Getting Out of the Habitus: An Alternative Model of Dynamically Embodied Social Action

Author(s): Brenda Farnell

Source: The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Sep., 2000), pp.
397-418
Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
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 GETTING OUT OF THE HABITUS:

AN ALTERNATIVE MODEL OF

DYNAMICALLY EMBODIED SOCIAL ACTION

BRENDA FARNELL

University of Illinois (Urbana- Champaign)

Although Bourdieu's theory of practice has drawn widespread attention to the role
of the body and space in social life, the concept of habitus is problematic as an explana-
tory account of dynamic embodiment because it lacks an adequate conception of the
nature and location of human agency. An alternative model is presented which locates
agency in the causal powers and capacities of embodied persons to engage in dialogic,
signifying acts. Grounded in a non-Cartesian concept of person and 'new realist',
post-positivist philosophy of science, vocal signs and action signs, not the dispositions
of a habitus, become the means by which humans exercise agency in dynamically
embodied practices. Ethnographic data from the commulnicative practices of the Nakota
(Assiniboine) people of northern Montana (USA) support and illustrate the theoretical
argument.

one has to situate oneself within 'real activity as such'

(Pierre Bourdieu 1990 (1980): 52).

it is our acting that lies at the bottom of our practices

(Ludwig Wittgenstein 1977: #204).

The concept of [causal] force is richer than that of disposition. The array of forces that act
on a system uniquely determine the disposition of that system to change but not conversely
(Sober & Lewontin 1993: 586).

Driving west across rolling grasslands in northern Montana, I arrived at Fort

Belknap Reservation on a hot summer afternoon. A cluster of administrative
buildings at the Reservation Agency included a community recreation hall,
which provided shade and welcome relief from driving. Wandering through
the building, I asked a young woman for directions to the nearby town of
Harlem.
'You go out of here this way, turn this way again and you'll come to the
highway. Go this way again, over the river, and you're gonna go that xvay into
town.'
Pointing gestures made sense of her instructions and I later realized that
her gestures were orientated to the cardinal directions even though she had
no visual landmarks to guide them (see figure 1).1

?) Royal Anthropological Institute 2000.

J. Roy. anthrop. Inst. (N.S.) 6, 397-418

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 398 BRENDA FARNELL

T
that way into town." [
and you're gonna go j

over the river {

Go this way again, [

I
the highway. T
and you'll come to x

tum this way again Harlem Highway 2

T ~ ~ ~ ~~ikRiver 7

this way, x W recreationii 1 E

I ~~~~~centre
"You go out of here 7
N

EA W
N

FIGURE 1. Route directions given by young Nakota woman at Fort Belknap. The flow of action
signs (written in the Laban script) and vocal signs read from bottom to top.

Field research taught me that her response was typical. Nakota people use
gesture and geographical space extensively in everyday discourse. North, south,
east, and west, plus 'earth' and 'sky', constitute an indexical form intrinsic to
many social situations and events. This form structures integrated speech and
gesture in social spaces, whether someone gives directions, tells stories or
engages in political discourse. It is the spatial form for religious and ceremo-

