GETTING OUT OF THE HABITUS:AN ALTERNATIVE MODEL OF

DYNAMICALLY EMBODIED SOCIAL ACTION

B F

University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign)

Although Bourdieu’s theory of practice has drawn widespread attention to the role of the body and space in social life, the concept of habitus is problematic as an explana-tory account of dynamic embodiment because it lacks an adequate conception of the nature and location of human agency. An alternative model is presented which locates agency in the causal powers and capacities of embodied persons to engage in dialogic,signifying acts. Grounded in a non-Cartesian concept of person and ‘new realist’,post-positivist philosophy of science, vocal signs and action signs, not the dispositions of a habitus, become the means by which humans exercise agency in dynamically embodied practices. Ethnographic data from the communicative practices of the Nakota (Assiniboine) people of northern Montana (USA) support and illustrate the theoretical argument.

one has to situate oneself within ‘real activity as such’(Pierre Bourdieu 1990 (1980): 52).

it is our acting that lies at the bottom of our practices(Ludwig Wittgenstein 1977: #204).

The concept of [causal] force is richer than that of disposition. The array of forces that acton a system uniquely determine the disposition of that system to change but not conversely(Sober & Lewontin 1993: 586).

Driving west across rolling grasslands in northern Montana, I arrived at FortBelknap Reservation on a hot summer afternoon. A cluster of administrativebuildings at the Reservation Agency included a community recreation hall,which provided shade and welcome relief from driving. Wandering throughthe building, I asked a young woman for directions to the nearby town ofHarlem.

‘You go out of here this way, turn this way again and you’ll come to thehighway. Go this way again, over the river, and you’re gonna go that way intotown.’

Pointing gestures made sense of her instructions and I later realized thather gestures were orientated to the cardinal directions even though she hadno visual landmarks to guide them (see figure 1).1

© Royal Anthropological Institute 2000.J. Roy. anthrop. Inst. (N.S.) 6, 397-418

Field research taught me that her response was typical. Nakota people usegesture and geographical space extensively in everyday discourse. North, south,east, and west, plus ‘earth’ and ‘sky’, constitute an indexical form intrinsic tomany social situations and events. This form structures integrated speech andgesture in social spaces, whether someone gives directions, tells stories orengages in political discourse. It is the spatial form for religious and ceremo-

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F 1. Route directions given by young Nakota woman at Fort Belknap.The flow of actionsigns (written in the Laban script) and vocal signs read from bottom to top.

nial events and it influences visual artwork and ceremonial regalia (see Farnell1995a; 1995c).

The Nakota concept of the four cardinal directions differs in importantways from the Euro-American tradition in that each direction comprises anarea of a circle sectioned into four quarters instead of four directional lines(see figure 2). Moreover, in the Nakota language, the cardinal directions arecollectively known as t’ate topa (the four winds) or t’ate oye topa (tracks of thefour winds). In spiritual practices it is from the four winds that various kindsof spiritual assistance (‘powers’) come. Instead of the four directions as linesmoving outward from a given point, the Nakota terms denote a general direc-tion from which certain things come towards a person. These important con-nections to spiritual beliefs confirm Williams’s observation that the spaces inwhich human acts occur are simultaneously physical, conceptual, moral, andethical (Williams 1995: 52; cf. de Certeau 1984; Clifford 1997: 52-91; Gupta& Ferguson 1997).

In Bourdieu’s theory of practice, this semantic structuring would beexplained as part of a Nakota habitus, an ‘unconscious practical logic’ by means of which Nakota people are ‘disposed’ to use this symbolic form as a ‘generative schema’ when they give route directions, tell stories, or dance.I find this explanation inadequate because, despite Bourdieu’s claims to the contrary, its residual Durkheimianism and Cartesianism mislocates human agency and so provides no satisfactory explanation of the means bywhich the habitus can be linked to what people do and say. Although habitus has been important in alerting anthropologists to the role of bodily and spatial practices in social action, it does not achieve an account ofembodied social action or a solution to the problem of disembodied socialtheory.

The Latin word habitus refers to ‘a habitual or typical condition, state orappearance, particularly of the body’ ( Jenkins 1992: 74). It has appeared inEuropean thought in the work of Hegel, Husserl, Weber, Durkheim, andMauss. It came to anthropology through Mauss’s ‘Les techniques du corps’(Mauss 1979), first published in 1935. Bourdieu refined and reintroduced theterm in Outline of a theory of practice (1977). The notion of habitus, whichappeals to the scholarly authority invested in Latin, appears to have filled alexical gap in British and American socio-cultural anthropology. It may havebeen widely accepted because it appears to offer a corrective to the curiouslydisembodied view of social life that permeated Western social theory untilrecently.2 In addition, the growth of practice-oriented approaches in anthro-pology sought to include agents and their embodied praxis/practices (Ortner1984). Debates about the nature and meaning of habitus (e.g. Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992; Calhoun et al. 1993; Jenkins 1992) attempt to clarify theconcept and to determine its value for anthropological understanding. It is inthis spirit that I seek to identify certain limitations in Bourdieu’s formulationand offer an alternative model.

Since semantically laden spaces cannot be understood without attention toactive persons moving in such spaces, the heart of the matter lies in under-standing (1) the nature and exact location of human agency and (2) the roleof causality in human affairs. If the habitus is a set of dispositions and genera-tive schemas that incline people to act in certain ways, we must ask how

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F 2. Two different cultural conceptions of the cardinal directions.

these entities operate and whether they are necessary to account for whatpeople say and do. The problems emerge more clearly if we place habitus inthe context of a non-Cartesian concept of person and a conception of therelationship between agency, substance, and causality articulated in the post-positivist philosophy of science known as ‘new realism’ (Aronson 1984;Aronson et al. 1995; Bhaskar 1978; Harré 1986).

