ABSTRACT
The term ‘theory of the symbolic’ is being used to refer to Bourdieu’s conceptual framework for the analysis of mental structures, including schemes and categories of perception, thought, evaluation, and action, both conscious and unconscious, as well as to activities, institutions, and objects pertaining to such schemes and categories. While in general practice refers to anything people do, when it is thought of with the intention of understanding or explaining people’s activities, we must look for its conceptual construction in relation to the theoretical tools devised to realize such an aim. The partial or discontinuous character of this logic is, according to Bourdieu, primarily explicable by the saving in time demanded by the urgency of practice that it makes possible and which, as he clarifies along the way, is not peculiar to ‘primitive societies’. The habitus, moreover, is the product of what Bourdieu terms a double historicity.
