Last week my first academic publication from my doctoral project was released in the journal Medical Anthropology Quarterly. It’s all about embodied history in China’s psy-boom (the rise of psychological services, like therapy, and of pop-psychology in the wider society). I was interested in how knowledge of psychology was interpreted by three different generations of therapists, and how they turned this into their therapeutic practice. How does knowledge become practice? I think that is one of the most interesting questions out there, particularly because practice is how we end up shaping the world around us.
Habitus
Pierre Bourdieu, the french social theorist, is credited with coming up with the concept of the Habitus (though there are analogous concepts put forth by Husserl and Merleu-Ponty before him that he is building off). For Bourdieu the habitus is comprised of “transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures”. Got that? Well, what about this? “In order to escape the realism of the structure, which hypostatizes systems of objective relations by converting them into totalities already constituted outside of individual history and group history, it is necessary to pass from the opus operandum to the modus operandi, from statistical regularity or algebraic structure to the principle of the production of this observed order, and to construct the theory of practice, or, more precisely, the theory of the mode of generation of practices, which is the precondition for establishing an experimental science of the dialectic of the internalization of externality and the externalization of internality, or, more imply, of incorporation and objectification.”
Don’t understand what that means? Well, let’s explain why Bourdieu writes like a tool by using Bourdieu’s own concept of the habitus. The habitus is embodied history. It’s how we carry all that we’ve learnt. That learning might be cultural, it might be academic. It can be anything, really. All of that ends up being carried by us, and it then forms the basis of how we respond to the world. So if you’re Bourdieu, and you’re French, and an academic brought up in a tradition that really celebrates impenetrable writing, then over time you end up absorbing all of that. When you reach for the pen (it was the 70s when he coined the concept) what comes out? Well, all of the history of everything you’ve consumed, and then your own ideas filtered through that. In a sense we function like prisms, but in reverse. All of these diverse inputs moving through us, and a solid beam out the other side.
In doing so, you construct your social world. When I write an academic paper I can’t get away with dismissing a scholar as a tool (though let me tell you, I often wish I could). Instead the rules of the game have been set by scholars like Bourdieu and there is an expectation that you will write in a certain way. To engage with a concept like habitus, you end up using terms like habitus which already separates you from everyday experience. One of my favourite examples of this is from the anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes who genuinely wrote this unironically: “We can write books that go against the grain by avoiding impenetrable prose (whether postmodernist or Lacanian) so as to be accessible to the people we say we represent.” She writes about illiterate mothers in Brazil losing their children. I doubt they read her book, whether post-modernly or Lacanianly.
Bourdieu argues that the habitus functions unconsciously. By the time you’ve put yourself all the way through a PhD programme and had multiple journal articles rejected because of your writing style (hi, it’s me) you too will notice yourself writing in increasingly impenetrable ways. I deleted the phrase ‘corporeal entity’ from a draft of this post. I meant body. That’s habitus. It’s conditioning. It’s hard to fight against.
But those unconscious dispositions also frame how easily you move through social worlds. If you went to a school like Eton then you are predisposed to feel comfortable in a space like Oxford. When you graduate, why not go for a political career? The Houses of Parliament look just like your school and your university. You’re disposed to relax. Maybe you put your feet up.
But habitus and embodied history can also be seen in more prosaic ways. How a chef holds a knife. How a baker knows instinctively whether dough has been overworked. The way a taxi driver can navigate a city. The way a basketball player knows how to block a pass. It’s all there. What do you do instinctively? What does your body tell us about your life? Look at your grandma’s hands.
I think that Bourdieu’s framing of the habitus is a bit rigid. It can undermine human agency. I think you can be aware of the history you carry and choose to question your natural tendencies. We are not static. The habitus as a concept would struggle to account for the way in which the entire globe seemed to drop hand-shaking within 3 months and how extremely complex organisations swiftly moved their entire enterprises online in a matter of days. We carry history, sure, but that should never allow you to be complacent. To quote the Rev. Angel Kyodo Williams, we are active in our passivity. We shouldn’t be resigned to our privilege or believe ourselves incapable of change. Acknowledging the existence of a habitus, and the way our histories shape us, I think is the first step to radical transformation.
Locating the Body
Embedded in the habitus is the body. It’s a theory that has opened a whole strand of anthropological work on embodiment. In my work, I’m a fan of Arthur Kleinman’s argument that ‘society stamps the body with meaning’. Beyond just providing salience for understanding ourselves as embodied beings, carrying ourselves and our histories through time and space, many psychologists and trauma specialists are also interested in the ways in which the body carries trauma. We have a tendency in the west to separate mind from body. Our conceptual frames have struggled to account for the extremely complex relationships we all have to our pain and how that can manifest throughout our systems. Mental health doesn’t make sense cleaved off from a more holistic understanding of the mind/body. For people interested in this work I recommend reading The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van der Kolk.
This week I watched a beautiful conversation hosted by Dust magazine between the performance artist MJ Harper and Erica Woodland, the founder of the National Queer Trans Therapists of Colour Network (NQTTCN). As they pointed out, systems of oppression are built on gaslighting the oppressed and disassociating them from their experience. So locating the body and finding the way back to all that it carries is the foundation of all healing practices.