habitus

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a foundational concept in Pierre Bourdieu's sociology referring to the durable, transposable system of dispositions — ways of perceiving, thinking, feeling, and acting — that individuals acquire through their social experiences and upbringing and that shape their behaviour across different social fields; habitus is neither a fixed character nor a conscious strategy but an internalised social grammar that generates practices appropriate to one's social position without requiring deliberate calculation; it explains how social class is reproduced through embodied behaviour