A brief thought on Habitus and my thesis - Lindsey's post

Sadly, I don’t have enough time to reflect as heavily on the readings as I would like to this week. Even though this may be a short post, I thought I would discuss briefly how I plan to use Bordieu’s concept of the habitus in my master’s thesis. The detailed choices, practices, and thoughts of everyday life were the things I trained my eye on this summer while conducting fieldwork with cattle ranchers. I have been familiar with Bordieu’s work since I was an undergraduate in anthropology, and am now attempting to utilize his dialectic notion of structure and practice that I find so useful in framing the way we think about a given group of individuals, and more specifically, so useful a theoretical framework in forming a new way of thinking about class in the United States. In his chapter ‘Structures, Habitus, Practices,’ Bordieu discusses that daily practices can only be accounted for “by relating the social conditions in which the habitus that generated them was constituted, to the social conditions in which it is implemented, that is, through the scientific work of performing the interrelationship of these two states of the social world that the habitus performs, while concealing it, in and through practice (Bordieu 1990: 56).” Using this conceptualization of everyday life, I want to emphasize that cattle ranchers are involved in daily negotiations of work practices that both build on objective, normative definitions of “lower” or “rural” class, but also act in ways that don’t fit into this very rigid mold. In essence, the way they conceptualize their own selves by the everyday work practices that they do – whether that is sharing hay with neighbors or building water fountains for immigrants that pass through their land – are built on social conditions formed over hundreds of years of traditions but are adopted to fit the ever-urbanizing and culturally fractured landscape of a modern Southwest. I am still working through all these concepts in my head, but most definitely the notion of habitus will give me a framework to talk about work practices in a way that allows for a multidimensional, permeable notion of class.