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Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology #16
Outline of a Theory of Practice
A translation of the study in which Bourdieu develops the theory for his empirical work, based on fieldwork in Kabylia, Algeria.
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1972
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3050 people want to read
About the author
Pierre Bourdieu
352 books1,250 followersBourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location, and symbolic violence to reveal the dynamics of power relations in social life. His work emphasized the role of practice and embodiment or forms in social dynamics and worldview construction, often in opposition to universalized Western philosophical traditions. He built upon the theories of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Georges Canguilhem, Karl Marx, Gaston Bachelard, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Erwin Panofsky, and Marcel Mauss. A notable influence on Bourdieu was Blaise Pascal, after whom Bourdieu titled his Pascalian Meditations.
Bourdieu rejected the idea of the intellectual "prophet", or the "total intellectual", as embodied by Sartre. His best known book is Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, in which he argues that judgments of taste are related to social position. His argument is put forward by an original combination of social theory and data from surveys, photographs and interviews, in an attempt to reconcile difficulties such as how to understand the subject within objective structures. In the process, he tried to reconcile the influences of both external social structures and subjective experience on the individual (see structure and agency).
Bourdieu rejected the idea of the intellectual "prophet", or the "total intellectual", as embodied by Sartre. His best known book is Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, in which he argues that judgments of taste are related to social position. His argument is put forward by an original combination of social theory and data from surveys, photographs and interviews, in an attempt to reconcile difficulties such as how to understand the subject within objective structures. In the process, he tried to reconcile the influences of both external social structures and subjective experience on the individual (see structure and agency).
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 46 reviews
May 10, 2008
In your heart you know he's right.
"Hello, I'm Pierre. It looks like you want to solve all the problems and problematic dichotomies that have continually been plaguing the human sciences. May I assist you?"
I feel that part of why Bourdieu is today's doxa is because he synthesizes all the insights of the Heroes. All the old-fashioned theorists that you spent so much time learning, but thought you'd never see again (the toys you abandoned when you left childhood) are all there at this shindig at Bourdieu's house! It turns out they weren't outdated after all, and were just waiting for you to show up to start the party!
"Immanuel, have I introduced you to Émile? Jean-Paul, have you met Max? Oh look everybody, it's Karl! (Big round of applause, hoots)"
Me: "I know all of you! Well, not really all that well. But I've heard of all you! Man, I must be a cool guy!"
Pretty soon, I'm spouting off about the 'habitus,' 'practice,' and 'symbolic violence,' as if I were a cool guy. Pierre smiles at me and rides off into the sunset.
"Hello, I'm Pierre. It looks like you want to solve all the problems and problematic dichotomies that have continually been plaguing the human sciences. May I assist you?"
I feel that part of why Bourdieu is today's doxa is because he synthesizes all the insights of the Heroes. All the old-fashioned theorists that you spent so much time learning, but thought you'd never see again (the toys you abandoned when you left childhood) are all there at this shindig at Bourdieu's house! It turns out they weren't outdated after all, and were just waiting for you to show up to start the party!
"Immanuel, have I introduced you to Émile? Jean-Paul, have you met Max? Oh look everybody, it's Karl! (Big round of applause, hoots)"
Me: "I know all of you! Well, not really all that well. But I've heard of all you! Man, I must be a cool guy!"
Pretty soon, I'm spouting off about the 'habitus,' 'practice,' and 'symbolic violence,' as if I were a cool guy. Pierre smiles at me and rides off into the sunset.
May 27, 2016
Huck Finn on Bourdieu:
I ain’t never seen such scribblin' before in my life. No sir, not from no con artists or carpet baggers, nor from no preachin' type neither. This man sure know how to give a man a headache, I tell you. He sayin' all sorts of stuff, like “structuring structures” and a “present past that tends to perpetuate itself into the future” that make me want to lie down. Shoot. Maybe it’s because he parler voo francey and this was Englished by some nut case, but maybe he's crazy in French, too.
But, I reckin’ he does have some nifty little ideas, like habitats and doxer, and some real good food for thought, once you get past the wordy baggage.
And now he is smilin’ down from yonder heaven, smirkin' at all these here anterpol’gists who have to read him fer school. That is, when he ain’t busy havin’ shouting matches with Sartre, playin’ poker with Levi-Strauss, and arm-wrestlin’ with Durkheim. And all them can parler voo francey 'til judgment day.
