Outline of a Theory of Practice

Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology #16

by Pierre Bourdieu, Richard Nice

Outline of a Theory of Practice is recognized as a major theoretical text on the foundations of anthropology and sociology. Pierre Bourdieu, a distinguished French anthropologist, develops a theory of practice which is simultaneously a critique of the methods and postures of social science and a general account of how human action should be understood. With his central concept of the habitus, the principle which negotiates between objective structures and practices, Bourdieu is able to transcend the dichotomies which have shaped theoretical thinking about the social world. The author draws on his fieldwork in Kabylia (Algeria) to illustrate his theoretical propositions. With detailed study of matrimonial strategies and the role of rite and myth, he analyses the dialectical process of the 'incorporation of structures' and the objectification of habitus, whereby social formations tend to reproduce themselves. A rigorous consistent materialist approach lays the foundations for a theory of symbolic capital and, through analysis of the different modes of domination, a theory of symbolic power.

Genres: Anthropology, Sociology, Philosophy, Theory, Nonfiction, Academic, Social Science

260 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

Bourdieu 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).

Reviews

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Roy Lotz · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Jeff Culver · Rating 4 out of 5]

Plan on averaging about 4 pages an hour.

[Justin Evans · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Jessica Zu · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Tobi ﾄﾋﾞ · Rating 5 out of 5]

“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

[Andrew]

Molasses-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.

[nell · Rating 3 out of 5]

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?

[Nick Wellings · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful. 10 stars out of 5.

[sutibah · Rating 5 out of 5]

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).

[Gacoca · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is very cute.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I lost Caesar Bose, a very close friend of mine, to cancer in the year 2017. He was three years my senior and one of the ace scholars I have had the privilege of knowing. We had started a project in 2009, wherein we sought to make a judiciously curated list of the toughest, most intellectually demanding, dense, or conceptually challenging books ever written — across philosophy, literature, science, mathematics, theology, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and critical theory. In this list would be books known for difficulty of language, abstraction, structure, or depth. We grouped them by category so the list was useful and not random. These books find a place in my ‘Toughest Read Shelf’. It is my obeisance to Caesar.

For starters, this is not a book you ‘read’; it’s a book you ‘grapple with’. You don’t finish it so much as you survive it, slightly rearranged, your old certainties quietly dismantled while you were busy decoding sentences that behave like philosophical obstacle courses. I entered the author’s mind in 2007. I was lost in a maze.

If most theory books invite you to sit down, this one asks you to stand, spar, and occasionally bleed.

At its core, ‘Outline’ is Bourdieu’s war declaration against lazy binaries: structure vs. agency, objectivism vs. subjectivism, rule vs. freedom, mind vs. body. Social theory before him, he argues, was either too rigid—treating humans as marionettes pulled by invisible structures—or too romantic, pretending individuals float freely through the world making choices untouched by history, class, or power.

Bourdieu’s intervention is surgical and brutal: ‘Both sides are wrong, and the truth is messier.’

Enter ‘‘habitus’’, the book’s most famous, most abused, and most misunderstood concept. Habitus is not ideology. It’s not consciousness. It’s not instinct either. It is embodied history—the way social structures sink into the body, shaping posture, taste, gesture, ambition, and even silence.

You don’t ‘think’ your habitus; you ‘live’ it. It’s how the village knows when to bow, how the elite knows which fork to pick up, how domination reproduces itself without needing daily instructions.

This is where Bourdieu gets almost Shakespearean in tragic irony. Like Macbeth moving “in blood / Stepp’d in so far,” social actors don’t consciously choose their limits; they move within them, mistaking necessity for choice. The tragedy is not ignorance—it is misrecognition. Power works best when it doesn’t look like power at all.

Bourdieu’s ethnographic grounding in Kabyle society (Algeria) gives the book its anthropological muscle. Gift exchange, kinship, honor, symbolic capital—everything that looks spontaneous turns out to be structured, and everything that looks structured turns out to be lived improvisation. Practice, for Bourdieu, is jazz, not sheet music. There are patterns, yes—but they emerge through repetition, timing, and feel, not explicit rules.

Milton whispers from the background here. “The mind is its own place,” says Satan in ‘Paradise Lost’, but Bourdieu would smirk and reply, “The mind is never alone; it is socially furnished.” Even rebellion borrows its furniture from the very house it claims to burn down. The habitus of the rebel still bears the imprint of what it resists. There is no Archimedean point outside society.

Stylistically, the book is unapologetically dense. Sentences loop back on themselves, qualifying their own claims, hedging against misreadings that haven’t yet happened. This is not accidental. Bourdieu is deeply suspicious of clean formulations. He fears that clarity may lie. So he writes like someone trying to trap reality mid-motion, knowing full well it will escape anyway.

Postmodern readers often find him oddly pre-postmodern. He rejects grand narratives, yet refuses relativistic chaos. He distrusts universals, yet insists on structural regularities. If Foucault dissolves the subject and Derrida dissolves meaning, Bourdieu stubbornly insists on ‘practice’—on what people actually do, day after day, with bodies trained by history.

