while also involving the mediation of bearings and prohibitions on operations with generative schemes and paradoxes of conceiving the inconceivable.
