ABSTRACT
Having outlined the basic conception of social structure that will inform the analyses to follow, this chapter will look more closely at how social agents can be said to ‘embody’ this social space. It will focus especially on the body’s role as the primary means ‘through’ which social agents come to inhabit, know and navigate this space, but also as the material tangible substrate for social and especially class-identity. It is in fact in our capacity as embodied, ‘fleshed out’ subjects that we come to be fundamentally affected, impressed and modified by the structures of the physical and the social world. As physico-material beings we are not only confined to occupy a discrete location in time and space, but are also exposed to the forces, frictions and inertias of physical existence, all of which tend to leave their mark on the body, either momentarily (bruises, scratches, etc.) or permanently (scars, disfigurements, etc.), visibly (burns, cuts, etc.) or invisibly (inflammations, fractures, etc.). As biological organisms, we are traversed by a host of visceral processes – respiration, digestion, circulation, excretion, etc. – that impinge on our existence “from the inside” and do so in a manner that is often as autonomous as it is anonymous. Finally, as socialized bodies, we are equally “affected”, “driven” or “moved” by the forces that inhabit the social world. Forces, that also leave their physical traces in and on the body and often impose themselves with an equally ineluctable necessity, but which do so in a manner that has little or nothing to do with simple mechanical determination and through ‘a mode of inclusion irreducible to simple material and spatial inclusion’ (Bourdieu, 2000: 135).