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 BRENDA FARNELL 399

nial events and it influences visual artwork and ceremonial regalia (see Farnell
1995a; 1995c).
The Nakota concept of the four cardinal directions differs in important
ways from the Euro-American tradition in that each direction comprises an
area of a circle sectioned into four quarters instead of four directional lines
(see figure 2). Moreover, in the Nakota language, the cardinal directions are
collectively known as t'ate topa (the four winds) or t'ate oye topa (tracks of the
four winds). In spiritual practices it is from the four winds that various kinds
of spiritual assistance ('powers') come. Instead of the four directions as lines
moving outward from a given point, the Nakota terms denote a general direc-
tion from which certain things come towards a person. These important con-
nections to spiritual beliefs confirm Williams's observation that the spaces in
which human acts occur are simultaneously physical, conceptual, moral, and
ethical (Williams 1995: 52; cf. de Certeau 1984; Clifford 1997: 52-91; Gupta
& Ferguson 1997).
In Bourdieu's theory of practice, this semantic structuring would be
explained as part of a Nakota habitus, an 'unconscious practical logic' by
means of which Nakota people are 'disposed' to use this symbolic form as
a 'generative schema' when they give route directions, tell stories, or dance.
I find this explanation inadequate because, despite Bourdieu's claims to
the contrary, its residual Durkheimianism and Cartesianism mislocates
human agency and so provides no satisfactory explanation of the means by
which the habitus can be linked to what people do and say. Although
habitus has been important in alerting anthropologists to the role of
bodily and spatial practices in social action, it does not achieve an account of
embodied social action or a solution to the problem of disembodied social
theory.
The Latin word habitus refers to 'a habitual or typical condition, state or
appearance, particularly of the body' (Jenkins 1992: 74). It has appeared in
European thought in the work of Hegel, Husserl, Weber, Durkheim, and
Mauss. It came to anthropology through Mauss's 'Les techniques du corps'
(Mauss 1979), first published in 1935. Bourdieu refined and reintroduced the
term in Outline of a theory of practice (1977). The notion of habitus, which
appeals to the scholarly authority invested in Latin, appears to have filled a
lexical gap in British and American socio-cultural anthropology. It may have
been widely accepted because it appears to offer a corrective to the curiously
disembodied view of social life that permeated Western social theory until
recently.2 In addition, the growth of practice-oriented approaches in anthro-
pology sought to include agents and their embodied praxis/practices (Ortner
1984). Debates about the nature and meaning of habitus (e.g. Bourdieu &
Wacquant 1992; Calhoun et al. 1993; Jenkins 1992) attempt to clarify the
concept and to determine its value for anthropological understanding. It is in
this spirit that I seek to identify certain limitations in Bourdieu's formulation
and offer an alternative model.
Since semantically laden spaces cannot be understood without attention to
active persons moving in such spaces, the heart of the matter lies in under-
standing (1) the nature and exact location of human agency and (2) the role
of causality in human affairs. If the habitus is a set of dispositions and genera-
tive schemas that incline people to act in certain ways, we must ask how

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 400 BRENDA FARNELL

W E

Euro-American cardinal directions

E - - W

Assiniboine cardinal directions

FIGURE 2. Two different cultural conceptions of the cardinal directions.

these entities operate and whether they are necessary to account for what
people say and do. The problems emerge more clearly if w-ve place habitus in
the context of a non-Cartesian concept of person and a conception of the
relationship between agency, substance, and cauisality articulated in the post-
positivist Philosophy of science known as 'new realism' (Aronson 1984;
Aronson et al. 1995; Bhaskar 1978; Harr&e 1986).
Although the new notion of dynamiically embodied personhood that
emerges is a Western secular, social-scientific conception, it provides a better
ground from which to explore alternative anthropologies of personhood and
self. Until we engage in a critical exarmination of our ontological and episte-
mological position(s) on this topic, we risk reading other persons through the
implicit dualistic categories characteristic of a distorting Cartesian lens.
Before presenting an alternative model of dynarmicafly embodied action, I
briefly summarize Mauss 's use of habitus, then criticafly exarmine Bourdieu's
use of the term.

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 BRENDA FARNELL 401

Mauss's habitus

In 'Les techniques du corps', Mauss paid attention to a category of 'rmiscelia-

neous social phenomena' that he collected over a period of years. He calls
these 'techniques of the body ... the ways in which from society to society
men [sic] know how to use their bodies' (1979: 97). He observed that physi-
cal activities such as walking, running, swimming, and digging are performed
in ways specific to their societies, noting that Polynesians do not swim as
Frenchmen do and that swimnming techniques in Europe changed during his
lifetime. Likewise, during the First World War he noticed that English troops
did not know how to use French spades (a fact requiring 8,000 spades to be
changed whenever French divisions were relieved, and vice versa). He saw a
British infantry division, marching with a completely different frequency and
stride from the French, and found their gait to be at odds with French buglers.
Mauss recognized that differences in actions were the result of social edu-
cation in bodily techniques.While some techniques are acquired through imi-
tating adults and peers, others are imposed through explicit educational
training. This involves adhering to rules of politeness and etiquette - 'Elbows
off the table!' and 'Sit up straight!' Mauss provides an example of a Maori
mother schooling her daughter in their distinctive gendered style of walking:
'You're not doing the onioni'. In sum, the biological is always and everywhere
shaped by the social and psychological: 'three elements indissolubly mnixed
together' (1979: 102). It is worthy of mention that Mauss addressed an audi-
ence of psychologists when he wrote this paper, choosing the word habitus
instead of the French habitude (habit or custom) in order to emphasize that
these actions were not individual habits. Rather, they varied according to
Durkheimian 'social facts': that is, they varied among 'societies, educations,
proprieties and fashions, prestiges' (1979: 101).
This brief synopsis historicafly situates the anthropological use of habitus
and highlights the extent to which Bourdieu revisits Mauss's focus on the
social nature of embodied action. Bourdieu's later work (1984) also develops
Mauss's programmatic suggestions about the constitutive role of embodied
action in the construction of class and status. However, Bourdieu requires
habitus to do much more theoretical work than this.

