Interior Structures: Thoughts On Pierre Bourdieu

In Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977) Pierre Bourdieu provides a framework both for understanding the way that cultural settings (re)produce the means of their own production, and for analysing the effect of this (re)production on the particular subjects of a given ‘habitus‘.

For Bourdieu, the term habitus refers to the collective entity by which and into which dominant social and cultural conditions are established and reproduced. In Bourdieu’s words, habitus refers to “a subjective but not individual system of internalised structures, schemes of perception, conception, and action common to all members of the same group or class.” These “internalised structures” and “schemes of perception” structure the subject’s (shared) world-view and their “apperception” of the world in which they suppose they exist.

For Bourdieu, the habitus instils a world-view in its subjects by conferring (cultural) value upon things, be they material or immaterial. Put simply, within the habitus, some things are valourised and some are not. Even at the seemingly intimate level of the body, the habitus posits and bestows specific properties.

Some of these are constructed as ‘good’, while others are ‘bad’ and stigmatised (such as physical strength, beauty, and ugliness). Some attributes are constructed as ‘neutral’ and ‘natural’ (that is, as pre-cultural and ‘objective’). Often, the attributes that are constructed as neutral and natural are those that become the most enduring and difficult to contest (examples of this might include race and gender).

For Bourdieu, valourised properties within the habitus come to constitute cultural capital, the possession of which affects how social and cultural relations are made and remade, and importantly, by whom and for whom.

According to Bourdieu, a sense of the habitus—and of that which is valued within the habitus—is conferred through its institutions. This process typically begins with the family setting, and is later consolidated through other institutions such as education and employment.

These institutions continually reinforce and sometimes restructure and amend the subject’s original templates of culture and sociality (that is, the templates by which the subject relates to the world and to others).

Subjects of (or in) the habitus internalise dominant social and cultural ideas, and the modes of being made available therein. By so doing, subjects become particular kinds of subjects (e.g. raced, gendered and/or national subjects; citizens; subjects of the law).

In turn, subjects support, reinforce and ultimately reproduce the habitus itself by subscribing to and propagating its dominant ideas and socio-cultural modes of being. Though subjects of a given habitus seemingly have their own ‘individual’ histories, these nevertheless occur within the same habitus, and become narrated on its terms.

As outlined above, the habitus (re)produces both itself and its subjects through its institutions. It also reproduces the socio-cultural conditions through which subjects relate to one another. Through the habitus subjects acquire a world-view and become particular kinds of subjects who act and conduct themselves as such. One example of this is law, which produces subjects who see the world in particular ways, and whose actions come to be conceptualised as such (for example, as lawful or unlawful).

Another example is the institution of education—both literal and figurative—which bestows titles and degrees such that subjects are not only able to represent their proficiencies and expertise, but so too, their imagined identities within socio-cultural settings. That is, the institutions of schools and universities endow subjects with the authority to represent themselves as doctors and lawyers and so on. Put differently, schools and universities allow subjects to become and represent themselves as particular kinds of subjects.

For Bourdieu, the process whereby the habitus reproduces both itself and its subjects also entails the production of a self-perpetuating system of unequal power relations that does not require direct political struggle between subjects to function. Instead, the habitus produces relationships of domination through its institutions by default, because institutions distribute cultural capital differently and differentially among individuals.

As Bourdieu elaborates, the unequal distribution of cultural capital creates and further exacerbates unequal socio-cultural settings; however, this inequality comes to appear ‘objective’, natural or meritorious within the habitus, because the institutions of the habitus obfuscate the extent to which cultural capital is contingent, and is accumulated via the other forms of capital a subject possesses, including (inherited) economic capital and other inequitable material conditions.

In turn, cultural capital assists in the maintenance and acquisition of other forms of capital, be it economic, social or cultural. To return to the examples above, if two people apply for the same job, and one has a particular degree the other does not, it might ‘objectively’ appear that the person with the degree is more qualified or deserving of the job.

What this determination obscures, however, is the fact that the unequal distribution of cultural capital potentially influences who has the capacity to acquire the degree in the first instance, and who does not (because, for example, cultural assumptions about race, sex and gender often impact how accessible education is for certain subjects).

On this view, the habitus therefore not only confers unfair levels of socio-cultural privilege upon certain individuals (through the bestowal of cultural capital), it also invisibilises this privilege. As a result, the struggle to change the socio-cultural conditions of the habitus is inherently difficult.

This is because dominant subjects are able to exercise their dominance merely by conforming to the status quo and by ‘being themselves’, while those who are dominated must effect a rupture of the habitus from within the habitus itself. Put differently, within the habitus, the dominance of dominant subjects appears ‘objective’. The dominant can just ‘be’, while the dominated must first ‘clear the way’ before they can ‘be’.

Liam Gillespie recently completed his PhD at the School of Social and Political Sciences, the University of Melbourne.

The photo shows, “Wanderer in the Storm,” by Julius von Leypold , painted in 1835.

The Glory That Was Lithuania

In the Middle Ages, Moscow was by no means the only center of gravity in the Russian lands. For several centuries, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania had designs on its own unified Russia.

Today, Lithuania is a small country on the north-eastern fringe of the European Union. However, 600 years ago it was one of the largest and most powerful states in Europe.