Although the new notion of dynamically embodied personhood thatemerges is a Western secular, social-scientific conception, it provides a betterground from which to explore alternative anthropologies of personhood andself. Until we engage in a critical examination of our ontological and episte-mological position(s) on this topic, we risk reading other persons through theimplicit dualistic categories characteristic of a distorting Cartesian lens.

Before presenting an alternative model of dynamically embodied action, Ibriefly summarize Mauss’s use of habitus, then critically examine Bourdieu’suse of the term.

Mauss’s habitus

In ‘Les techniques du corps’, Mauss paid attention to a category of ‘miscella-neous social phenomena’ that he collected over a period of years. He callsthese ‘techniques of the body … the ways in which from society to societymen [sic] know how to use their bodies’ (1979: 97). He observed that physi-cal activities such as walking, running, swimming, and digging are performedin ways specific to their societies, noting that Polynesians do not swim asFrenchmen do and that swimming techniques in Europe changed during hislifetime. Likewise, during the First World War he noticed that English troopsdid not know how to use French spades (a fact requiring 8,000 spades to bechanged whenever French divisions were relieved, and vice versa). He saw aBritish infantry division, marching with a completely different frequency andstride from the French, and found their gait to be at odds with French buglers.

Mauss recognized that differences in actions were the result of social edu-cation in bodily techniques.While some techniques are acquired through imi-tating adults and peers, others are imposed through explicit educationaltraining. This involves adhering to rules of politeness and etiquette – ‘Elbowsoff the table!’ and ‘Sit up straight!’ Mauss provides an example of a Maorimother schooling her daughter in their distinctive gendered style of walking:‘You’re not doing the onioni’. In sum, the biological is always and everywhereshaped by the social and psychological: ‘three elements indissolubly mixedtogether’ (1979: 102). It is worthy of mention that Mauss addressed an audi-ence of psychologists when he wrote this paper, choosing the word habitusinstead of the French habitude (habit or custom) in order to emphasize thatthese actions were not individual habits. Rather, they varied according toDurkheimian ‘social facts’: that is, they varied among ‘societies, educations,proprieties and fashions, prestiges’ (1979: 101).

This brief synopsis historically situates the anthropological use of habitusand highlights the extent to which Bourdieu revisits Mauss’s focus on thesocial nature of embodied action. Bourdieu’s later work (1984) also developsMauss’s programmatic suggestions about the constitutive role of embodiedaction in the construction of class and status. However, Bourdieu requireshabitus to do much more theoretical work than this.

Bourdieu’s habitus

In his theory of practice, Bourdieu wishes to account for the ‘practical knowl-edge’ of social actors – the whole complex of habituated activities of ordi-nary living that people acquire through socialization: a ‘practical sense’ of how to act and react appropriately as they think, feel, talk, stand, gesture, andorganize social spaces.

At the heart of Bourdieu’s project is an attempt to develop a theory ofaction that will replace the subjectivist–objectivist dualism in classical socialtheory with its problematic matching pair: ‘individual’ and ‘society’. He wantsto ‘escape from under the philosophy of the subject without doing away withthe agent as well as from under the philosophy of the structure but withoutforgetting to take into account the effect it wields upon and through theagent’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992: 121–2; see also Bourdieu 1985). He rein-

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troduces habitus to account for the nature of the relationship between indi-vidual and society, because

I wanted to account for practice in its humblest forms – rituals, matrimonial choices, themundane economic activity of everyday life etc. – by escaping the objectivism of actionunderstood as a mechanical reaction ‘without an agent’ and the subjectivism which portraysaction as the deliberate pursuit of a conscious intention, the free project of a consciencepursuing its own ends and maximizing its utility through rational computation (Bourdieu& Wacquant 1992: 121).

Bourdieu wants to avoid objectivist, behaviourist accounts of human activ-ity that deny agency, without resorting to their subjectivist opposite. He wantsto avoid references to rules of social action, observing that social regularitiesformulated by observers after the fact as ‘rules’ can become a discourse inwhich such rules are supposed to exist in people’s heads and guide theiractions. This echoes Wittgenstein’s observation that ‘People use rules to assessthe correctness of their actions; rules do not use people as the vehicles of theircausal efficacy to generate actions’ (paraphrase of Wittgenstein in Mülhäusler& Harré 1990: 7).

If the strategies people employ and the practices in their everyday livescannot be understood solely in terms of rational individual decision-makingor as being determined by supra-individual structures, how can we accountfor them? Bourdieu’s answer is to say that they are embedded in a habitus that,‘once acquired … underlies and conditions all subsequent learning and socialexperience’ (Bourdieu 1977: 72-95; 1990: 52-65).

To see if habitus is adequate to account for these aspects of social life towhich Bourdieu draws attention, we must ask, what is the habitus exactly andhow does it connect with what people say and do? Bourdieu tells us that thegenerative schemas and dispositions of the habitus are durable because they arelearned during the early years of life. Inscribed in ‘bodily hexis,’3 they arehabitual and unreflexive: ‘[T]he agent does what he or she “has to do” withoutposing it explicitly as a goal – beneath the level of calculation and even con-sciousness, beneath discourse and representation’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992:128). And again: ‘Bodily hexis … turned into a permanent disposition, adurable manner of standing, speaking and thereby of feeling and thinking.… The principles embodied in this way are placed beyond the grasp of consciousness, and hence cannot be touched by voluntary deliberate transfor-mation, cannot even be made explicit’ (Bourdieu 1977: 93, 94). Unless youare the social theorist, apparently.

What is the ontological status of ‘dispositions’ and how is this different fromthe status of ‘rules’? How do dispositions activate the generative schemas ofthe habitus, if they are beyond the conscious grasp of the agent? And if theyare, how is the habitus not deterministic?

Bourdieu tries to avoid determinism by suggesting that the habitus only dis-poses actors to do certain things. It provides a basis for the generation of prac-tices but does not determine them. But if habitual schemas are ‘generative’,there must be some means by which agents draw on their habitus as a resourceof some kind. The problem with this formulation is that the process of generation, the socio-cultural content generated and subsequent adjustmentsto external constraints (demands and opportunities) of the social world, are

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all apparently unconscious, or less than conscious. Hence, it is not clear howthis causal link might actually work, or how it can be the doing of an agenticperson.

