Pierre Bourdieu and the Practiced Body

Despite being already aware of and sensitive to the symbolic interrelation between social and individual bodies, I still crave to understand how these resemblances happen in practice, of a social body but also the very physical, individual one, as well as how they are experienced.

Here I shift to another author considered a peacemaker between two sociological traditions, Pierre Bourdieu. He provides a theory targeting the problem of the individual adoption of one’s place in a social structure but also places focus on the physical body. Since Bourdieu’s purview is practice, the relationship between the social and individual body here would be that of practice. As Csordas puts it, the work of Bourdieu “shifted an earlier focus on the body as the source of symbolism or means of expression to an awareness of the body as the locus of social practice” (Csordas 1993, 135). Words about the body, to Bourdieu (1992, 69–70), contain qualities which we relate specifically to “virtue” and “states of mind”. He writes that “these two relations to the body are charged with two relations to other people, time and the world, and through these, to two systems of values”. (ibid.)

Still, departing implicitly from Mary Douglas’s two bodies theory, Bourdieu brings the question of power even more explicitly into play, stating that “symbolic power works partly through the control of other people’s bodies and belief that is given by the collectively recognized capacity to act in various ways on deep-rooted linguistic and muscular patterns of behaviour” (Bourdieu 1992, 69). This capacity to act or, put differently, dispositions are grasped in the concept of habitus, consisting of mental and bodily dimensions. In Bourdieu’s terminology, the bodily hexis is [then] political mythology realized, em-bodied, turned into a permanent disposition, a durable way of standing, speaking, walking, and thereby of feeling and thinking” (ibid.).

Although Bourdieu builds upon Mauss’s theory resembling the described habitus (bodily hexis) display, he focuses more profoundly on the mechanisms of acquiring this embodied (habitual) social enskilment, which he explains through the concept of belief.

Something he calls “practical belief”, he then surprisingly, in comparison to previous treatment of this term, situates with the body (ibid., 68). By doing so he destigmatizes the problematic concept of belief (Good 1994a), stating our social qualification, together with social structure itself, are established via the practice of transmitting culturally specific ways of being in a society (ibid.). These are fixed to (and reproduced by) body like a memory card (Bourdieu 1992, 68). While this practical belief is a “state of a body” rather than a state of mind or “an

arbitrary adherence to a set of instituted dogmas and doctrines (‘beliefs’)”, the relationship of immediate adherence which emerges from this practice “between a habitus and the field to which it is attuned” is called doxa (ibid., 69), usually understood as the rules of the game (field).

Doxa then also frames how habitus that makes the body and mind socially qualified is acquired (ibid., 73). This process happens through a practical mimesis (ibid.), which “has nothing in common with an imitation that would presuppose a conscious effort to reproduce [a model of movement, attitude, etc.]” and which “take place below the level of consciousness, expression and the reflexive distance which these presuppose. The body believes in what it plays at: it weeps if it mimes grief. It does not represent what it performs, it does not memorize the past, it enacts the past, bringing it back to life. What is ‘learned by body’ is not something that one has, like knowledge that can be brandished, but something that one is” (ibid.).

Here, Bourdieu treats the body as a performance (cf. Butler 1988). We are an enactment of our position in the social structure, a becoming of provided schemes of bodily ways of relating to oneself and the world. And we do not doubt this becoming. It is automatic because the body believes the practice it is conveying. Here, belief is a principle of habitus—an embodied disposition (knowledge–not knowledge). This treatment of belief has an interesting implication to the medical anthropology tradition I aim to connect to here and to the anthropology of religion I am, to a certain extent, bypassing. It does not introduce the concept of belief as a way of disqualifying others (who only believe, whereas we know the facts). Good criticizes the usage of this concept to demonstrate how belief has been abused as an “anthropological response to fundamentalist epistemologies” that support the ethnocentric approach of conceptualizing and therefore devaluing culture as a belief—based on a rationalist tradition implying an assumption of correct/wrong belief (to be corrected). (Good 1994a, 7- 8)

Bourdieu nevertheless builds his argumentation as a critique of the positivist sociological treatment of belief as a logical decision of the rational agent (Bourdieu 1992, 50). He claims belief, as an anthropological construct, worked as a shelter for rational actor theorists in situations where “rational action can have no other principle than the intention of rationality and the free, informed calculation of a rational subject” (ibid.). Belief therefore worked as the logical and best accessible explanation for unusual events (cf. Evans-Pritchard 1976).