Bourdieu's habitus

In his theory of practice, Bourdieu wishes to account for the 'practical knowl-
edge' of social actors - the whole complex of habituated activities of ordi-
nary living that people acquire through socialization: a 'practical sense' of
how to act and react appropriately as they think, feel, talk, stand, gesture, and
organize social spaces.
At the heart of Bourdieu's project is an attempt to develop a theory of
action that wili replace the subjectivist-objectivist dualism in classical social
theory with its problematic matching pair:'individual' and'society'. He wants
to 'escape from under the philosophy of the subject without doing away with
the agent as weli as from under the philosophy of the structure but without
forgetting to take into account the effect it wields upon and through the
agent' (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992: 121-2; see also Bourdieu 1985). He rein-

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 402 BRENDA FARNELL

troduces habitus to account for the nature of the relationship between indi-
vidual and society, because

I wanted to account for practice in its humblest forms - rituals, matrimonial choices, the
mundane economic activity of everyday life etc. - by escaping the objectivism of action
understood as a mechanical reaction 'without an agent' and the subjectivism which portrays
action as the deliberate pursuit of a conscious intention, the free project of a conscience
pursuing its own ends and maximizing its utility through rational computation (Bourdieu
&Wacquant 1992: 121).

Bourdieu wants to avoid objectivist, behaviourist accounts of human activ-

ity that deny agency, without resorting to their subjectivist opposite. He wants
to avoid references to rules of social action, observing that social regularities
formulated by observers after the fact as 'rules' can become a discourse in
which such rules are supposed to exist in people's heads and guide their
actions. This echoes Wittgenstein's observation that 'People use rules to assess
the correctness of their actions; rules do not use people as the vehicles of their
causal efficacy to generate actions' (paraphrase of Wittgenstein in Miilhausler
& Harre 1990: 7).
If the strategies people employ and the practices in their everyday lives
cannot be understood solely in terms of rational individual decision-making
or as being determined by supra-individual structures, how can we account
for them? Bourdieu's answer is to say that they are embedded in a habitus that,
'once acquired ... underlies and conditions all subsequent learning and social
experience' (Bourdieu 1977: 72-95; 1990: 52-65).
To see if habitus is adequate to account for these aspects of social life to
which Bourdieu draws attention, we must ask, what is the habitus exactly and
how does it connect with what people say and do? Bourdieu telis us that the
generative schemas and dispositions of the habitus are durable because they are
learned during the early years of life. Inscribed in 'bodily hexis,'3 they are
habitual and unreflexive:'[T]he agent does what he or she "has to do" without
posing it explicitly as a goal - beneath the level of calculation and even con-
sciousness, beneath discourse and representation' (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992:
128). And again: 'Bodily hexis ... turned into a permanent disposition, a
durable manner of standing, speaking and thereby of feeling and thinking.
... The principles embodied in this way are placed beyond the grasp of
consciousness, and hence cannot be touched by voluntary deliberate transfor-
mation, cannot even be made explicit' (Bourdieu 1977: 93, 94). Unless you
are the social theorist, apparently.
What is the ontological status of'dispositions' and how is this different from
the status of'rules'? How do dispositions activate the generative schemas of
the habitus, if they are beyond the conscious grasp of the agent? And if they
are, how is the habitus not deterministic?
Bourdieu tries to avoid determinism by suggesting that the habitus only dis-
poses actors to do certain things. It provides a basisfor the generation of prac-
tices but does not determine them. But if habitual schemas are 'generative',
there must be some means by which agents draw on their habitus as a resource
of some kind. The problem with this formulation is that the process of
generation, the socio-cultural content generated and subsequent adjustments
to external constraints (demands and opportunities) of the social world, are