Bourdieu, then, has not escaped the problem of rules. He has simplyreplaced them with dispositions, equally tacit and unknowable. An appeal tosome form of tacit knowledge suits Bourdieu’s goal of removing ‘rationalchoice’ as the determining factor in accounting for what people do or say,but this means that his theory depends on the assumption of some hidden or‘virtual’ apparatus by means of which agents draw on implicit knowledge thatthey acquired through social experience and explicit socialization. Bourdieuinternalizes this sphere of tacit knowledge at the level of the individual whentalking of dispositions, and externalizes it when talking of the collectivity,because the habitus is also a social phenomenon (see Jenkins 1992: 79).

I suggest that the invention of analytical constructs or mechanisms such asthe dispositions and generative schemas of the habitus are necessary becauseBourdieu’s theory lacks an adequate conception of the nature and location ofagency, and an adequate conception of the nature of human powers and capac-ities. The want of clarity surrounding Bourdieu’s attempts to defend his con-ception against critics is symptomatic of this failure (see Bourdieu & Wacquant1992: 120-40). Clearly, the root problem is how to define and locate humanagency.

The location of agency

In our common-sense way of thinking about the world, an agent is any beingthat has the power to make things happen. From the perspective of a newrealist philosophy of science (the basis of the alternative model offered here),a transcendent entity like ‘the habitus’ is problematic because it posits a cognitive and transcendent causal nexus that has no ontological grounding.That is, it postulates an entity, the habitus, that exists somewhere between neurophysiology and the person. Bourdieu says,

As an acquired system of generative schemes objectively adjusted to the particular con-ditions in which it is constituted, the habitus engenders all the thoughts, all the perceptions,and all the actions consistent with those conditions … the habitus is an endless capacity toengender products – thoughts, perceptions, expressions, actions – whose limits are set by thehistorically and socially situated conditions of its production (1977: 95).

Habitus being the social embodied, it is at home in the field it inhabits, it perceives it immediately as endowed with meaning and interest (1992: 128).

If one asks where human agency is located in all this, one finds that ‘habitus’has replaced ‘person’ as the agentic power, located somewhere ambiguouslybehind or beneath the agency of persons. For example, we could substitute‘person’ for habitus in the passages above and regain agency (i.e. the personhas an endless capacity to engender thought, perception, etc.). The habituspresents us with what Wittgenstein would call an ‘unnecessary shuffle’ in aneffort to get to a genuine source of agency. From this perspective, such hypo-thetical entities are mistaken because as ‘virtual orders’ they are just as ethereal as the Cartesian res cogitans. In this case, the way in which the less-

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than-conscious dispositions of the habitus generate practices is just as myste-rious as the relations between Descartes’s dichotomy of ‘mental substance’ and‘physical extended matter’. Bourdieu’s model does not recognize that neither‘rules’ nor ‘habitus’ can use people, because such constructs themselves have nocausal efficacy. Only people do.

Wittgenstein’s eschewal of all reference to hypothetical cognitive and tran-scendent entities, and all reference to subterranean orders of powers, mecha-nisms, and states, was not intended to provide a better theory, but to invalidateexplanations that went beyond describing actions in terms of contextualized,situated practices – beyond saying, ‘this is what we do’ (1977: #204).Wittgen-stein’s position requires legitimization in an appropriate philosophy of science.Fortunately, this legitimation is provided by ‘causal powers’ theory (Harré &Madden 1975;Varela 1994; 1995b;Varela & Harré 1996).4

Causal powers theory

The notion of a ‘causal power’ is a central component of the new realist philosophy of science. It provides the metaphysical grounding for Harré’s conception of embodiment, person, and self (1984; 1993a; 1993b) and forWilliams’s anthropological theory of dynamically embodied human actioncalled ‘semasiology’ (1975; 1982; 1995; 1996; 1999). The notion of ‘causalpowers’ provides an alternative to the conception of human being articulatedby Descartes. Generally speaking, the traditional Platonic-Cartesian model sees‘mind’ as the internal, non-material locus of rationality, thought, language, andknowledge. In opposition to this, the ‘body’ is the mechanical, sensate, mate-rial locus of irrationality and feeling. This bifurcation has led to the valoriza-tion of spoken and written signs as ‘real’ knowledge, internal to the reasoningmind of a solipsistic individual, to the exclusion of other meaning-makingpractices, thereby bifurcating intelligent activities and ascribing them either tophysical or mental realms. Brief examination of an alternative metaphysics ofpersonhood can help us to understand exactly how a residual Cartesianism inBourdieu’s theory of practice creates a dualism between dispositions and prac-tice that is theoretically unconvincing.

In causal powers theory, human beings are one natural kind of causallyempowered entity. For this to be possible without biological reductionismrequires a new conception of substance, one that avoids Descartes’s mater-ial–non-material dualism. In his mechanistic view, all activity, be it of organicor inorganic bodies, is the result of motion. What we discern at any particu-lar moment is the result of prior motion, all the way back to the originalsource of motion, a Prime Mover – the Creator. Since no material thing isever a source of its own motion, material agency is an illusion (Harré 1995:121).

In contrast, post-mechanistic physics argues that there are original sourcesof activity in the physical world.This view, central to causal powers theory, isrooted in the changing conception of matter in the development of quantumphysics. The view requires a conception of substance in which various formsof matter are derived from moving forces of attraction and repulsion thatbecome structured into diversified natural kinds of substances with unique

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powers and capacities. The natural world is thus constituted by the distribu-tion and stratification of numerous natural kinds of powerful particulars. Inother words, different stratified natural kinds have powers and forces intrinsicto their structural design. Causation, then, is the activity of such powerful par-ticulars at work.The forces of which powerful particulars are capable producereal consequences.

