Habitus: beyond sociology

This paper presents a contribution of a set of interrelated innovative thinking to revitalize the sociological understanding of the notion of the habitus. It discusses contributions by sociologists exploring the sources of Bourdieu's inspiration from psychology and psychoanalysis to the development of the concept, and brings in new thinking inspired by authors and frameworks that branch out of sociology to bring into sociology fresher thinking. Three areas of concern about habitus are focused on: firstly, the objectivism and subjectivism dichotomy; secondly, the plasticity or rigidity of the concept; and thirdly, the implications of intangibles attached to the notion. The paper introduces a Special Section including five articles on theoretical and empirical explorations bringing exciting perspectives to creative and critical sociology.     

Fish, field, habitus and madness: the first wave mental health users movement in Great Britain

This paper traces and explains the emergence of the mental health users movement in Great Britain, focusing specifically upon the formation of the Mental Patients Union in the early 1970s. The analysis presented in the paper draws, to some extent, from conventional movement theory. In addition, however, it draws from the work of Pierre Bourdieu. This represents an innovation in movement analysis and the necessity of this innovation is argued for in an early section of the paper.     

The historical universal: the role of cultural value in the historical sociology of Pierre Bourdieu

Best known for his pioneering study Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, in which the aesthetic attitude of disinterestedness is accounted for as the expression of a class ethos, Bourdieu has become something of an icon of relativism. In thus effecting a Bakhtinian 'discrowning' of official hierarchies of the arts, he is often celebrated for his concern to place all tastes, popular and high, on a similar footing, equally rooted in specific class practices. Only a careless inattention could support such a conclusion. From his early interventions in French cultural policy debates up to and including The Rules of Art and Pascalian Meditations (1996), Bourdieu has consistently repudiated the view that a sociological approach to questions of aesthetic judgment must result in a levelling form of relativism. In exploring why this should be so, this paper considers the issues at stake in the forms of 'historical universalism' that are associated with Bourdieu's account of the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere. It does so with a view to identifying some of the difficulties underlying his understanding of sociology as a historical practice.     

象征差异与权力:试论布迪厄的象征支配理论

本文对布迪厄的文化支配理论进行了较为详尽的考察。布迪厄指出,象征差异以间接的方式从属于它们所表达与改变的经济差异。而且在象征体系内,上层阶级的生活方式总是占据支配性地位,并作为一种合法品味被广泛用来对下层阶级实施“象征暴力”。象征差异体现了一种等级关系和权力关系。布迪厄的文化（象征）支配理论不仅对我们理解文化在社会结构（各种支配关系和不平等关系）的生产与再生产过程中的重要作用有很大的帮助,而且也为我们剖析以各种不同形式影响和制约人类知觉、判断及行为的无形的权力作用,即“文化支配（象征支配）”的机制提供了全新的视角。     

从实践出发:开启艺术人类学研究的新视域

从实践出发,就是把社会生活的实际运行过程作为最基本的研究对象和研究目标,并使之贯穿于学术研究的始终。艺术人类学把从实践出发作为学科的学术价值取向,既承续了其母体学科文化人类学的学术传统,又确定了与文艺学、美学、艺术学等以艺术和审美为研究对象的诸学科相区别的学科边界,从而赋予艺术人类学作为文化人类学的新兴子学科或独立性的交叉学科的建构具有了合理性与合法性,进而开启出生活世界的艺术和审美活动的新视域,在艺术和审美研究领域拓展出以田野民族志为基本方法和以人们在生活中的艺术创作和接受行为为焦点、以由社会关系网络和社会结构所构成并对人及其行为具有形塑作用的场域为坐标、以由社会制度或社会规定性逐渐内化到人的身体之中而形成的并具有不断吸纳特定场域中新的社会规定性以调整与重构自身和实践对象的惯习研究为指归的研究策略。     

IS THERE SUCH A THING AS AN ONLINE HEALTH LIFESTYLE?

The purpose of this paper is to examine the use of the Internet for health-related purposes and whether this usage is part of larger pattern of health-promoting behaviors, or health lifestyle. Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus provides the key theoretical concept that links health lifestyle and the digital inequality framework to explain how social conditions (i.e. social status and quality of Internet access) influence attitudes and behaviors. Path analysis is used to examine the relationship between key endogenous variables on attitudes, health behavior, health status, and online health-related activities, while controlling for demographics and other factors. Data comes from the National Cancer Institute's 2007 Health Information National Trends Survey. The results demonstrate that online health behaviors can be usefully conceptualized as elements of health lifestyle. The combination of health lifestyle and digital inequality provides a broader theoretical framework that highlights the importance of social conditions to influence people's Internet habitus and routine health-promoting behaviors. The combination of health lifestyle and digital inequality provides a useful theoretical framework for future research investigating persistent social disparities in health and the potential for the growing reliance on information and communication technologies to contribute to socially patterned health outcomes.     

从布迪厄社会学理论视角看苏曼殊《惨世界》的翻译动机和策略

以法国社会学家皮埃尔·布迪厄的社会学理论为指导,主要从其核心概念“场域”、“惯习”入手,分析清末民初翻译家苏曼殊汉译《悲惨世界》的动机和策略,指出当时的社会历史条件和其个人的个性及价值观促使了译作《惨世界》的诞生,并影响了该译作的风格特点。     

Class habitus and perception of the future: recession,employment insecurity and temporality

This paper examines the consequences of the recent economic downturn and UK government spending cuts, as exacerbations of prevailing trends in neoliberal employment policy, on temporal perception, specifically as it relates to the adaptation of subjective anticipations of and projections into the future to objective prospects of unemployment by class. Grounded in a phenomenologically‐minded Bourdieusian conceptualization of class and time and contextualized by statistics on chances of job loss, it draws on qualitative research with 57 individuals from across the class structure to chart differing dispositions toward the future. In particular, it distinguishes three orientations – the future as controllable, the future as uncontrollable and the future as reasonably controllable – which appear to correspond with resources possessed.     

Reflexive habits: dating and rationalized conduct in New York and Berlin

This paper builds on the work of Norbert Elias to examine how conduct varies across cultural contexts. We compare courtship practices in New York and Berlin and ask how people act during the course of ‘getting together’ with a sexual or romantic partner. Drawing on interviews in both contexts, we find that conduct associated with the practice of ‘dating’ among New York respondents is more rationalized as indicated by a greater awareness of timing, a greater degree of intentionality and planning and a greater tendency to psychologize self and others. Berlin respondents report observations of themselves and others in less detail and tend to describe themselves as passive objects of the impersonal forces of love. Whereas conduct associated with dating is more reflexive in some ways, these forms of reflexive conduct are not themselves fully conscious or the object of reflection but have in turn become taken for granted and habitual. These findings challenge us to conceptualize habitus in a manner that does not reproduce the opposition between habit and reflexivity but allows us to use the concept as a tool to capture variations in how self‐monitoring and habit are combined in modes of conduct.