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 BRENDA FARNELL 403

all apparently unconscious, or less than conscious. Hence, it is not clear how
this causal link might actually work, or how it can be the doing of an agentic
person.
Bourdieu, then, has not escaped the problem of rules. He has simply
replaced them with dispositions, equally tacit and unknowable. An appeal to
some form of tacit knowledge suits Bourdieu's goal of removing 'rational
choice' as the determining factor in accounting for what people do or say,
but this means that his theory depends on the assumption of some hidden or
'virtual' apparatus by means of which agents draw on implicit knowledge that
they acquired through social experience and explicit socialization. Bourdieu
internalizes this sphere of tacit knowledge at the level of the individual when
talking of dispositions, and externalizes it when talking of the collectivity,
because the habitus is also a social phenomenon (see Jenkins 1992: 79).
I suggest that the invention of analytical constructs or mechanisms such as
the dispositions and generative schemas of the habitus are necessary because
Bourdieu's theory lacks an adequate conception of the nature and location of
agency, and an adequate conception of the nature of human powers and capac-
ities. The want of clarity surrounding Bourdieu's attempts to defend his con-
ception against critics is symptomatic of this failure (see Bourdieu &Wacquant
1992: 120-40). Clearly, the root problem is how to define and locate human
agency.

The location of agency

In our common-sense way of thinking about the world, an agent is any being
that has the power to make things happen. From the perspective of a new
realist philosophy of science (the basis of the alternative model offered here),
a transcendent entity like 'the habitus' is problematic because it posits a
cognitive and transcendent causal nexus that has no ontological grounding.
That is, it postulates an entity, the habitus, that exists somewhere between
neurophysiology and the person. Bourdieu says,

As an acquired system of generative schemes objectively adjusted to the particular con-

ditions in which it is constituted, the habitus engenders all the thoughts, all the perceptions,
and all the actions consistent with those conditions ... the habitus is an endless capacity to
engender products - thoughts, perceptions, expressions, actions - whose limits are set by the
historically and socially situated conditions of its production (1977: 95).

Habitus being the social embodied, it is at home in the field it inhabits, it perceives it
immediately as endowed with meaning and interest (1992: 128).

If one asks where human agency is located in all this, one finds that 'habitus'
has replaced 'person' as the agentic power, located somewhere ambiguously
behind or beneath the agency of persons. For example, we could substitute
'person' for habitus in the passages above and regain agency (i.e. the person
has an endless capacity to engender thought, perception, etc.). The habitus
presents us with what Wittgenstein would call an 'unnecessary shuffle' in an
effort to get to a genuine source of agency. From this perspective, such hypo-
thetical entities are mistaken because as 'virtual orders' they are just as
ethereal as the Cartesian res cogitans. In this case, the way in which the less-

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 404 BRENDA FARNELL

than-conscious dispositions of the habitus generate practices is just as myste-

rious as the relations between Descartes's dichotomy of'mental substance' and
'physical extended matter'. Bourdieu's model does not recognize that neither
'rules' nor'habitus' can use people, because such constructs themselves have no
causal efficacy. Only people do.
Wittgenstein's eschewal of all reference to hypothetical cognitive and tran-
scendent entities, and all reference to subterranean orders of powers, mecha-
nisms, and states, was not intended to provide a better theory, but to invalidate
explanations that went beyond describing actions in terms of contextualized,
situated practices - beyond saying,'this is what we do' (1977: #204).Wittgen-
stein's position requires legitimization in an appropriate philosophy of science.
Fortunately, this legitimation is provided by 'causal powers' theory (Harre &
Madden 1975;Varela 1994; 1995b;Varela & Harre 1996).4

Causal powers theory

The notion of a 'causal power' is a central component of the new realist

philosophy of science. It provides the metaphysical grounding for Harre's
conception of embodiment, person, and self (1984; 1993a; 1993b) and for
Williams's anthropological theory of dynamically embodied human action
called 'semasiology' (1975; 1982; 1995; 1996; 1999). The notion of 'causal
powers' provides an alternative to the conception of human being articulated
by Descartes. Generally speaking, the traditional Platonic-Cartesian model sees
'mind' as the internal, non-material locus of rationality, thought, language, and
knowledge. In opposition to this, the 'body' is the mechanical, sensate, mate-
rial locus of irrationality and feeling. This bifurcation has led to the valoriza-
tion of spoken and written signs as 'real' knowledge, internal to the reasoning
mind of a solipsistic individual, to the exclusion of other meaning-making
practices, thereby bifurcating intelligent activities and ascribing them either to
physical or mental realms. Brief examination of an alternative metaphysics of
personhood can help us to understand exactly how a residual Cartesianism in
Bourdieu's theory of practice creates a dualism between dispositions and prac-
tice that is theoretically unconvincing.
In causal powers theory, human beings are one natural kind of causally
empowered entity. For this to be possible without biological reductionism
requires a new conception of substance, one that avoids Descartes's mater-
ial-non-material dualism. In his mechanistic view, all activity, be it of organic
or inorganic bodies, is the result of motion. What we discern at any particu-
lar moment is the result of prior motion, all the way back to the original
source of motion, a Prime Mover - the Creator. Since no material thing is
ever a source of its own motion, material agency is an illusion (Harre 1995:
121).
In contrast, post-mechanistic physics argues that there are original sources
of activity in the physical world. This view, central to causal powers theory, is
rooted in the changing conception of matter in the development of quantum
physics. The view requires a conception of substance in which various forms
of matter are derived from moving forces of attraction and repulsion that
become structured into diversified natural kinds of substances with unique

