Adam Johnson - 4/11 Blog Post

#3 Bourdieu defines his concept of 'habitus' as basically being a way that power is created and bolstered through both culture and symbols of society. Habitus itself refers to the social norms and customs that guide the behavior, thoughts, and actions of the people within the society. These ideas and norms are constantly being reaffirmed and strengthened by how they are setup and intertwined in the institutions or agencies, as well as the structures of the society as a whole (although they are in no way a result of just said structures). This occurs over time as past events, values, and standards shape the practices of the modern day through massive societal conditioning towards them. The fact that this society and the information that structures all things in it (the norms, symbols, beliefs, etc.) are gathered by individuals and become amassed and ingrained in them is the main point of habitus. Content is in essence trained into an individual based off of their past experiences in reference to others and their external environment and forms an almost standardized way of thinking, acting, and feeling that dictates everything that they do in their lives. Habitus itself is heavily standardized and decisive, but it acts as more of a bigger picture outline, which explains individuality and variation within the boundaries of most set or widely understood norms. Because of this, it only becomes fully immersed in a society when its original founding, purpose, or understanding is no longer a reference but it supports itself as a standard. This allows individual interpretation while still maintaining a common view or application of it.
These dispositions are in no way static or unchangeable, and much like Foucault's view of power through knowledge, they are constantly open to fluidity and redeveloped notions or structures. Because this theory posits that these dispositions are massive social concepts that are well rooted into most individuals, it makes the dispositions all but untouchable once formed into a culture. Under unexpected or extraordinary circumstances though, and also over long periods of time, structures that make up habitus can change and adapt to the new elements. A challenge is presented in this though because if the theory is as strong as Bourdieu asserts, then these transferable and multi-contextual staples of thought are very deeply seeded in a mass amount of people and social structure, and therefore the situation required to spark this change must be impactful on an enormous scale.
I think a great example of this would be government as habitus and how people accept it at face value without much question or redefinition of its role and purpose. This is a very obvious one because it has been around since the beginning of "civilized" society in one form or another, and has come to be defined in many different ways but with the same relative idea. The idea is that government keeps order and can dictate and define the lives and purposes of people much better than they can. People feed into the ideas of government but are blinded by the fact that the only reason a lot of it still functions is because "that's just how it is, has always been, and always will be." Type of rule as a habitus have changed over time though, from slavery, to rulers/monarchs/dictators, to serfs, and now to democratic government. Much of this rule is the same, but how it is defined and ingrained has changed slightly, still achieving much of the same goals and feeding into the structures and institutions that it serves. By continually succumbing to rule in one form or another, people accept it as the standard of living without continually questioning it or adapting it (why would they do that if their brains don't tell them that it's a necessary thing to do). Habitus creates this compliance to and acceptance of norms that were defined outside of the current-day individual's understanding, which in itself makes the dispositions solid and unchanged until an extraordinary event or gradual shift over history by way of studying the past.