I ain’t never seen such scribblin' before in my life. No sir, not from no con artists or carpet baggers, nor from no preachin' type neither. This man sure know how to give a man a headache, I tell you. He sayin' all sorts of stuff, like “structuring structures” and a “present past that tends to perpetuate itself into the future” that make me want to lie down. Shoot. Maybe it’s because he parler voo francey and this was Englished by some nut case, but maybe he's crazy in French, too.
But, I reckin’ he does have some nifty little ideas, like habitats and doxer, and some real good food for thought, once you get past the wordy baggage.
And now he is smilin’ down from yonder heaven, smirkin' at all these here anterpol’gists who have to read him fer school. That is, when he ain’t busy havin’ shouting matches with Sartre, playin’ poker with Levi-Strauss, and arm-wrestlin’ with Durkheim. And all them can parler voo francey 'til judgment day.
October 16, 2011
Plan on averaging about 4 pages an hour.
September 22, 2011
The best thing about this book is the blurb from the Times Higher Ed Supplement:
"OTP can be highly recommended as a complex and often beautifully written piece of philosophical literature."
*BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN*??? What the heck were they reading before this, Hegel translated into Linear B????
Execrable prose style aside, this is well worth reading, particularly if you can resist the temptation to read it all. If you're an anthropologist, no doubt his musings on the Kabyla ritual year calendar and so on could be of interest. If you're a historian of philosophy, his complaints about Sartre might be worth a look. But the real meat is the three short theoretical chapters: 'The Objective Limits of Objectivism,' argues that a purely objective social science (which looks at the world from a third person perspective) will never capture the importance of social rituals. It also handily dispatches structuralist and phenomenological approaches to social science as hopelessly one-sided. 'Structures and the Habitus' outlines the concept of the latter: it mediates between objective structures and practices, and can be seen in the similarities of different spheres of life. 'Structures, Habitus, Power' introduces us to the idea of 'doxa' (the realm of the thinkable), symbolic capital (convertable into economic capital and therefore not purely 'cultural') and tries to put all of the above into a political perspective.
The big problem is with that last little bit; Bourdieu's 'political' perspective is one that assumes, without further ado, that *only* 'heterodoxy' or heresy can produce new ideas; that both doxa and orthodoxy are by definition bad; and that everything is, in the last instance, the product of material interests and nothing else. Aside from being '68-simplistic, this is also numbingly depressing. It's just possible that the world we live in has some good things about it, and that those things aren't just material interests. And if that's not possible, it's not clear to me why you'd give a tish about politics at all.
"OTP can be highly recommended as a complex and often beautifully written piece of philosophical literature."
*BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN*??? What the heck were they reading before this, Hegel translated into Linear B????
Execrable prose style aside, this is well worth reading, particularly if you can resist the temptation to read it all. If you're an anthropologist, no doubt his musings on the Kabyla ritual year calendar and so on could be of interest. If you're a historian of philosophy, his complaints about Sartre might be worth a look. But the real meat is the three short theoretical chapters: 'The Objective Limits of Objectivism,' argues that a purely objective social science (which looks at the world from a third person perspective) will never capture the importance of social rituals. It also handily dispatches structuralist and phenomenological approaches to social science as hopelessly one-sided. 'Structures and the Habitus' outlines the concept of the latter: it mediates between objective structures and practices, and can be seen in the similarities of different spheres of life. 'Structures, Habitus, Power' introduces us to the idea of 'doxa' (the realm of the thinkable), symbolic capital (convertable into economic capital and therefore not purely 'cultural') and tries to put all of the above into a political perspective.
The big problem is with that last little bit; Bourdieu's 'political' perspective is one that assumes, without further ado, that *only* 'heterodoxy' or heresy can produce new ideas; that both doxa and orthodoxy are by definition bad; and that everything is, in the last instance, the product of material interests and nothing else. Aside from being '68-simplistic, this is also numbingly depressing. It's just possible that the world we live in has some good things about it, and that those things aren't just material interests. And if that's not possible, it's not clear to me why you'd give a tish about politics at all.
