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What Is Habitus?

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Theorizing Bioarchaeology

Part of the book series: Bioarchaeology and Social Theory ((BST))

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Abstract

The history of anthropology has made a tradition of studying the body. Among those early scholars who gifted us with fundamental ideas was Marcel Mauss. In the 1920s, Mauss’s students at the University of Paris acted as sounding board for his thoughts on body techniques. He formalized his lecture notes for a 1934 presidential address to the Société de Psychologie. His abbreviated statements about habitus inspired Pierre Bourdieu’s compelling treatment of the concept. Bourdieu went on to develop hexis, or embodied habitus. That practices and beliefs, structures and dispositions, leave imprints on bodies is an ingress for bioarchaeology. Here, citing modern and ancient examples and with an awareness of the potential pitfalls, I sketch out the beginnings of a bioarchaeology of body habits.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Writings on the body authored by humanists and social scientists are numerous. For a reader that hits the high points see Fraser and Greco (2005).

  2. 2.

    For a more expanded treatment of Marcel Mauss, see Fournier’s (2006) recent biography of the man.

  3. 3.

    There is much debate among paleoanthropologists about the earliest hominins capable of habitual bipedalism. Evidence, like the Laetoli footprints, is conclusive about australopithecines’ habitual bipedalism. But anatomical features exhibited by Ardipithecus kadabba (5.2–5.8), Ardipithecus ramidus (4.4 mya), Orrorin (5.7–6 mya), and Sahelanthropus (6.8–7 mya) indicate that earlier genera of hominids may have also walked erect (Harcourt-Smith 2010).

  4. 4.

    The concept did not originate with Marx, however. Aristotle (2011) invoked praxis in writings like Nicomachean Ethics (see Chap. 6), and the concept, as discussed here, is first used by the philosopher August Cieszkowski, a contemporary of Marx (Bernstein 1999: xv).

  5. 5.

    That being said, Bourdieu’s (2007) posthumous publication Sketch for a Self-Analysis does take his life experiences, particularly his fieldwork in Algeria during its war of independence from France, as contributing to a shift in his own habitus.

  6. 6.

    For comparison’s sake, an earlier version of this definition can be found in The Outline of a Theory of Practice (1995 [1977]: 72). (It appears to disregard the rules of grammar, in both the French and English language, for run-on sentences):

    The structures constitutive of a particular type of environment (e.g. the material conditions of existence characteristic of a class condition) produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively “regulated” and “regular” without in any way being the product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them and, being all this, collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor.

  7. 7.

    Near the end of his life, Bourdieu outlined his analysis of self in the book length essay (2007). “This is not an autobiography,” appears as its epigraph. The proclamation calls to mind René Magritte’s Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe).

  8. 8.

    To Camper’s point, Drapeau and Forgues-Marceau (2019) have documented the deformation of metatarsals in “Eurocanadians” from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. In comparing this population’s metatarsal torsion values to those of pre-contact “Amerindians,” they found significant differences, which they attribute to shoe type. While the latter wore soft moccasins, the former preferred hard-sole leather shoes or wooden clogs. No sexual differences were recorded, suggesting males and females wore similar shoes during these periods.

  9. 9.

    I also recognize that Chinese researchers may have conducted such work that is inaccessible to Westerners.

  10. 10.

    Boas’s own thinking on plasticity had precursors. Influential was his professor Rudolf Virchow. This German physician conducted early histological studies that showed how a cell responds to injury from disease (1859).

  11. 11.

    I acknowledge but leave it for other researchers to explore in greater detail transgenerational plasticity, or heritable epigenetic changes (Gowland 2015; Mulligan 2016).

  12. 12.

    The condition is also known as Panner’s disease, named for the orthopaedic surgeon Dr. Dane Panner who first described it. The elbows of young athletes involved in throwing sports (i.e., little league baseball players) and gymnastics are affected (Claessen et al. 2015). In the current literature, there is no mention of a Japanese predisposition, suggesting Angel was incorrect about population genetics in this case.

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    Pamela L. Geller

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Geller, P.L. (2021). What Is Habitus?. In: Theorizing Bioarchaeology. Bioarchaeology and Social Theory. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70704-0_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70704-0_2

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-70702-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-70704-0

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