Habitus

The concept of habitus is overwhelmingly associated with the writing of the eminent French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. It is a philosophical term that was used by Aristotle and then intermittently by later authors including Hegel, Husserl, Weber and Durkheim. Bourdieu's development of the concept can most usefully be seen as a synthesising combination of Edmund Husserl's phenptnenologtcal rendenng of the term, Norbert Elias's use of it to emphasise the socially embedded psychology of actors and Marcel Mauss's focus on bodily habits. Bourdieu set out this idea as a way of resolving its struggles with structuralist anthropology and existentialistn, with ideas of social structure and action.