Having been destroyed by the Mongols, Russia was fertile soil for Lithuanian expansion. Through dynastic marriages, military campaigns, and outright annexation, Lithuania subjugated vast swathes of the variegated Russian principalities – so much so that it threatened Moscow’s status as the center of Russian unification.

When, in the early 13th century, the East Baltic pagan tribes suffered the horrors of the Northern Crusades, it seemed that the Lithuanians would share the sad fate of other Baltic tribes crushed by the Teutonic Knights.

Surprisingly, however, the Lithuanian tribes managed to consolidate and not only halt the German onslaught, but inflict some punishing counterattacks on the aggressors. In 1236, at the Battle of Saule, they almost completely destroyed the Livonian Brothers of the Sword, a Catholic military order operating in the territories of modern Latvia and Estonia. Interestingly, 200 soldiers from Pskov, then an ally of the order, perished along with the swordsmen.

From the west (today’s Kaliningrad Region), the Teutonic Order subdued the Prussian tribes on its way to the Lithuanian lands. The Teutons annexed the remains of the so-called Sword Brethren, forming the Livonian Order, and set about clamping the Lithuanians in a pincer movement from both sides.

The Lithuanian rulers realized that they couldn’t survive in isolation. Fortunately for them (but not for the Russians), in 1237 the Mongols invaded the Russian principalities, which largely solved Lithuania’s problems.

The Mongol invasion devastated the Russian principalities of north-eastern Rus and weakened the western Russian principalities, which Lithuania sought to exploit.

Its expansion into the Russian lands was not all through fire and sword, however. In fact, the annexation was largely peaceful, for in the powerful Lithuania the Russian rulers saw the chance of protection from the Mongols. The Lithuanians in turn received much-needed support in the struggle against the Teutonic Knights, and they too were threatened by the marauding Mongols.

The Lithuanian princes did not encroach on the rights of the local nobility, establishing relations with regional rulers under a vassalage system. In case of military exigency, they could rely on local armed contingents.

In the mid-13th century, Lithuania annexed the so-called “Black Russia,” the territory of modern western Belarus, renaming itself the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

The Grand Duchy reached its maximum extent in the 14th century under Princes Gediminas and Algirdas. The Lithuanian state included vast territories that today lie inside Belarus, Ukraine, and south-west Russia.

Now the Grand Duchy of Lithuania had to reckon not only with its old enemy the Teutons, but also the Mongols, the Poles, the Hungarians, as well as the Muscovites. Moscow and the Lithuanian territories were separated by no more than 200 kilometers.

The Grand Duchy of Lithuania was only Lithuanian in name. 90% of its population was made up of the ancestors of modern Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians. Maintaining the integrity of such a patchwork state was not an easy task, and its rulers had to skillfully navigate between different groups of subjects.

A central pillar of the state was tolerance. Although officially pagan, not only did it not violate the rights of the Orthodox population, it actively supported them. In 1316, the Lithuanians even sought to set up its own metropolitan see in Novogrodok (modern Novogrudok in Belarus), and established direct contacts with the Patriarch of Constantinople.

Much later, in the 16th century, the ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire, Sigismund Herberstein, wrote about the Lithuanian capital, then called Vilna: “There are considerably more Russian churches than ones of the Catholic faith.”

The Lithuanian princes first established a protectorate, before finally annexing Kiev in the 1360s, recognizing it as the “mother of Russian cities.” Ruthenian supplanted Lithuanian as the official language, and remained so until the late 17th century.

Lithuania pulled out all the stops to demonstrate to the Russian principalities and its main rival in the east, the Grand Duchy of Moscow, that it was the political and spiritual center of unification for the Russian lands.

For a long time, the Lithuanian princes maneuvered between the Catholic and Orthodox worlds without taking sides.

For instance, Grand Duke Mindaugas was baptized into Catholicism and crowned “king of Lithuania” by Pope Innocent IV. However, after his death in 1263, Lithuania returned once more to the fold of paganism, which, incidentally, did not prevent Mindaugas’ son Vaisvilkas, who succeeded his father, from being a fanatical adherent of Orthodoxy.

However, this state of affairs could not continue indefinitely. As the last pagan state of Europe, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania could not be regarded as an equal by the Christian sovereigns of Europe. It also played into the hands of the Teutonic Order, which could legitimately wage unending holy war against Lithuanian paganism.The situation was resolved by Lithuania’s political and cultural convergence with Poland, with whom it had fought against the Teutons. In 1387, the Grand Duke of Lithuania, Jogaila, who was concurrently King of Poland under the name Wladyslaw II Jagiello, converted Lithuania to Catholicism.

From that moment on, the Grand Duchy’s encouragement of Orthodoxy ceased, and the Catholic faith took root. Hence, Lithuania could no longer lay claim to the title of unifier of the Russian lands.

The union of Lithuania and Poland as one state in the 16th century exerted tremendous political, cultural, and religious pressure on the Grand Duchy’s Orthodox population, namely the Belarusian and Ukrainian people. Over the coming centuries, they would be a bone of contention between the Polish and Russian civilizations. It remains a live issue to this day.

Boris Egorov writes for Russia Beyond.

The photo shows, “The Battle of Grunwald,” by Jan Matejko, painted in 1878.