This dynamical model of substance provides us with a view of human beingas a unique structure of powers and capacities.The natural powers for agencygrounded in the structure of our biological beings make possible our personalpowers, themselves grounded in and afforded by social life (Varela 1995b: 369).This means there are two sites for human agency: (1) natural (biological)powers and (2) acquired powers grounded in social activities (Shotter 1973;Varela 1995b: 369). Although self-mobilization is individual, it is effectedthrough the dynamics of inter-personal consideration. Directing oneself to actrequires that a given ‘self ’ consider how a given ‘other’ will react.The processof the enactment of human agency is thus a social act, ‘a mutual process ofconsideration whereby persons consider how [other persons] will, can or couldact in response to their own act in order to direct themselves to act in sucha way that a joint or social act is accomplished’ (Varela & Harré 1996: 323).‘Person’ is thus a social category, because the everyday enactment of personalpowers can only be accomplished socially.

‘Since the process of the exercise of human agency is social, to locate theagentic act inside the individual is not only to lose bringing about joint actswith others, but it is also to lose the essentially joint character of social reality’(Varela & Harré 1996: 323).This replaces the dualisms of individual vs. societyand subjectivist vs. objectivist with the joint activity of empowered embod-ied persons using vocal and action signs. It dissolves Cartesian subjectivismwithout losing agency, since the source of activity is the agentic efficacy ofsocial human beings. It simultaneously dissolves the objectivist notion ofsociety as social structures since the ‘powerful particulars’ that create socialentities (like institutions) are dynamically embodied persons using signifyingacts of all kinds in dialogic interactions.5

The importance of this new formulation of causality for social theory hasbeen articulated by Varela (1995a: 218), who notes that ‘contrary to theHumean tradition, the ideas of substance, causation and agency are internallycompatible with each other. In this light human agency entails both that theperson is a real entity – a substance – and that the exercise of agency is a realevent – a causal force’.

At the microscopic level, the exercise of the causal powers of electromag-netic charges brings the material world into being. At another level, the exer-cise of human causal powers brings the conversational (that is, social) worldinto being. ‘Conversation’ – not only speech exchanges, but any meaning-making practices – creates a social world just as physical causality generates aphysical one (Harré 1984: 65): ‘The conversational world, like the physicalworld, evolves under the influence of real powers and forces, dispositionalproperties of the utterances that are the real substrate of all interchanges’(Mühlhäusler & Harré 1990: 24).

‘Conversational realism’ holds that it is through their power to managesymbols that people jointly bring social order into being. This prescribes an

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ontological view of social life as rooted in two realities; biology and conver-sation.The vocal signs (speech acts) and action signs (Williams 1975) that con-stitute conversation are grounded in and enabled by, but cannot be reduced to,biology because they are symbolic (in the sense of manipulating signs) andrelations between signs are non-deterministic in meaning and effect. In con-trast to this, the relations between biological phenomena are causal and deter-ministic. Personhood is rooted in both realms. Causal powers theory thusentails a duality in Giddens’s sense (1984), but not a dualism in the Cartesiansense of positing the existence of two different substances, mind and body.Human agency is located in the powers and capacities of embodied personsfor all kinds of action rather than in a Cartesian non-material substance, or(in a reversal of that centre of privilege) in the equally ambiguous subjectivist‘bodily intentionality’ of the phenomenology of Merleau Ponty (1962; seeRussow 1988;Varela 1995a).

Of particular significance for an embodied theory of human action, causalpowers theory transcends the nature–culture divide. It reconnects us to thenatural physical world of which we are a part, without denying the species-specific powers and capacities that have given us the means to create diversecultural worlds. Humanity is ‘naturally cultural’, as it were.6

Grounding dispositions

Harré (1986: 130) reminds us that ‘dispositions are part of the scientific conception of nature just in so far as they can be actually or theoreticallygrounded in the constitutions of kinds or the generative mechanisms ofprocesses’. In conversational realism, the dispositional properties of utterancesare grounded in persons viewed as powerful particulars, as capable of causalactivity. On the other hand, dispositions in the habitus are not grounded inany clear conception of human agency.

To avoid both behaviourism and determinism, dispositions must begrounded in a natural kind of powerful particular, in which case the stimu-lus does not determine the response, but is the occasion for a powerful particular to produce the response. Since Bourdieu does not ground the dis-positions of the habitus, he commits two fallacies that violate the logic of causalpowers.

According to causal powers theory, causation is the result of the power of a particular, not a particular and a power. To separate the power from the particular is to violate the principle of structural integrity, which is thefallacy of bifurcation (see Varela 1994: 174; 1995a: 270-4). Two variants of this appear regularly in social theory. One is the psychological varieties oftranscendentalist devices such as those found in Freud, Lacan, Chomsky, andmuch of cognitive science (see Harré & Gillett 1994). Here, there is the individualist reification of internal mental structures in a ‘power and par-ticular’ schema. The Freudian unconscious is a power separate from the bodythat nevertheless controls a person’s actions. The other, sociological in themanner of Marx and Durkheim, is the collectivist reifications of external social structures: the externalization of the ‘power and particular’ schema(Varela 1994: 174). Social structures have causal power separate from the joint

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activities of persons. Thus, Bourdieu’s error is common in much of socialtheory.7

The habitus manifests both externalized and internalized variants of thefallacy of bifurcation, for it is both embodied in individuals and a collectivephenomenon. ‘[T]he habitus [is] a socially constituted system of cognitive andmotivating structures’ (Bourdieu 1977: 76). In turn, this means Bourdieucannot see dialogic signifying acts as the means by which social order is pro-duced, despite his attention to practice. An example is the following account:

[An] old woman … specializes in the magic which uses the left hand, the cruel hand (a‘left-hander’s blow’ is a deadly blow) and turns from right to left (as opposed to man, whouses the right hand, the hand used in swearing an oath and turns from left to right); she isadept in the art of slyly ‘twisting her gaze’ (abran walan) away from the person to whomshe wishes to express her disapproval or annoyance (abran, to turn from right to left, to makea slip of the tongue, to turn back or front, in short, to turn in the wrong direction, isopposed to geleb, to turn one’s back, to overturn, as a discreet, furtive passive movement, afemale sidestepping, a ‘twisted move,’ a magical device is to open honest, straightforward,male aggression) (Bourdieu 1977; 126).