November 20, 2013
I read Bourdieu as a philosopher first, a phenomenologist in particular, and a neo-Marxist second. Outline of a Theory of Practice is definitely the corner stone of all his later more famous work. The more appropriate title for it should be Outline of a Theory of the Genesis of Practice. This is because what he offers here is a meta-theory thoroughly debunking our modern Fetishism (first voiced by Marx but never fully developed) of scienticism: long live the objective observer; long live the objective knowledge! What Bourdieu offers is NOT an objective description of practice, or the structures of practices. What we find here, is a critical analysis of how these structure are socially produced through coded practices, passed on (or reproduced) through habitus acquired through schooling and upbringing, and fetishized into “nature” “taste”.
The fatal mistake of objective knowledge, by prioritizing and naturalizing the “disinterestedness” of the objective observer, lies in its blindness toward the generative strategies inherent in these “observed” social structures. To put it differently, objectivism constitutes a second-order myth making. The structures of practice, first produced and then mythified by its practitioners, now is fetishized into the “objective” structures for scientists to decode. In order to correct the bias of objectivism, naïve subjectivism is NOT the way to go. Rather, as researchers, one must ask a different set of questions: what is the genesis of these social structures? for what purpose? how are they sustained? In so doing, Bourdieu offers at lease on way out of the perpetual dilemma of us-them perspective. Us-Them, when properly framed as the philosophical question of first-person and third-person perspective, is no longer a unbridgeable abyss, but now becomes a vantage point: by integrating first-person experience into the third-person perspective (e.g. how people experience the gift in giving and receiving and how gift is seen from an outsider’s perspective), Bourdieu demythified both the objectivism and the “nature” of first-person experience. This is equivalent for researchers to explain water for fish: “Habitus is history made into nature and the unconscious is the forgetting of that history.” While fish cannot talk about water, researchers can talk about both meaningfully.
Bourdieu is often criticized by later scholars as NOT giving agency to the individual. These critiques are unfair. This is because the majority of the critics “naturally” equate agency with free will of the individual, conveniently forgetting the history of how our modern autonomous individual emerged out of the thickness of theology, metaphysics, and the Enlightenment idea self. Agency has been fetishized as freedom from organized forces and systemic structures, which is in turn mythifized into the foundation of our democracy that demands this fiction of agentive self to guarantee both the political and institutional myth-making. What remains unthought in this paradigm is that discipline can be an agentive choice and democracy can be oppressive, as argued by John Modern in Secularism in Antebellum America. If we follow Modern’s interpretation of agency as something that happens “in and through instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets and concepts”, then agency looms large in Bourdieu’s analysis as intention of the individual (toward practical cocerns) entangled with intention of the group (the practical logic in maintain privilege). Collective intention and individual’s willingness to conform to the collective are both valid grounding for agency. Historicizing objectivism and the individual seems the natural next step in pushing forward Bourdieuan phenomenology.
The fatal mistake of objective knowledge, by prioritizing and naturalizing the “disinterestedness” of the objective observer, lies in its blindness toward the generative strategies inherent in these “observed” social structures. To put it differently, objectivism constitutes a second-order myth making. The structures of practice, first produced and then mythified by its practitioners, now is fetishized into the “objective” structures for scientists to decode. In order to correct the bias of objectivism, naïve subjectivism is NOT the way to go. Rather, as researchers, one must ask a different set of questions: what is the genesis of these social structures? for what purpose? how are they sustained? In so doing, Bourdieu offers at lease on way out of the perpetual dilemma of us-them perspective. Us-Them, when properly framed as the philosophical question of first-person and third-person perspective, is no longer a unbridgeable abyss, but now becomes a vantage point: by integrating first-person experience into the third-person perspective (e.g. how people experience the gift in giving and receiving and how gift is seen from an outsider’s perspective), Bourdieu demythified both the objectivism and the “nature” of first-person experience. This is equivalent for researchers to explain water for fish: “Habitus is history made into nature and the unconscious is the forgetting of that history.” While fish cannot talk about water, researchers can talk about both meaningfully.
