5: From rules to strategies Flashcards
From rules to strategies
- How culture is transmitted from generation to generation
• The idea that on the one hand there are explanations of how the world works, that focuses on structure, on big pictures, on things that people share, on large scale. (top down explanation) And on the other hand, there is agency which focuses on an agency focused explanation on how people do things, how there are micro-interactions, how people in their everyday lives make certain little changes that then add up to make bigger changes etc. (bottom up explanation)
• Most anthropologists would agree that this is in fact a continuum. Its not one or the other. Every good explanation would take into account both the large scale top down story and the small scale bottom up story.
• We want to make sure that we get to understand the structuralist influences and explanations, and we also want to agency part to be part of our explanations, and see how they connect with each other.
Pierre Bourdieu
1930-2002
- Focus on the dialectic between ‘structure’ and ‘agency’
- Emphasises questions of practice and inequality: of our practical mastery of the world, the practice of social life, how practices reproduce inequalities etc
- against reification of structures as sets of rules: against ‘scholastic fallacy’
Introduction to the theory of Pierre Boudieu focus on these aspects and how they are linked together
- Practice – what people do
- Inequality
- The body
What does Bourdieu think about structuralism?
focus from rules to STRATEGIES.
Structuralism system of classification, classify things, one culture has a different system of classification then other people, people then act on the world according to these classifications Bourdieu is interested in these structures and logics of classifications and how people classify. He says that such a structuralism approach is interesting but when we assume that we start from rules of classification then we are making a mistake we have to move from focusing on rules (structuralism: e.g. can’t eat/can eat etc) to strategies .
The idea that rules are at the core of human behaviour is something he calls…
‘scholastic fallacy’
Thinking that people act according to rules is actually a mistake that scholars make because scholars are interested rules, and then make rules then they project this on real world then they think this is normal. A mistake typical of scholars.
e. g. don’t learn to ride a bike by rules can’t have a manual telling you how to ride a bike. You don’t learn the rules cognately then execute them you first sit on the bike then you fall off, then from that you learn certain rules e.g. keep pedalling then wont fall over.
e. g. pin codes etc – memory is in your body
Bourdieu wants to relate ideas of practice and the body to ideas of…
inequality.
- He says that Anthropologists as outsiders may try to understand what people are doing by focusing on rules
- e.g. anthropologist from other cultural background (e.g. Africa) would come to a posh dinner in UK. How would they start? Get a dining Etiquette book. May try and study this history of etiquette. If you were an outsider anthropologists you would focus on the rules because you don’t know them.
- Then they would engage in scholastic fallacy (make the typical mistake of the scholar – these people are doing things because they are obeying ‘the rules’) – Bourdieu says if we approach things in this way we are making an error - that’s because that’s not how we have learnt these rules, but for people at the table have never looked at an etiquette book. People have embodied these rules from other dinners - they don’t first look at the rules which are reflecting a structure and then act, but they do these things through bodily practice.
- But… (inequalities)… person who has never learnt these dinner party rules…the person would have to learn all these rules and then obey them, whereas the people who are around the table don’t have to learn them as they already embody them – inequality is expressed through this way as they don’t have to think about these things they just do them.
- For many people, thinking about rules is not necessary, it’s in their body. Others have to learn them, and that puts them at a disadvantage.
• In structuralism, the culture is somehow shared. What Bourdieu says here is that within cultures there are also hierarchy’s and inequalities and therefore the idea that everyone shares a particular culture (like structuralism says) is itself an inequality (e.g. lower background who goes to posh dinner would have to learn rules)
positions
- people’s locations in (unequal) social relations
- the social location where we find ourselves in the society (hierarchy’s, e.g. gender, class, income, bodily health etc. We can quantify/map this.
- We can map them objectively
- Map a person in the hierarchy of a particular society
dispositions
- disposition = a propensity to habitually act in particular ways
- a tendency to approach something in a particular way – he or she is ‘disposed’ to wake up early in the morning - something that becomes before action – its part of the person and it channels the way in which they do things
- dispositions as CAPACITIES
♣ capacity to classify and recognise (schemata)
♣ capacity to use and move our body (hexis)
♣ capacity to foresee (plan, recognise opportunities as doable or not doable, realistic/not realistic hopes and aspirations, etc.)
♣ These capacities are not equally distributed in society, they are unequal
all three dispositions, for B, are embodied
Crucial thing to him is: if we were to map dispositions, we would get a map that was homologous, that would have the same logic e.g. people that share certain social positions, tend to share certain tastes – e.g. raw food organic veg crowd tends to circle around people who are higher educated etc. He found that peoples tastes tended to cluster in the same positions. The homology between the two. There are certain obvious links: e.g. kind of people that go to watch polo, and the people who go to watch dog races, you are very likely to find
Homology
► set of relations linking up positions is homologous to set of relations linking up dispositions (homologous = unfold according to the same structural logic)
► existence of this homology between positions and dispositions works to maintain the status-quo, because it makes us feel that the social order in which we exist is the only possible one (although it is in fact a contingent social construction)
► how does this happen?
