Using Bourdieu’s Habitus in International Relations

Abstract

The concept of habitus is a centerpiece of Pierre Bourdieu’s cultural sociology and is among the most popular conceptual imports into the Bourdieu-inspired “practice turn” in International Relations (IR). There have, however, been recurrent questions whether IR work using habitus and Bourdieu mainly “re-describe in different language” what scholars already know about world politics. This article argues that a more traditional use of habitus that pays attention to the production of habitus is key to advancing distinctly Bourdieusian and practice-based accounts of international politics. Drawing on a detailed survey of habitus scholarship in IR, the article shows how the practice turn takes a narrow view of social structure by bracketing social class, race, and gender; is preoccupied with the pedagogical labor of secondary socialization over primary socialization; and neglects the concrete embodied dimension of practice. Looking to Bourdieu’s own work, this article calls for theoretically armed empirical attention to social structure, primary socialization, and embodiment. It articulates a specific strategy for this recovery: closer attention to the production of habitus by mapping the biographies of individuals and groups and relating these sedimented histories to agents’ practices and shared structures of experience.