Although richly evocative of Kabyle gendered spatial oppositions, bodymovement, metaphors, and common sayings, this description is ultimately ofthe norms of bodily praxis written in the third person. Bourdieu is the onlysubject here. Although he presents the actions of Kabyle men and women, histheoretical resources only allow him to include talk about them: we rarely hearfrom them. Likewise, we find detailed talk about the body, but not ‘talk’ fromthe body (Farnell 1994; 1996).

The language of theorizing

As Whorf (1984) pointed out, speakers of Indo-European languages are proneto create nouns to refer to intangible ideas. For example, our metaphors forthe intangibles of the physical world that we experience, such as time, arenouns that provide time with length and substance. We speak of a long orshort time and divide it into units we call weeks, days, hours, minutes, andseconds. We talk about not having enough time, of spending and wasting it,and so forth. Given this propensity in our language, it is not surprising to findin Western social theorizing a similar tendency to nominalize and reify intangible ideas. If we say that some activity is performed ‘knowledgeably’,even though the individual cannot say what makes it so, we are led to assume it must be knowledgeable in virtue of some thing about that indi-vidual (Pleasants 1996: 238). An adverbial expression readily spawns a noun.The Cartesian error lies in supposing ‘that every substantive must refer to a substance’ (Harré 1993: 4). Treating the substantive term ‘mind’ as a mentalsubstance commits the Cartesian error of ontologizing ‘the self ’ (Harré 1984:95–102; Mühlhäusler & Harré 1990: 115-22).

In ordinary language, we frequently talk of doing something unconsciously,without paying attention. Freud turned this adverb into a noun and created‘the unconscious’ as a causal power working behind what people do and say.Likewise, Bourdieu has turned our ordinary talk about habitual activities intoa metaphorical entity, ‘the habitus’. We are led to assume that an individual

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acts knowledgeably through a capacity to implement a set of dispositionsunderlying (or generating) that activity.

Residual Durkheimianism

It was in order to escape the Durkheimian collectivist fallacy of reifying socialstructures that Bourdieu introduces the idea of a habitus located in individualactors.This is an attempt to keep social determinism at bay without renounc-ing the influence of social and cultural forces. In the end, Bourdieu fails toavoid the fallacy of collectivism because the questionable ascription of causalpowers means that he simply translated and internalized Durkheimian ‘socialfacts’. Habitus in Bourdieu’s theory is a substitute for Durkheim’s ‘social force’in the collective social construction of the world. The problem is, if socialstructure (or the habitus) is causally efficacious, then how is it to be analysedas an entity possessing causal powers? Because Bourdieu is not clear aboutthis, an unintended consequence is an aura of determinism that is not deci-sively dispelled, despite Bourdieu’s unequivocal denunciation.

Bourdieu’s habitus thus betrays a residual Durkheimianism, because it givesus ‘social facts’ that are embodied and located in the individual without evergetting to people interacting.8 Bourdieu retains ‘the externality criterionaccording to which the facticity of the social exists outside the patterns ofjoint human action’ (Varela & Harré 1996). While persons as agents are theonly efficient causes in society, they are persons in their joint social activities.Bourdieu would undoubtedly agree with the thesis that individual being issocial, but the array of powers necessary for the creation of a symbolic socialorder are exercised when people act jointly – an idea that requires a discur-sive turn toward dialogic signifying acts (see Voloshinov 1973), especiallyspeech acts and action signs, as the means by which people exercise theiragency.

Residual Cartesianism

Bourdieu retains a dualist conception of human beings as two distinct enti-ties: mind and body.The body is a mnemonic device upon and in which thebasic practical taxonomies of the habitus are imprinted and encoded duringsocialization. He bifurcates ‘person’ when he separates a habituated body, thebody of the habitus, from mind and discourse, in an effort to avoid emphasison rational choice as a reason for action. This separation appears in his ten-dency to separate involvement with thought and language from practical activ-ities.The Cartesian mistake is to separate thought from action, presuming thatsuch action is unconscious if not accompanied by self-reflective, propositionalthought.

It is the case that ‘habit diminishes the conscious attention with which ouracts are performed’ ( James 1950: 114), but this means that we act unselfcon-sciously rather than unconsciously.This arrangement enlarges our capacity forintelligent action, allowing us to be selective about which aspects of actionwe keep in our focal awareness (Polanyi 1958). Ordinary language is instruc-

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tive here: we often say that someone ‘knows how to’ ride a bike or swim,even though most people cannot articulately describe their action or state thelaws of physics to which these activities conform.As Polanyi puts it, ‘We knowmore than we can tell’ (1967: 4).9 ‘[O]rdinary use of the term “know” oftendoes not entail or imply a corresponding discursive or propositional facilityto say how or what it is that one knows’ (Pleasants 1996: 234). Bourdieu’serror lies in assuming that the lack of such a discursive facility entails a lackof consciousness.

In this assumption, Bourdieu perpetuates a misconception in dualistthought, that thinking is what goes on in the head or brain quite distinctfrom the actions of the body, and that it necessarily precedes or accompaniesthoughtful action.As Best (1993: 201, emphasis added) points out: ‘To describean action as thoughtful is not to say that the physical behavior is accompa-nied or preceded by an inner mental event; it is to describe the kind of actionit is’. Active engagement in any physical activity is thinking, which is not tosay that one cannot also be reflective and think about the activity when oneis not engaged in it. The conception of habitus denies the possibility ofthoughtful action because it limits the body to its Cartesian status, a mind-less, unconscious repository and mechanistic operator of practical techniques.Bourdieu’s work privileges the theorist’s account at the expense of accountsof persons enacting the body in intelligent activities (Ingold 1993a; 1993b) oraction sign systems (Williams 1975) that may be out of focal awarenessthrough habit and skill but are not thereby rendered unconscious. As causallyempowered agents, we employ an embodied intentionality to act (Gibson1979: 218-19) that is embedded in intersubjective practices.