Bourdieu is often criticized by later scholars as NOT giving agency to the individual. These critiques are unfair. This is because the majority of the critics “naturally” equate agency with free will of the individual, conveniently forgetting the history of how our modern autonomous individual emerged out of the thickness of theology, metaphysics, and the Enlightenment idea self. Agency has been fetishized as freedom from organized forces and systemic structures, which is in turn mythifized into the foundation of our democracy that demands this fiction of agentive self to guarantee both the political and institutional myth-making. What remains unthought in this paradigm is that discipline can be an agentive choice and democracy can be oppressive, as argued by John Modern in Secularism in Antebellum America. If we follow Modern’s interpretation of agency as something that happens “in and through instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets and concepts”, then agency looms large in Bourdieu’s analysis as intention of the individual (toward practical cocerns) entangled with intention of the group (the practical logic in maintain privilege). Collective intention and individual’s willingness to conform to the collective are both valid grounding for agency. Historicizing objectivism and the individual seems the natural next step in pushing forward Bourdieuan phenomenology.
January 21, 2024
“The anthropologists particular relation to the object of his study contains the makings of a theoretical distortion in as much as his situation as an observer, excluded from the real play of social activities by the fact that he has no place in the system observed and has no need to make a place for himself there, inclined him to a hermeneutic reservation of practises, leading him to reduce all social relations to communicative relations and, more precisely, to decoding operations.”
[catches breath]
“It is not significant for anthropology to break with native experience of that experience: it has to make a second break and question the presuppositions inherent in the position of an outside observer, who, in his preoccupation with interpreting practises, is an individual to introduce into the subject principals of his relation to the object, as it is attested by the special importance he assigns to communicative functions whether in language, myth or marriage. Knowlage does not merely depend, as an elementary relativism teaches, on the particular standpoint of an observer “situated in space and time” take up on the object.”
Thank you kind sir for your continued epic contributions to anthropology
Thank you kind sir for your continued epic contributions to anthropology
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December 24, 2013Molasses-thick, filled with structuralist concepts and analyses of the Kabyle habitus and doxa, this isn't a work by the Bourdieu I came to know and love in La Distinction. But some of is analyses are truly insightful, making room for both structure and agency, recognizing the role of physical motion in establishing practice, and proving that there is a middle ground between relativism and objectivity. Not a breezy afternoon read, but an important contribution to social theory, and one I'm glad I read.
May 29, 2009
i hear its better in french. and if i had time to outline every sentence perhaps it would be easier to follow. that said, how can one not love structuring structures?
September 29, 2013
Wonderful. 10 stars out of 5.
July 6, 2025
In order to escape the realism of the structure, which hypostatizes systems of objective relations by converting them into totalities already constituted outside of individual history and group history, it is necessary to pass from the opus operatum to the modus operandi, from statistical regularity or algebraic structure to the principle of the production of this observed order, and to construct the theory of practice, or, more precisely, the theory of the mode of generation of practices, which is the precondition for establishing an experimental science of the dialectic of the internalization of externality and the externalization of internality, or, more simply, of incorporation and objectification (72).
August 26, 2019
This book is very cute.
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August 14, 2008This is the last book of the summer for Art Theory Summer Camp. I would not call this an easy read, but Bourdieu provides an excellent tool kit for looking at the assumptions we all have when asking questions and how the question itself reveal our bias.
February 3, 2014
I keep going back to this book because it takes the Wittgensteinian line of representing philosophy as an intellectual error - but the catch is, as Aristotle observed, even those who attack philosophy are doing philosophy!
August 17, 2011
"Almost comically obtuse at time (in the great French postmodern tradition!) but this work does a good job introducing some key concepts in social anthropology such as ""doxa."""
November 14, 2018
I don't know who to blame, the writer or the translator, but someone has no idea how to form a legible sentence. The only reason I don't give a lower rating is because the ideas of Bourdieu are really good and inventive. It's just a shame that the writing does its best to bury them.
Issues with the writing. Long paragraphs that are only one sentence. Phrases that seem directly translated but are not useful as is ("Structuring structures" for example). And finally, sentences that don't seem to be designed for readers. They lack flow and cohesion.
If I had to guess, it was written in academic French, and the translator only cared about a direct translation rather than focusing on conveying meaning. However, words are not directly equivalent across languages.
