ABSTRACT
The body and intercorporeal communication are central to the ways in which horses and riders experience their own lives and one other (Thompson, 2011). Recent research into the social and cultural construction of horses has sought to grasp the tacit knowledge, practices, and dispositions within which equine bodies experience and are experienced. In their consideration of a current trend toward breeding and competing sports ponies, Gilbert and Gillett (2012) use Bourdieu's concept of “habitus” to explain the construction of the horse as athlete. Bourdieu defines habitus as emerging from the “systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures” (1977,p. 72). A concept that has been difficult to clearly explain (Inoue, 2006), the term habitus is often translated as “a feel for the game.” It describes the physical, emotional, and embodied dispositions for particular kinds of action and activity, such as ballet (Wainwright, Williams, & Turner, 2006). Habitus is more than “simply a state of mind, it is also a bodily state of being” (Wainwright, Williams, & Turner, 2006, p. 537). Gilbert and Gillett extend the habitus concept to animal bodies by discussing an “equine habitus, ” which predisposes some horses to participate and perform well in certain sports. By also borrowing from Bourdieu's forms of capital (1986), they explore the intersection of an equine habitus with physical capital (equine appearance and abilities) and social/cultural capital (its temperament and manner of relating to others). In relation to one particular equestrian pursuit, Thompson (2012) identifies a “bullfighting habitus” in the horses selected for specialized training as the mounts of Spanish bullfighters. 1