Getting out of the habitus

Although the anti-Cartesian conception of human agency articulated inHarré’s causal powers provides all the necessary conditions to get to dynam-ically embodied action, its full realization requires a theory such as Williams’ssemasiology with its concepts of the signifying body and of the action sign.10

Consistent with the shift ‘from function to meaning’ in British social anthro-pology (Crick 1976), semasiology views human beings as meaning-makerswith causal powers and capacities as embodied persons to use signifying actsof all kinds.11 A semasiology of action takes an agentic perspective on corpo-real space, which is viewed as a centre of intersecting axes linked to ourmoving bodies that structures semantically rich human spaces into right andleft, up and down, in front and behind, inside and outside.This corporeal spaceis structured by local conceptions of spatial orientation (e.g. the Nakota useof the four directions) in which action and vocal signs are embedded. Actionand vocal signs thus become the components of deictic (space/time) refer-ence, indexicality and performativity. These are, in turn, embedded withinlarger performance spaces of all kinds (e.g. living spaces, village plazas, court-rooms, etc.).

Semasiology thus relieves ‘meaning’ from being fixed to a referential or representational function and adds indexical aspects of sign functions into theanalytic frame. This allows the kinds of practical activities of special interest

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to Bourdieu to be included in the realm of the joint construction of socialaction as signifying acts. Let us take ordinary walking as an example.

To argue in a behaviouristic manner that ‘I’m just walking, it doesn’t meananything’ is to decontextualize the act, and reduce action to gross physicalmovement (Best 1978). One is, perhaps, walking to the store to get groceries,or walking in order to keep fit; or walking for the pleasure of it simply because‘being’ matters: it is a human value. All these actions are semiotic in the senseof being meaningful, intelligent activities (Ingold 1993b).Walking as an ‘actionsign’ thus takes its meaning from the context in which the walking occurs,from its place within a system of signs.

Since styles of walking are shaped socially, as Mauss observed, others canuse the way I walk to position me socially, as I can use it to position myself(on positioning, see Davies & Harré 1990; Harré & van Langenhow 1999).Although walking is normally outside one’s focal awareness it is always avail-able for focal attention if necessary. In Northern Ireland, for example, carefulreading of the walk, posture, eye gaze, and clothing of other persons (a prac-tice called ‘telling’) determines whether a person is identified as Catholic orProtestant and therefore evaluated as someone worthy of ‘talk’ (social interac-tion) or not. In this tension-ridden context, attention to ways of walking andaccompanying bodily practices has become important (Kelleher in press).When social borders of any kind must be crossed, it seem that habitual actionstake centre stage instead of remaining out of awareness.

The semasiology of action

According to Bourdieu’s theory of practice, it is the habitus of Nakota peoplethat makes them unconsciously disposed to use the symbolic form of the fourdirections and circle as a ‘generative schema’ when they give route directions.The hidden reality of the habitus is revealed in Nakota practices. In contrast,according to the semasiology of action, when Nakota people give route direc-tions, they are causally empowered dynamically embodied persons utilizingresources provided by the systems of signifying acts into which they have beensocialized. Instead of inventing a transcendental realm somewhere betweenneurophysiology and the person, we need only examine the dynamic resourcesavailable to the embodied person. The differences between these two expla-nations – the habitus or a semasiology of action – can be grasped with thefollowing ethnographic example.

A Nakota elder, skilled in using Plains Sign Language and spoken Nakota simultaneously,gave me directions for how to travel from the town of Harlem, just north of the reserva-tion, to Lodgepole, a community at the southern end.12 On this occasion she was sittingfacing north with her back towards the actual direction involved and so was confrontedwith a dilemma. If she adhered to the cultural norm of using the spatial frame of referencebased on the cardinal directions, she would have to violate the spatial grammar of PlainsSign Language by reaching out of the conventional signing space into the region behindher. She solved the problem by orientating her gestural signs as if she were facing the direc-tion of travel and taking the journey herself. Her instructions are thus not tied to actualgeographical direction, but are a 180° reversal of it and internally consistent once begun.She switched from a constant (or absolute) frame of reference based on the cardinal direc-tions to a body frame of reference, according to which spatial orientation (what counts as

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front/back, left/right, etc.) is judged from the direction the actor is facing.This is a creativeindexical move that allows her to perform clearly the signs for each feature on the journeyafter starting with ‘town’.

Figure 3 shows how the Nakota vocal signs and actions signs from PlainsSign Language accomplished this task.The action signs can be translated intoEnglish nouns such as TOWN, RIVER, STORE (place where you buy), andMOUNTAINS, plus verbs whose spatial inflections in the signing space addindexical components: CROSS (THE RIVER); GOING (FARTHER ON,

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F 3. Route directions from Harlem to Lodgepole in Nakota and Plains Sign language.

THIS WAY); GOING (A LONG WAY); ARRIVE AT (THAT PLACE) andOVER THERE.13 The directions begin with the spoken agásam (across),together with OVER THERE (N) (i.e. the hand points north towards thetown of Harlem). These are an alternative to saying tiota (town) or ‘Harlem’,and refer to the fact that one must first go ‘across the (Milk) river’ to Harlemin order to start the journey. The elder thus started her narrative using thenormative constant frame of reference based on the cardinal directions. Thenshe switched her frame of reference so that now her action signs point forwardfrom her body to indicate travelling SOUTH.