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 BRENDA FARNELL 405

powers and capacities. The natural world is thus constituted by the distribu-
tion and stratification of numerous natural kinds of powerful particulars. In
other words, different stratified natural kinds have powers and forces intrinsic
to their structural design. Causation, then, is the activity of such powerful par-
ticulars at work. The forces of which powerful particulars are capable produce
real consequences.
This dynamical model of substance provides us with a view of human being
as a unique structure of powers and capacities. The natural powers for agency
grounded in the structure of our biological beings make possible our personal
powers, themselves grounded in and afforded by social life (Varela 1995b: 369).
This means there are two sites for human agency: (1) natural (biological)
powers and (2) acquired powers grounded in social activities (Shotter 1973;
Varela 1995b: 369). Although self-mobilization is individual, it is effected
through the dynamics of inter-personal consideration. Directing oneself to act
requires that a given 'self' consider how a given 'other' will react. The process
of the enactment of human agency is thus a social act, 'a mutual process of
consideration whereby persons consider how [other persons] will, can or could
act in response to their own act in order to direct themselves to act in such
a way that a joint or social act is accomplished' (Varela & Harre 1996: 323).
'Person' is thus a social category, because the everyday enactment of personal
powers can only be accomplished socially.
'Since the process of the exercise of human agency is social, to locate the
agentic act inside the individual is not only to lose bringing about joint acts
with others, but it is also to lose the essentially joint character of social reality'
(Varela & Harre 1996: 323). This replaces the dualisms of individual vs. society
and subjectivist vs. objectivist with the joint activity of empowered embod-
ied persons using vocal and action signs. It dissolves Cartesian subjectivism
without losing agency, since the source of activity is the agentic efficacy of
social human beings. It simultaneously dissolves the objectivist notion of
society as social structures since the 'powerful particulars' that create social
entities (like institutions) are dynamically embodied persons using signifying
acts of all kinds in dialogic interactions.5
The importance of this new formulation of causality for social theory has
been articulated by Varela (1995a: 218), who notes that 'contrary to the
Humean tradition, the ideas of substance, causation and agency are internally
compatible with each other. In this light human agency entails both that the
person is a real entity - a substance - and that the exercise of agency is a real
event - a causal force'.
At the microscopic level, the exercise of the causal powers of electromag-
netic charges brings the material world into being. At another level, the exer-
cise of human causal powers brings the conversational (that is, social) world
into being. 'Conversation' - not only speech exchanges, but any meaning-
making practices - creates a social world just as physical causality generates a
physical one (Harre 1984: 65): 'The conversational world, like the physical
world, evolves under the influence of real powers and forces, dispositional
properties of the utterances that are the real substrate of all interchanges'
(Miihlhausler & Harre 1990: 24).
'Conversational realism' holds that it is through their power to manage
symbols that people jointly bring social order into being. This prescribes an

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 406 BRENDA FARNELL

ontological view of social life as rooted in two realities; biology and conver-
sation.The vocal signs (speech acts) and action signs (Williams 1975) that con-
stitute conversation are grounded in and enabled by, but cannot be reduced to,
biology because they are symbolic (in the sense of manipulating signs) and
relations between signs are non-deterministic in meaning and effect. In con-
trast to this, the relations between biological phenomena are causal and deter-
ministic. Personhood is rooted in both realms. Causal powers theory thus
entails a duality in Giddens's sense (1984), but not a dualism in the Cartesian
sense of positing the existence of two different substances, mind and body.
Human agency is located in the powers and capacities of embodied persons
for all kinds of action rather than in a Cartesian non-material substance, or
(in a reversal of that centre of privilege) in the equally ambiguous subjectivist
'bodily intentionality' of the phenomenology of Merleau Ponty (1962; see
Russow 1988;Varela 1995a).
Of particular significance for an embodied theory of human action, causal
powers theory transcends the nature-culture divide. It reconnects us to the
natural physical world of which we are a part, without denying the species-
specific powers and capacities that have given us the means to create diverse
cultural worlds. Humanity is 'naturally cultural', as it were.6

