Habitus Quotes

“You are the sum total of the people you meet and interact with in the world. Whether it’s your family, peers, or co-workers, the opportunities you have and the things that you learn all come through doors that other people open for you.”
― Tanner Colby, Some of My Best Friends Are Black: The Strange Story of Integration in America

“Whether we do it consciously or subconsciously, we tend to organize our lives to display our identity as accurately as possible. Our lifestyle choices often reveal our values, or at least what we’d like people to perceive as our values…as we make our everyday choices, we continuously calculate not just which choices best match who we are and what we want but also how those choices will be interpreted by others. We look for cues in our social environment to figure out what others think of this or that, which can require being sensitive to the most localized and up-to-date details of what a particular choice means.”
― Sheena Iyengar, The Art of Choosing

“I can tell you as a scientist Diana, that there's no such thing as 'normal'." His voice was losing its careful softness. "'Normal' is a bedtime story-a fable- that humans tell themselves to feel better when faced with overwhelming evidence that most of what's happening around them is not 'normal' at all”
― Deborah Harkness, A Discovery of Witches

“Habitus maintains our social comfort and helps us regain it when those around us do not act in familiar and acceptable ways. .... Thus, white fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress in the habitus becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. .... These behaviors, in turn, reinstate white racial equilibrium.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“In insisting that personal habit and political action be one and the same, absolutist moralizing limits the possibilities of both.”
― Heather Paxson, Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America (California Studies in Food and Culture)

“We make choices and are in turn made by them.”
― Sheena Iyengar, The Art of Choosing

“Saya sudah menunjukkan secara panjang lebar dalam La distinction di mana cinta itu juga bisa dideskripsikan sebagai bentuk dari amor fati, bahwa mencintai sampai titik tertentu selalu berarti mencintai seseorang sebagai cara lain untuk memenuhi takdir sosialnya sendiri.”
― Pierre Bourdieu, Choses dites (Le sens commun)

“Being an elite is not a mere possession or something "within" an actor (skills, talents, and human capital); it is an embodied performative act enabled by by both possessions and the inscriptions that accompany experiences within elite institutions (schools, clubs, families, networks, etc.). Our bodily tastes, dispositions, and tendencies are not simply something we're born with; they are things that are produced through our experiences in the world. Not only do they occur in our minds, but they are things we enact repeatedly so that soon these performances look less and less like an artificial role we're playing- a role that might advantage us- and instead look more and more like just who we naturally are.”
― Shamus Rahman Khan, Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul's School

“By habitus, I mean dispositions that inhere and mold the deepest, subtlest, intricate structures of personhood, are constituted and emergent in the most elusive folds and lineaments of consciousness, and are articulated in lastingly resilient, enduring textual tapestries of experience, orientations, desires. The range of habitus is deep and broad: habitus forms the long arc of evolutionary developments and arrangements of the body in action and at rest, posture, gait, stance, and gesture; it is the silent teacher of the phonemic alphabet, determining subtle distinctions of timbre and tone, accents and intonations in voice articulations; it is the subcutaneous, ingrained dynamic inhering in daily competencies, executed flawlessly and yet seemingly unconsciously, such as balancing huge loads the size of a person’s body weight on the head as Kikuyu women often do, or walking fearlessly on narrow glacial paths through plunging cliffs as the Sherpas do, or weaving in and out of traffic while engaged in deep conversations on a cell phone as Californians do. Habitus describes the imbrication of structure and culture in desire. It is what defines subtle distinctions of taste, those almost ineffable differences of sweetness, succulence, spiciness, and bitterness in food and drink; the raging fetishes and unbidden cravings that shadow sexuality; the fickle difference between scents that intoxicate or trigger upheavals of wretching. Habitus, then, is “human nature” understood as the deep penetration of sociality with biology in such a manner that it is the motor of self, of choice, of vocation.”
― Omedi Ochieng, Groundwork for the Practice of the Good Life: Politics and Ethics at the Intersection of North Atlantic and African Philosophy

“Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence, which is ‘violence that is exercised upon a social agent with his or her complicity’...provides an explanation of how social inequalities can continue largely unabated. Within this perspective, individual subjects are subjected to various forms of violence, such as being treated unfairly or denied resources, or are limited in their social mobility and aspirations, but they do not tend to see it that way; rather it is misrecognised by individual subjects as the natural order of things. Gender domination in the patriarchal family is an example of symbolic violence in operation. Through habitus formation in this context, women were often confined emotionally, socially, economically and physically and the perception that women were inferior to men in the home and more generally in society was perpetuated. Women’s misrecognition of this violence as ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ gendered relations in the world led to their being complicit in reinscribing through their daily practices, their own domination.”
― kerry H Robinson

“Die dissoziierte Resonanz zu Gewalttaten, Zerstörungsgewohnheiten der Umwelt und den Konsequenzen eigenen Handelns entsteht wohl aus einer fehlenden Anverwandlung, verminderter Spürfähigkeit, durch habituelle Dissoziationen und Abwertung von femininen Eigenschaften.”
― Sarina Samaya, Radikal verbunden: Über traumatisierende Herrschaft und den spirituellen Aktivismus als Brücke zwischen sozio-politischem Aufdecken und mitfühlender Bezogenheit