Complementing Good’s critique, he focusses on another dimension of the belief, that is, its acquisition, which happens during “the continuous, unconscious conditioning that is exerted through conditions of existence as much as through explicit encouragements or warnings [which] implies the forgetting of acquisition” (Bourdieu 1992, 50).⁴⁹ Belief as a “principle of practices has to be [practically] sought … in the relationship between external constraints which leave a very variable margin for choice, and dispositions which are the product of economic and social processes that are more or less completely reducible to these constraints, as defined at a particular moment” (ibid.). Actions are, according to Bourdieu, reasonable without being the product of “rational calculation; informed by a kind of objective finality without being consciously organized in relation to an explicitly constituted end; intelligible and coherent

49 “There is therefore no need to invoke that last refuge of freedom and the dignity of the person, ‘bad faith’ in the sense of a decision to forget decision and a: lie to oneself, in order to account for the fact that belief, or any other form of cultural acquirement, can be experienced simultaneously as logically necessary and sociologically unconditioned.” (Bourdieu 1992, p. 50)

without springing from an intention of coherence and a deliberate decision; adjusted to the future without being the product of a project or a plan” (ibid., 50-51).

Building upon the same premise as Mary Douglas concerning the interdependency between an individual and a society and emphasizing the power relations, together with the physical layer of the habitus, the theory of the social fields seems to create a promising framework for my argumentation. I can affirm that people develop one Ayurvedic practice over the other because they were differently disposed towards it. Similar to the pugs in Wacquant’s work (Wacquant 1995)—who are too short; thus, they “need to fight according to their disposition” and work on their speed—I could also consider that more analytical people would put an emphasis on knowing, whereas intuitive people would develop a more bodily Ayurvedic practice. However, can I really state why this is? They may value one way more than the other despite being able to practice both with the same intensity... What is happening in the study’s field sites, however, is, opposite to habitus, much more grounded in extremely conscious acquisition. Returning to Good (1994b), who, in his: “how medicine constructs its subject”, depicts ways in which medics learn to adopt something—a “medical habitus” in Bourdieu’s jargon. Good describes how medics learn to read, speak and look like doctors.

Furthermore, Bourdieu’s theory is based on a relational understanding of sociality, which makes conflict central to its functioning. The main principle of society is the fight, he argues. Since Ayurveda does not really create a social field in the Bourdieusian sense (conflict, hierarchy, doxa), it cannot serve as my main frame. Nevertheless, I consider this theory useful especially when framing the arguments presented in the chapter on everyday practice. Here, I have chosen a very down-to-earth approach to data interpretation, distilling the spaciotemporal bodily ways of everyday organization. In other words, similarly to Wacquant, I attempt here to discuss how not just an Ayurvedic body, but a way of living is achieved on a material level, through specific body work. What I think can be treated as a habitual process in the phenomenon under scrutiny does not relate to Ayurveda itself, as it does not fulfil the parameters of a social field. What does is today’s prevalent self-management practices and specific ethos of emancipation, which encompass all the processes creating docility described by Foucault (1995): (self-)surveillance, normalization and examination.

The bodily/psychological incorporation of objective social structure entangled with culturally specific ideological structures has its practical forms in the world of bodily practice, that is, the world of already accomplished aims. “The relation to the body is fundamental relation of the habitus that is inseparable from the relation to language and to time. It cannot be reduced to the body image, even the body concept … [a] subjective representation largely based on the representation of one’s own body produced and returned by others” (Bourdieu, 1992, 72).

Although the process of habituation seems to introduce a rather fitting analytical tool in terms of the adoption of complex embodied schemes of relating to oneself and the world, the unconscious character of habitus does not resemble much the effort I have observed in most of the rather disciplined practices my informants enforced upon themselves in the name of a wellbeing according to Ayurveda.

Bourdieu’s work formed my thinking about the body in terms of its primacy (next to language and time) in (human) action, and therefore, I consider it fundamental to understanding that

action. Moreover, the phenomenon I focus on is described using the example of Ayurvedic practice, but I hope to target an area of social nature which reaches far beyond Ayurveda itself.

Here, Bourdieusian theory helps to grasp why people search for this kind of alternative, and why it makes sense to them. It also frames my understanding of the politics around Ayurveda in the Czech Republic. Likewise, Wacquant’s idea of body work and Bourdieu’s perspective of habitus as established according to external constraints and dispositions (reducible to these constraints) helps me to understand the phenomenon under study on a broader scale. To summarize then, I can understand why people value what Ayurveda has to offer—why they are practising it, why it does or does not works in terms of real change—but what remains is the technique of the Self, the self-discipline happening in relation to the (Ayurvedic) discourse, the discourse which Bourdieu condemns.