Grounding dispositions

Harre (1986: 130) reminds us that 'dispositions are part of the scientific
conception of nature just in so far as they can be actually or theoretically
grounded in the constitutions of kinds or the generative mechanisms of
processes'. In conversational realism, the dispositional properties of utterances
are grounded in persons viewed as powerful particulars, as capable of causal
activity. On the other hand, dispositions in the habitus are not grounded in
any clear conception of human agency.
To avoid both behaviourism and determinism, dispositions must be
grounded in a natural kind of powerful particular, in which case the stimu-
lus does not determine the response, but is the occasion for a powerful
particular to produce the response. Since Bourdieu does not ground the dis-
positions of the habitus, he commits two fallacies that violate the logic of causal
powers.
According to causal powers theory, causation is the result of the power
of a particular, not a particular and a power. To separate the power from
the particular is to violate the principle of structural integrity, which is the
fallacy of bifurcation (see Varela 1994: 174; 1995a: 270-4). Two variants of
this appear regularly in social theory. One is the psychological varieties of
transcendentalist devices such as those found in Freud, Lacan, Chomsky, and
much of cognitive science (see Harre & Gillett 1994). Here, there is the
individualist reification of internal mental structures in a 'power and par-
ticular' schema. The Freudian unconscious is a power separate from the body
that nevertheless controls a person's actions. The other, sociological in the
manner of Marx and Durkheim, is the collectivist reifications of external
social structures: the externalization of the 'power and particular' schema
(Varela 1994: 174). Social structures have causal power separate from the joint

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 BRENDA FARNELL 407

activities of persons. Thus, Bourdieu's error is common in much of social

theory.7
The habitus manifests both externalized and internalized variants of the
fallacy of bifurcation, for it is both embodied in individuals and a collective
phenomenon. '[T]he habitus [is] a socially constituted system of cognitive and
motivating structures' (Bourdieu 1977: 76). In turn, this means Bourdieu
cannot see dialogic signifying acts as the means by which social order is pro-
duced, despite his attention to practice. An example is the following account:

[An] old woman ... specializes in the magic which uses the left hand, the cruel hand (a
'left-hander's blow' is a deadly blow) and turns from right to left (as opposed to man, who
uses the right hand, the hand used in swearing an oath and turns from left to right); she is
adept in the art of slyly 'twisting her gaze' (abran walan) away from the person to whom
she wishes to express her disapproval or annoyance (abran, to turn from right to left, to make
a slip of the tongue, to turn back or front, in short, to turn in the wrong direction, is
opposed to geleb, to turn one's back, to overturn, as a discreet, furtive passive movement, a
female sidestepping, a 'twisted move' a magical device is to open honest, straightforward,
male aggression) (Bourdieu 1977; 126).

Although richly evocative of Kabyle gendered spatial oppositions, body

movement, metaphors, and common sayings, this description is ultimately of
the norms of bodily praxis written in the third person. Bourdieu is the only
subject here. Although he presents the actions of Kabyle men and women, his
theoretical resources only allow him to include talk about them: we rarely hear
from them. Likewise, we find detailed talk about the body, but not 'talk'from
the body (Farnell 1994; 1996).

The language of theorizing

As Whorf (1984) pointed out, speakers of Indo-European languages are prone

to create nouns to refer to intangible ideas. For example, our metaphors for
the intangibles of the physical world that we experience, such as time, are
nouns that provide time with length and substance. We speak of a long or
short time and divide it into units we call weeks, days, hours, minutes, and
seconds. We talk about not having enough time, of spending and wasting it,
and so forth. Given this propensity in our language, it is not surprising to find
in Western social theorizing a similar tendency to nominalize and reify
intangible ideas. If we say that some activity is performed 'knowledgeably',
even though the individual cannot say what makes it so, we are led to
assume it must be knowledgeable in virtue of some thing about that indi-
vidual (Pleasants 1996: 238). An adverbial expression readily spawns a noun.
The Cartesian error lies in supposing 'that every substantive must refer to a
substance' (Harre 1993: 4). Treating the substantive term 'mind' as a mental
substance commits the Cartesian error of ontologizing 'the self' (Harre 1984:
95-102; Miihlhausler & Harre 1990: 115-22).
In ordinary language, we frequently talk of doing something unconsciously,
without paying attention. Freud turned this adverb into a noun and created
'the unconscious' as a causal power working behind what people do and say.
Likewise, Bourdieu has turned our ordinary talk about habitual activities into
a metaphorical entity, 'the habitus'. We are led to assume that an individual

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 408 BRENDA FARNELL

acts knowledgeably through a capacity to implement a set of dispositions

underlying (or generating) that activity.