It is difficult to account for this creative move in terms of Bourdieu’s dis-positions. Do we say that she made a mistake and selected the wrong dispo-sition? Or misapplied the correct disposition? Or applied a non-standarddisposition correctly? Are we supposed to say that she was disposed to respondmistakenly (Pleasants 1996: 244)? In addition, what are the criteria for apply-ing a tacit disposition correctly? Clearly the only criteria available for correctuse of dispositions are those observable, ‘accountable’ actions displayed inpublic, which means that the postulation of the habitus and its dispositions isredundant.This makes the habitus explanatorily empty, for it merely describesagain the phenomenon to be explained. Bourdieu tells us that people say anddo things habitually according to the ways in which they have been social-ized because of their habitus, which thus becomes an artefact of the social the-orist’s own practice and his theoretical interest to transcend objectivism andsubjectivism. Not unlike reified notions of culture, it becomes a device thatgives theoretical discourse a spurious appearance of authority over what isactually happening.Wittgenstein’s rebuttal of his rationalist interlocutor appliesequally well to the use of any form of tacit knowledge on the part of socialtheorists, be it Giddens’s (1979) ‘practical consciousness’, Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’,‘tacit rules’, or the Freudian ‘unconscious’. That is, ‘you interpret a grammat-ical movement made by yourself as a quasi-physical phenomenon which youare observing’ (Wittgenstein 1968: #401).

The semasiological point is that my Nakota consultant is not being acti-vated by her habitus. Rather, the semiotic modalities of vocal and action signsprovide her with culturally shaped means of conceptualizing (using) her cor-poreal space.This provides a resource for thoughtful (but not necessarily reflec-tive) action according to context and purpose, through which norms can beadhered to or creatively transgressed. In contrast with Bourdieu’s talk aboutthe body, in the form of third-person descriptions of normative practices thatare activated by the dispositions of a habitus, we have talk from the body,accounts of persons enacting their bodies using vocal signs and action signsin dialogic interactional processes.

Concluding remarks

I have argued that even though Bourdieu’s concept of habitus has been animportant sensitizing construct, it is theoretically problematic from the per-spective of a realist philosophy of science.The habitus turns out to be a hypo-thetical cognitive and transcendent causal nexus that has no ontologicalgrounding because it exists somewhere between neurophysiology and the person.

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I have also suggested that the invention of an analytical construct like thehabitus is necessary to Bourdieu’s theory of practice, because he does not have an adequate conception of the nature and location of agency and thenature of human powers and capacities. If the implicit conception of causa-tion as either internal or wholly external to individuals is no longer satisfac-tory, it follows that Bourdieu’s habitus contains residual Cartesianism andDurkeimianism.

Social theory has had a propensity to create ontologically problematic enti-ties such as internal mechanisms and macrosocial forces. A systematic con-ception of causal powers, and the notion of the ‘powerful particular’ in Harré’sapproach, helps control this. Since the ascription of causal powers depends onsatisfying certain stringent ontological conditions, it offers social theory a newand potentially fruitful meta-theoretical constraint.

Unfortunately, Bourdieu’s theory of practice gives us an essentiallyungrounded and mind-less notion of human action that is restricted to habit-uated practices.Without any deeper understanding of the performative powerof action and vocal signs as equally available resources for meaningful actionin social life, Bourdieu is stuck on the twin river-banks of objectivism andsubjectivism.We can characterize this by saying that although Bourdieu’s the-oretical resources allow him to include talk about the body, he is unable toinclude ‘talk’ from the body.

One important reason why Bourdieu’s theoretical project fails in this regardis that he never lets go of the dualistic terms he wishes to transcend, despitehis desire to ‘reject all the conceptual dualisms upon which nearly all post-Cartesian philosophies are based: subject and object, internal and external,material and spiritual, individual and social and so on’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant1992: 122). He continues to use them in ways that compromise his theoret-ical goals.The habitus as ‘socialized subjectivity’ is the source of ‘objective prac-tices’ but is itself a set of ‘subjective generative principles’ produced by the‘objective patterns of social life’. Bourdieu appears unable to think in termsother than those rooted in the dualism, and it is precisely in this kind of talkthat we see him jumping from one bank to the other.

I have also indicated how we might be able to connect saying with doingand thus tackle what Giddens (1984: xxii) identified fifteen years ago as thenext major problem in social theory. Once conceived as powerful particularsat work in a non-Cartesian metaphysics, human beings become persons, embod-ied agents in a social world of signifying acts, using vocal and action signs.These two kinds of semiotic practices (among others) are the means by whichsocial action is carried out; that is, learned, passed on, imposed by and ontoothers, changed and reinvented. As Bourdieu himself advocates, the importantshift from structure to process and practice involves situating ourselves theo-retically and methodologically within ‘real activity as such’, but I suggest thatthis also entails getting out of the habitus and following Wittgenstein’s direc-tive that ‘it is our acting that lies at the bottom of our practices’.

NOTES

My thanks to Rom Harré, Alejandro Lugo, Andy Orta, Charles Varela and Drid Williams fortheir insightful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. The usual disclaimers apply. I am also

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deeply indebted to the generosity of numerous Nakota teachers and friends on the Fort BelknapReservation, as well as the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research who sup-ported the long-term field research.

1 Figures 1 and 3 use Labanotation. The graphic signs designate specific body parts, the direction of their movement and the relationships between them (e.g. touching, passing nearetc.). The flow of action and speech through time reads from bottom to top. Williams andFarnell (1990) and Farnell (1995c) describe this system.

2 For discussion and overviews of the absent body in social theory, see Frank (1991); Shilling(1993); Turner (1984; 1991). For discussion of the absent moving body in social theory, seeVarela (1994; 1995a) and Farnell (1994; 1995a; 1999). For a new paradigm of embodiment inanthropology, see Csordas (1994); Lock (1993); Scheper-Hughes and Lock (1987).