I am of the belief that if two writers, in two different languages, wrote the same book, they would be incomparable. Moreover, if you were to translate the two books into the other language, you wouldn't have a duplicate, but a wholly new book. I don't know if I'm being clear, but I think the sin of this translator is to think that translations consists solely of exchanging one word for an equivalent, without the contextual understanding of why the word was chosen or how it would be read. This is a translation that began and ended with the dictionary.
Issues with the writing. Long paragraphs that are only one sentence. Phrases that seem directly translated but are not useful as is ("Structuring structures" for example). And finally, sentences that don't seem to be designed for readers. They lack flow and cohesion.
If I had to guess, it was written in academic French, and the translator only cared about a direct translation rather than focusing on conveying meaning. However, words are not directly equivalent across languages.
I am of the belief that if two writers, in two different languages, wrote the same book, they would be incomparable. Moreover, if you were to translate the two books into the other language, you wouldn't have a duplicate, but a wholly new book. I don't know if I'm being clear, but I think the sin of this translator is to think that translations consists solely of exchanging one word for an equivalent, without the contextual understanding of why the word was chosen or how it would be read. This is a translation that began and ended with the dictionary.
July 30, 2018
A concise and thorough explanation to arguably one of the most dynamic reconciliations of sociology's structure and agency paradox. Bourdieu's theory of practice avoids reductionism at all costs and makes an admirable attempt to describe the complexity of human action through a multi-faceted, stratified deconstruction of identity. The Habitus, Doxa, Forms of capital all come together to provide the social sciences with a beautifully pragmatic contribution. A joy to read and an even bigger joy when applied to everyday life.
August 20, 2020
It is a kind of heavy book to understand is not just because I am not a native speaker (English). But there are some word and phrase which is unfamiliar with me and frequently that I don't understand. pretty good to check and read the footnote because the are some parts where the author references the theory from the outside of the book. Actually Bourdieu writes the book in France language which is mean this book translated from that and unfortunately, I don't understand France language well it is pretty lucky if you could read the France version of this book.
June 13, 2017
It's quite French. There's a lot of suggestive material that asserts broad theses without doing what I could recognize as arguing for them, esp. in the ways that practices cannot be understood in more "objective" or "cognitive" ways. But the suggestions are certainly interesting. It provides, I suppose, a way of looking at phenomena that one might investigate on one's own and invites questions to ask.
November 26, 2017
This volume presents Bourdieu's formulations of key concepts largely based on ethnographic analyses in North Africa. It works especially well in conjunction with the volume titled The Field of Cultural Production, which applies his economic analyses to European trends in Modern Art, which are only hinted at in the concluding chapter here.
January 7, 2020
The ideas presented here are amazing - practice theory and habitus are concepts everyone in social sciences should know. 3 stars though, because it is hard to grasp the wordy french translated into English. Having read it, and used it, I often turn to other sources that explain it better in my native tongue.
March 24, 2018
Provides a very useful heuristic for analyzing social practices which surmounts the distortions caused by the strict methodological dichotomy between objectivism/subjectivism. Knowledge of the European (esp. French) intellectual tradition is helpful.
March 19, 2018
Wonderful book about human relations being about tactics and strategy, so an objective account and a subjective account both miss the point.
August 18, 2019
I liked it! I could relate to much of the writing angst and decisions about stepping away from the novel writing. Not sure I’d recommend it for non-writers though.
August 28, 2020
A pleasure to reread. All Bourdieu starts here, an essential text for thinking about the relationship between individuals, social structures, and material conditions.
November 25, 2021
A important critique for social science. But I don't why this edition is so different from French edition......
June 6, 2023
Up your doxa sucker!
June 29, 2024
the content is amazing but the writing is so difficult to read :(
December 12, 2024
Bourdieu is brilliant, this is his magnum opus. He's best when he's working with ethnographic material, and it makes me endlessly sad that his theoretical apparatus got half-chewed and spat out and passed around as the most trite and boring version of itself.
March 17, 2025
Encantado com a teoria, desgostoso com uma das escritas mais estranhas que meu pequeno cérebro símio tentou decifrar
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April 5, 2022Strictly speaking, I've read only two chapters (4, 6) for an university course, though I'm resolved to finish the whole book sometime in the future, it's definitely worthwhile and enriching read.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 46 reviews