Residual Durkheimianisrn

It was in order to escape the Durkheimian collectivist fallacy of reifying social

structures that Bourdieu introduces the idea of a habitus located in individual
actors. This is an attempt to keep social determinism at bay without renounc-
ing the influence of social and cultural forces. In the end, Bourdieu fails to
avoid the fallacy of collectivism because the questionable ascription of causal
powers means that he simply translated and internalized Durkheimian 'social
facts'. Habitus in Bourdieu's theory is a substitute for Durkheim's 'social force'
in the collective social construction of the world. The problem is, if social
structure (or the habitus) is causally efficacious, then how is it to be analysed
as an entity possessing causal powers? Because Bourdieu is not clear about
this, an unintended consequence is an aura of determinism that is not deci-
sively dispelled, despite Bourdieu's unequivocal denunciation.
Bourdieu's habitus thus betrays a residual Durkheimianism, because it gives
us 'social facts' that are embodied and located in the individual without ever
getting to people interacting.8 Bourdieu retains 'the externality criterion
according to which the facticity of the social exists outside the patterns of
joint human action' (Varela & Harre 1996). While persons as agents are the
only efficient causes in society, they are persons in their joint social activities.
Bourdieu would undoubtedly agree with the thesis that individual being is
social, but the array of powers necessary for the creation of a symbolic social
order are exercised when people act jointly - an idea that requires a discur-
sive turn toward dialogic signifying acts (see Voloshinov 1973), especially
speech acts and action signs, as the means by which people exercise their
agency.

Residual Cartesianism

Bourdieu retains a dualist conception of human beings as two distinct enti-

ties: mind and body. The body is a mnemonic device upon and in which the
basic practical taxonomies of the habitus are imprinted and encoded during
socialization. He bifurcates 'person' when he separates a habituated body, the
body of the habitus, from mind and discourse, in an effort to avoid emphasis
on rational choice as a reason for action. This separation appears in his ten-
dency to separate involvement with thought and language from practical activ-
ities. The Cartesian mistake is to separate thought from action, presuming that
such action is unconscious if not accompanied by self-reflective, propositional
thought.
It is the case that 'habit diminishes the conscious attention with which our
acts are performed' (James 1950: 114), but this means that we act unseffcon-
sciously rather than unconsciously. This arrangement enlarges our capacity for
intelligent action, allowing us to be selective about which aspects of action
we keep in our focal awareness (Polanyi 1958). Ordinary language is instruc-

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 BRENDA FARNELL 409

tive here: we often say that someone 'knows how to' ride a bike or swim,
even though most people cannot articulately describe their action or state the
laws of physics to which these activities conform. As Polanyi puts it, 'We know
more than we can tell' (1967: 4).9 '[O]rdinary use of the term "know" often
does not entail or imply a corresponding discursive or propositional facility
to say how or what it is that one knows' (Pleasants 1996: 234). Bourdieu's
error lies in assuming that the lack of such a discursive facility entails a lack
of consciousness.
In this assumption, Bourdieu perpetuates a misconception in dualist
thought, that thinking is what goes on in the head or brain quite distinct
from the actions of the body, and that it necessarily precedes or accompanies
thoughtful action. As Best (1993: 201, emphasis added) points out:'To describe
an action as thoughtful is not to say that the physical behavior is accompa-
nied or preceded by an inner mental event; it is to describe the kind of action
it is'. Active engagement in any physical activity is thinking, which is not to
say that one cannot also be reflective and think about the activity when one
is not engaged in it. The conception of habitus denies the possibility of
thoughtful action because it limits the body to its Cartesian status, a mind-
less, unconscious repository and mechanistic operator of practical techniques.
Bourdieu's work privileges the theorist's account at the expense of accounts
of persons enacting the body in intelligent activities (Ingold 1993a; 1993b) or
action sign systems (Williams 1975) that may be out of focal awareness
through habit and skill but are not thereby rendered unconscious. As causally
empowered agents, we employ an embodied intentionality to act (Gibson
1979: 218-19) that is embedded in intersubjective practices.

