Summary
Habitus is the set of ingrained dispositions – ways of perceiving, judging, moving and speaking – that people absorb from the social world they grow up in, and that then guide what they do with little conscious thought. The word goes back to Aristotle; Marcel Mauss used it in 1934 for culture anchored in bodily practices such as walking. It’s now tied to the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who took it up from 1967.
Bourdieu’s point is that it runs both ways: social position forms our habitus, and acting from it tends to reproduce that position. Critics call this deterministic, though he described habitus as “durable but not eternal”.
Rationale
Named in Part 1 among concepts that look beneath conscious belief. Its two-way loop is one we describe too: arrangements “continually reproduce the dispositions that sustain them”. Bourdieu’s varies by class; ours run culture-wide.