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      Chapter

      Silent Complicities: Bourdieu, Habitus, Field
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      Chapter

      Silent Complicities: Bourdieu, Habitus, Field

      DOI link for Silent Complicities: Bourdieu, Habitus, Field

      Silent Complicities: Bourdieu, Habitus, Field book

      Silent Complicities: Bourdieu, Habitus, Field

      DOI link for Silent Complicities: Bourdieu, Habitus, Field

      Silent Complicities: Bourdieu, Habitus, Field book

      ByKim Dovey
      BookBecoming Places

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      Edition 1st Edition
      First Published 2009
      Imprint Routledge
      Pages 12
      eBook ISBN 9780203875001
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      ABSTRACT

      We experience places primarily in states of distraction; we live in the world first

      and look at it second. Our contemplative gaze falls upon buildings and cities

      within a spatial world we have already silently imbibed and embodied. How to

      reconcile this unreflexive embodiment of place in everyday life with the ways in

      which our critical gaze turns place into discourse? For this task I want to use the

      work of Pierre Bourdieu. The ‘habitus’ and the ‘field’ are two key concepts that

      form threads through Bourdieu’s sociology. The habitus is a set of embodied dis-

      positions towards everyday social practice; divisions of space and time, of objects

      and actions, of gender and status. The habitus conflates ‘habit’ and ‘habitat’ to

      construct both a sense of place and the sense of one’s place in a social hierarchy

      (Bourdieu 1977). The habitus is taken for granted: ‘The most successful ideo-

      logical effects are those that have no words, and ask no more than complicitous

      silence’ (Bourdieu 1977: 188). While the use of the term ‘ideology’ now seems

      dated, the role of place as a taken-for-granted construction of everyday life

      remains a key to the ways power is mediated in built form. Bourdieu’s later work

      on ‘fields’ of cultural production examines overlapping fields of discourse (art,

      architecture, urbanism) which are like game boards with certain forces prevailing

      and resources at stake (Bourdieu 1993). The resources are forms of capital that

      flow between the economic (material) and the cultural (social, symbolic). For

      Bourdieu, fields of cultural production, such as architecture, are structured in a

      manner which sustains the authority of those who already possess it, those with

      the ‘cultural capital’ and the ‘feel for the game’ embodied in the habitus.

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