ABSTRACT
Habitus is the closest approximation in contemporary anthropology to what was called holistic inquiry. In his extended dialogue with Loïc Wacquant, Pierre Bourdieu (1992:126-127) opened up the concept of habitus to examine the systems of preception resulting from the institution of the social in the body. He posed this as “the space through which we learn who or what we are in society” (1977:163). David Harvey expanded its meaning as the site for relating “generative principles of regulated improvisations” to practices that “reproduce the objective conditions which produced the generative principles of habitus in the first place” (Harvey 1989:219-221). The meanings attributed to habitus are sufficiently flexible to allow me to appropriate the concept to examine cultural reproduction among Mayans in Chiapas.