♣ our constant exposure to social relations (which relate positions unequally to each other) leads us to internalise them as a ‘set of durable and transposable dispositions‘
♣ we inherit certain ways of encountering social reality (dispositions), and we then act upon them—and this, generally, reproduces social inequality as it is (positions) because our dispositions our homologous to our positions
• He found the dispositions ‘tastes’ of particular people tend to cluster in similar ways to their position
• People who share certain social positions tend to share certain lifestyles
• What’s the link with inequality? He says that if people share certain dispositions, and capacity’s, and if these dispositions are embodied… then when they classify the world eg. I like this, I don’t like this… if they have certain dispositions towards these things of liking/not liking etc, then they are also there by classifying themselves, and telling us something about their position in society
• We make assumptions about people by their body, what they look like etc.
• Their dispositions tell us something about their position
• For bordeui, this classifying yourself, by expressing dispositions, is not a neutral process, its part of inequalities, and part of how inequities have reproduced over time, and this is part of his entire approach.
READ NOTES ON THIS
Not Rules but strategies:
► not rely on a model that explains people’s acts with reference to rules (unwritten rules of behaviour—’culture’)
► B says we should shift to the strategies of those subjects
► but ‘strategy’ does NOT mean a merely rational, cold individual calculation a la homo economicus
► such strategies are social
► such strategies are bodily
► B: reproduction of socially unequal structures relies MORE on the transferral of ways of strategising than on transferral of rule-obeying
• He places the emphasis in the fact that we don’t choose the categories by which we live. We don’t ourselves don’t make up everything from scratch. What we are like, don’t like, what we are challenged by, what we want to stay away from intrigued by etc, we didn’t make up our self, a lot of this we learn from other people in our social position. We tend to inherit dispositions. To deal with that he says that we should shift from rules to strategies.
• Structuralism tries to explain regularities and behaviour and then focuses on the rule e.g. don’t eat pork etc ‘unspoken rules’. Then link to classification.
• But he says that we shouldn’t just look at these rules as this is ‘scholastic fallacy’ What we should look at instead of rules is peoples strategies. The strategies that he is talking about and should focus on, they are not individual strategies, they are social strategies. We inherit the way in which we strategize to a large degree, which are not the same as other people as it depends on our social position. Also, they are not rational, not cognitive, not about the mind, but they are embodied. We don’t think about it, we are not necessarily aware of it, we act in certain ways because our body has become accustomed to acting in this way. Not always a conscious rational strategy.
- . If you look at peoples practices, from then you can distils a lot of information about their strategies, about what they are trying to do, their dispositions. This again links to social positions
• He is interested in regularities and patterns interested in what they do do – investigates in practice, when kids or themselves are about to get married, how do they actually engage with finding a match. Found there are systematic ways in which they do these things. People on the whole tend to share certain strategies, or ‘dispositions’ in which they find a match for marriage, that they share amongst each other. And this reflects their social positions. Dispositions related to positions!
• He gets back to the rule: Why do they all tell me that they marry cross-cousin. – ideology, covering up what is really going on.
• Shows how dispositions are systematically related (homologous) to positions
HABITUS
► ‘a system of dispositions’ (Bourdieu 2002: 27)
Habitus and strategies
► in most cases habitus harmonises individual actions with objective probabilities through adjustment of hopes and desires (cf. homology)
► regularity in strategies (capacities): for B, people who (more or less) share a certain habitus, are not best seen as obeying the same cultural rules; instead: they have similar aspirations and similar estimations of whether it is worthwhile acting towards certain goals (strategies)
► when objective probabilities change, there can be a structural mismatch (habitus slow to change)
► social inequality is not just about different amounts of capital but about how well habitus is attuned to a particular ‘field’ (field = ordered, patterned system of objective forces)
CRITICISMS OF HABITUS
► B argues that his approach is NOT static, deterministic, objectivistic
♣ fields can only be reproduced through practice
♣ action always involves some struggle
♣ so always some (even minimal) change
♣ but, B says, there really is striking regularity over time and habitus-concept grasps this:
♣ habitus changes slower than objective probabilities
♣ habitus acquired in early socialisation very persistent
- Habitus doesn’t leave space for change, its static.
- It doesn’t allow for social mobility, makes people look like robots who are totally determined by their social positions, can’t escape from it. Doesn’t leave space for creativity.
- He says in response, that this is not the case. He says that actually, there is change because my explanation is based on the observation on people’s practices… If people are doing different hings over time, not all of it will reproduce. He does leave space for change.
- He also says that data he collects shows that things stay the same, that is because in reality there is more things that stay the same than change.
- The habitus to him is durable, resilient to change
