ABSTRACT
As an admirer of the writings of both Margaret Archer and Pierre Bourdieu, it troubles me that Archer rejects the latter’s concept of habitus, while Bourdieu himself was dismissive of the everyday reflexivity that is the focus of Archer’s recent work (Archer, 2003, 2007). I am struck by both the importance of the internal conversation and the power of the habitus in life. It is indeed extraordinary how little attention social science has paid to people’s internal conversations, given their importance to us and given the fact that we hold one another responsible for so many of our actions, that is, capable of reflecting on what we should do. It is also indisputable that we do much ‘on automatic’; we have many embodied inclinations, aversions, and skills. We could hardly be skilled actors if we needed to reflect and deliberate on everything before acting, and Archer’s earlier discussions of practice in Being Human seem to acknowledge this (Archer, 2000). We have a feel for many familiar games, and in unfamiliar situations where we have no feel for the game, we may struggle, and feel uncertain, awkward and stupid. Bourdieu’s concept of habitus helps us avoid what he termed the scholastic fallacy, in which academics unknowingly project their overwhelmingly contemplative and discursive relation to the world on to actors whose relation to the world is embodied and primarily practical.
