ABSTRACT
It would be easy enough to show that the concept of structure and even the word "structure" itself are as old as the epistémé–that is to say, as old as Western science and Western philosophy. At the time of Pierre Bourdieu's death in 2002 Bourdieu was a giant among intellectual heroes in France, and was respected the world over as a brilliant empirical researcher, inventive writer, and path-breaking social theorist of cultural politics. The habitus, a product of history, produces individual and collective practices–more history–in accordance with the schemes generated by history. The habitus–embodied history, internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history–is the active presence of the whole past of which it is the product. As such, it is what gives practices their relative autonomy with respect to external determinations of the immediate present.