3 Bourdieu’s move to embody social theory relies on the dual notions of habitus and hexis,the latter with a meaning similar to the Latin habitus. ‘Bodily hexis’ denotes a personal mannerand style in matters such as deportment, stance, gait, and gesture that ‘combines with the social’(Bourdieu 1977: 83, 87, 94).

4 A disclaimer is necessary here. European social thought has frequently grounded the legitimacy of its hypotheses and conclusions on its imitation of the natural sciences. The argument I present here does not seek to imitate the natural sciences, nor does it intend to provide a new foundationalism based on the biological realities of human life. Instead, I illustrate how a reflexive anthropology requires an explicit philosophy of science to clarify itsontological and epistemological presuppositions about personhood and agency. While human-istic anthropologists have been correct in rejecting objectivist and positivist versions of doingscience based on natural-science paradigms, a wholesale rejection of science throws the babyout with the bath water. There are post-positivist philosophies of science that distinguish thenatural and social sciences on more adequate grounds. New realism provides an example ofhow, in seeking to understand the lives of human beings, we can be scientific in the same sense,but not in exactly the same ways as the natural sciences (Bhaskar 1979: 203). This is becausethe social sciences are ‘internal’ with respect to their subject-matter in ways in which the natural sciences are not. Since the social sciences are in principle incapable of realizing experimental decisiveness, precision in meaning assumes the place of accuracy of measurement(Bhaskar 1978: 59).

5 The social nature of human being afforded by the new ontology reorients theories ofperson, self, and agency away from an ethnocentric, individualist psychologism and towardssocio-cultural dimensions of interaction, cross-cultural variability (Hill & Irvine 1993) and theenactment of indexical dynamics (Mülhäusler & Harré 1990; Urciuoli 1996). Accordingly, thelocus of ‘meaning’ shifts from internal mental structures and the individual, towards the dia-logic processes within which meanings are constructed and construed. See Farnell and Graham(1998) for further references to such ‘discourse centred’ approaches to culture, and Harré (1995)and Harré and Gillett (1994) for application to ‘discursive psychology’.

6 Geertz (1973) recognized that we are ‘naturally cultural’, and essays in MacCormack andStrathern (1980) problematize the nature–culture divide.Their calls are, however, programmatic.They do not provide the necessary epistemological and ontological grounding to make such aconceptual move.

7 Bhaskar’s ‘critical realism’ takes a direction rejected by Harré (see Davies & Harré 1990;Varela & Harré 1996). Harré locates structures in human activity whereas Bhaskar locates struc-tures outside human activity.The heart of the difference lies in the conception of causal powers(see Potter & Lopez in press).

8 Durkheim had a realist notion of causation, but it remained intuitive. He clearly struggledto convince himself that the reality of ‘the social fact’ was an external determinism, that thenecessity for social rules must mean the necessity of the social rules (Varela & Harré 1996: 319).Although Bourdieu renounces the notion that ‘rules’ constitute an implicit realm behind socialbehaviour, he invents new analytic constructs that commit the same conceptual errors.

9 Ryle’s (1949) distinction between ‘knowing that’ and ‘knowing how’ is helpful. Knowledgethat can be put into discursive or propositional form is ‘knowing that’, but this is always under-pinned by our large stock of ‘knowing how’ that is not in propositional form.

10 See Williams (1975; 1982; 1995; 1999) and Varela (1993). ‘Semasiology’ is derived fromGreek and refers to signification and meaning. Williams employed the term in order to dis-tinguish her theory from other approaches to semiotics that include the sign functions of non-human animals and machines. In contrast, semasiology conceptualizes the signifying body and

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the spaces in which people move as specifically human; that is, as meaning-making practicesspecific to language-using creatures (Williams 1991: 363-4).

11 Williams developed the concept of the ‘action-sign’ for an anthropology of human move-ment systems utilizing programmatic ideas from Saussure’s original vision of a scientific studyof ‘the functioning of signs within social life’ (Saussure 1916: 33; Williams 1999; see Farnell1999). Action signs are units of human body movement that take their meaning(s) from theirplace within a system of signs. Like spoken languages, action-sign systems are open-endedsemantic systems, and encompass all human uses of the medium of bodily movement. Theyrange from the unmarked (i.e. ordinary) uses of manual and facial gestures, sign languages,posture, skills, and locomotion to highly marked deliberate choreographies of the kind thatoccur in rituals, ceremonies, dances, theatre, the martial arts, and sports.

12 Although English has, on the whole, taken over the inter-tribal communicative functionof Plains Indian Sign Language or ‘sign talk’, it remains important in story-telling, oratory,during ritual events and in communicating with the deaf and elderly (see Farnell 1995a; 1995c;Taylor 1996).

13 Words in capital letters are translations of action signs into English vocal signs (a wordgloss).

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Sortir de l’habitus: un modèle alternatif de l’incarnationdynamique de l’action sociale

Résumé

Bien que la théorie de la pratique de Bourdieu ait attiré une attention considérable sur lerôle du corps et de l’espace dans la vie sociale, le concept d’habitus est problématique pourrendre compte et expliquer l’incarnation dynamique car il est dépourvu d’une concep-tion adéquate de la nature et de la situation de l’action humaine. Je présente un modèlealternatif qui situe l’action dans les pouvoirs causatifs et dans la capacité qu’ont les per-sonnes incarnées de s’engager dans des actes dialogiques et signifiants. Sur les bases d’unconcept non-cartésien de la personne et d’une philosophie des sciences ‘néo-réaliste’ et

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post-positiviste, les signes vocaux et les signes d’action, et non les dispositions d’un habitus,deviennent les moyens par lesquels les humains exercent leur capacité d’action dans des pra-tiques incarnées dynamiquement. Des données ethnographiques sur les pratiques commu-nicatives des Nakota (Assiniboines) du Montana du Nord (USA) corroborent et illustrentcette discussion théorique.

Anthropology Department, University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), 109 Davenport Hall, 607 5thMathews Ave., Urbana, IL 61801, USA Bfarnell@uiuc.edu

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