The Making of a Good White - E-thesis - Helsinki.fi

In Bourdieu’s theory of practice, the notion of habitus, on the one hand,
aims to go beyond the theories of methodological individualism such as
phenomenology, that explain practices as a non-reflected basis for social
life. On the other hand, this notion seeks to avoid the structuralist or structural
functionalist views, which tend to perceive practice as too constituted
and pre-ordained. For him, social life is an interaction of structures,
dispositions and actions which, together with social structures (fields, institutions
and discourses) and embodied knowledge produce orientations
to practice, which, in turn, influence social structures. (Postone, LiPuma
and Calhoun 1993: 4.)
Habitus is relational, manifested in a multitude of human characteristics
in different cultural and historical locations, and in what Bourdieu
called ‘social spaces’. These semi-autonomous social spaces or fi elds are
characterized by their own agents (such as poor whites, social workers
and middle-class whites), their own history and their own logic. The
fields are built with different principles of differentiation, namely capital,
which can be economic and cultural. Economic capital refers to material
resources, while cultural capital refers to knowledge and skills such as
education. Bourdieu pointed out that these capitals can also be seen as
symbolic capital once it is perceived and recognized as such in a system
of classification (Bourdieu 1998: 85). Thus, the quantity of cultural and
economic capital that an agent (a group, class or a person) has, grants it
(them or him/her) a certain position and a tendency towards certain habitus
(Bourdieu 1998: 6-9). However, each field is dependent on other fields.
Capital rewards gained in one field may be transferred to another. Moreover,
each field, connected to class relations, is a site of internal struggles
and battles over the power to define a field. (Postone et al. 1993: 6.)
A person living in a poor white suburb could claim symbolic capital
by showing identification with the middle-class habitus. If there was no
money, one could still always compete with the neighbours over who had
most avidly internalised the White way of life with all its trappings.
Habitus can be simultaneously individual and collective, manifested
in the individual behaviour, and the likes and dislikes of a whole class
of people. The idea of habitus helps to understand the principles of differentiation
in different societies. This task is carried out by understanding
the structures of differences, which reveals what is important in any
social world, and how the power is distributed, and what kind of capital is
important. (Bourdieu 1998: 31-32.)
Despite all the pressure to contrary, sometimes being as middle-class
as possible was not the best tactic of day-to-day living in a poor white
82