There’s something almost Sanskritic in this insistence on embodied disposition. The ‘‘Bhagavad Gita’’’s notion of ‘svabhāva’—one’s inherent disposition shaped by action and past action—resonates uncannily with habitus. ‘“Sadr̥śaṁ ceṣṭate svasyāḥ prakṛter jñānavān api”‘ (Even the wise act according to their nature). Knowledge does not free you from disposition; it negotiates with it. Bourdieu would nod.

And yet, this is not quietism. The book is often misread as fatalistic. It is not. By revealing how domination reproduces itself through everyday practice, Bourdieu arms critique with precision.

You cannot fight what you don’t understand. Liberation, if it is to exist, must begin with a ruthless diagnosis of how consent is manufactured through taste, education, manners, and so-called “common sense.”

This is where the book becomes ethically uncomfortable. You start seeing habitus everywhere—class in accent, power in politeness, and hierarchy in leisure. Innocence evaporates. You begin to suspect that even your most personal preferences are socially rehearsed performances.

As Shakespeare warned, “All the world’s a stage”—but Bourdieu adds: the script is written long before the actors arrive, and improvisation is permitted only within invisible boundaries.

Comparatively, if Marx exposed exploitation at the level of production, and Weber mapped rationalization, Bourdieu exposes domination at the level of ‘disposition’. If Durkheim spoke of social facts as external and coercive, Bourdieu shows how they become internal and pleasurable. Power doesn’t just command; it seduces.

This is why the book endures despite—or because of—its difficulty. It resists slogans. It refuses closure. It trains the reader to think relationally, historically, and suspiciously. Each rereading reveals a new angle, a previously unnoticed implication. Like Milton’s epics or Shakespeare’s tragedies, its meaning deepens with time, not speed.

And let’s be honest: this book humbles you. It does not care about your intelligence, your degrees, or your confidence. It will slow you down. It will make you reread pages. It will make you question whether understanding itself is socially stratified. That discomfort? That’s part of the lesson.

Bourdieu once said sociology is a martial art. ‘Outline of a Theory of Practice’ is its black belt exam.

Now, let us conclude with two questions:

1. Why is it tough?

2. And even if it is, what makes this text worth reading time and again?

‘‘Why is it tough?’’ : It is tough because Bourdieu dismantles the reader’s comfort zones one by one. He denies us clean oppositions, quick summaries, or quotable certainties. His prose resists linear reading; each sentence doubles back, corrects itself, and anticipates misuse. The difficulty is not ornamental—it mirrors his argument. Social reality, he insists, does not operate through neat rules or conscious intentions, so any language that pretends otherwise would be a lie. The concept of ‘habitus’ is hard because lived life is hard to theorize without flattening it. The book is also tough because it implicates the reader: our tastes, judgments, and even our sense of intellectual freedom are revealed as socially conditioned. As Shakespeare puts it, “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all”—self-knowledge here is unsettling, not liberating.

‘‘And yet, why read it again and again?’’: Because few texts teach you ‘how to see’ rather than ‘what to think’. Each rereading sharpens perception: power becomes visible where it once felt natural; choice reveals its hidden limits; domination appears not as force but as familiarity. Like Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’, the book rewards slow return—meanings unfold with intellectual maturity and historical distance. Like the Gita’s insight into ‘svabhāva,’ it reminds us that action precedes reflection and shapes it in turn. Bourdieu gives us a vocabulary for the invisible grammar of social life, and that grammar keeps rewriting itself as the world changes.

The book endures because it does not age into doctrine. It remains a method, a discipline of suspicion, and a refusal to mistake comfort for clarity. Tough, yes—but in its durability lies its gift: it makes the reader more patient, more alert, and far less easily deceived.

An all-time classic.

[Amber]

This 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.

[Jeffrey Towey · Rating 5 out of 5]

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!

[Mark Dellenbaugh · Rating 3 out of 5]

"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."""

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Will Gregor · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Zainul Arifin · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Bernhard Nickel · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Roger Green · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Brendan Pelto · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Preston · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Rolf · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like Bourdieu’s ideas much more than his writing. Like Foucault, he is a scholar whose ideas I have understood better and appreciated more through the writings of others. Still, this is a classic in terms of its impact, and an important read.

[David Kirby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful book about human relations being about tactics and strategy, so an objective account and a subjective account both miss the point.

[Gloria · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Humphrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

A pleasure to reread. All Bourdieu starts here, an essential text for thinking about the relationship between individuals, social structures, and material conditions.

[Wangchunhua · Rating 5 out of 5]

A important critique for social science. But I don't why this edition is so different from French edition......

[Brian Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Up your doxa sucker!

[Emmanuel Magdalene · Rating 3 out of 5]

the content is amazing but the writing is so difficult to read :(

[Lily Bronski · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.