Behavioral science · construct
Habitus
Pierre Bourdieu, 1972
Bourdieu wanted to explain why people so reliably reproduce the social position they were born into without anyone forcing them to. His answer was habitus: the durable dispositions a body absorbs from its circumstances — tastes, postures, a sense of what is 'for people like us' — that then generate choices feeling entirely like one's own. Structure, in this account, gets into the body and is lived as instinct.
Working definition
A system of acquired schemes that generates perception, judgment, and action; structure made second nature, reproducing itself through practice.
Where Vela uses this
Habitus gives Vela a way to read taste and formation on the learning axis — why aesthetic and moral preferences track social position so closely, and why they feel natural to the one who holds them. It pairs with the formation thread across the emotion lens and complicates any simple story of free choice. Vela uses it to notice the social shape of preference without reducing a person to their class.
Origin & lineage
Bourdieu (*Outline of a Theory of Practice*, 1972; *Distinction*, 1979) → field theory and cultural-capital research → wide application in education, sociology of taste, and class analysis.
Where it shows up in Vela
Related concepts
- Disciplinary power / the panopticon
Sits next to — Both locate social order in the trained body.
Scholars
Honest framing
Habitus is often criticized as hard to test and as leaving too little room for agency and change. Vela uses it as a lens on how disposition forms, not as a determinism about how a life must go.