Getting out of the habitus

Although the anti-Cartesian conception of human agency articulated in

Harre's causal powers provides all the necessary conditions to get to dynam-
ically embodied action, its full realization requires a theory such as Williams's
semasiology with its concepts of the signifying body and of the action sign.10
Consistent with the shift 'from function to meaning' in British social anthro-
pology (Crick 1976), semasiology views human beings as meaning-makers
with causal powers and capacities as embodied persons to use signifying acts
of all kinds."1 A semasiology of action takes an agentic perspective on corpo-
real space, which is viewed as a centre of intersecting axes linked to our
moving bodies that structures semantically rich human spaces into right and
left, up and down, in front and behind, inside and outside. This corporeal space
is structured by local conceptions of spatial orientation (e.g. the Nakota use
of the four directions) in which action and vocal signs are embedded. Action
and vocal signs thus become the components of deictic (space/time) refer-
ence, indexicality and performativity. These are, in turn, embedded within
larger performance spaces of all kinds (e.g. living spaces, village plazas, court-
rooms, etc.).
Semasiology thus relieves 'meaning' from being fixed to a referential or
representational function and adds indexical aspects of sign functions into the
analytic frame. This allows the kinds of practical activities of special interest

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 410 BRENDA FARNELL

to Bourdieu to be included in the realm of the joint construction of social

action as signifying acts. Let us take ordinary walking as an example.
To argue in a behaviouristic manner that 'I'm just walking, it doesn't mean
anything' is to decontextualize the act, and reduce action to gross physical
movement (Best 1978). One is, perhaps, walking to the store to get groceries,
or walking in order to keep fit; or walking for the pleasure of it simply because
'being' matters: it is a human value. All these actions are semiotic in the sense
of being meaningful, intelligent activities (Ingold 1993b).Walking as an 'action
sign' thus takes its meaning from the context in which the walking occurs,
from its place within a system of signs.
Since styles of walking are shaped socially, as Mauss observed, others can
use the way I walk to position me socially, as I can use it to position myself
(on positioning, see Davies & Harre 1990; Harre & van Langenhow 1999).
Although walking is normally outside one's focal awareness it is always avail-
able for focal attention if necessary. In Northern Ireland, for example, careful
reading of the walk, posture, eye gaze, and clothing of other persons (a prac-
tice called 'telling') determines whether a person is identified as Catholic or
Protestant and therefore evaluated as someone worthy of'talk' (social interac-
tion) or not. In this tension-ridden context, attention to ways of walking and
accompanying bodily practices has become important (Kelleher in press).
When social borders of any kind must be crossed, it seem that habitual actions
take centre stage instead of remaining out of awareness.

The semasiology of action

According to Bourdieu's theory of practice, it is the habitus of Nakota people

that makes them unconsciously disposed to use the symbolic form of the four
directions and circle as a 'generative schema' when they give route directions.
The hidden reality of the habitus is revealed in Nakota practices. In contrast,
according to the semasiology of action, when Nakota people give route direc-
tions, they are causally empowered dynamically embodied persons utilizing
resources provided by the systems of signifying acts into which they have been
socialized. Instead of inventing a transcendental realm somewhere between
neurophysiology and the person, we need only examine the dynamic resources
available to the embodied person. The differences between these two expla-
nations - the habitus or a semasiology of action - can be grasped with the
following ethnographic example.

A Nakota elder, skilled in using Plains Sign Language and spoken Nakota simultaneously,
gave me directions for how to travel from the town of Harlem, just north of the reserva-
tion, to Lodgepole, a community at the southern end."2 On this occasion she was sitting
facing north with her back towards the actual direction involved and so was confronted
with a dilemma. If she adhered to the cultural norm of using the spatial frame of reference
based on the cardinal directions, she would have to violate the spatial grammar of Plains
Sign Language by reaching out of the colnventional signing space into the region behind
her. She solved the problem by orientating her gestural signs as if she were facing the direc-
tion of travel and taking the journey herself. Her instructions are thus not tied to actual
geographical direction, but are a 1800 reversal of it and internally consistent once begun.
She switched from a constant (or absolute) frame of reference based on the cardinal direc-
tions to a body frame of reference, according to which spatial orientation (what counts as

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 BRENDA FARNELL 411

front/back, left/right, etc.) is judged from the direction the actor is facing. This is a creative
indexical move that allows her to perform clearly the signs for each feature on the journey
after starting with 'town'.

Figure 3 shows how the Nakota vocal signs and actions signs from Plains
Sign Language accomplished this task. The action signs can be translated into
English nouns such as TOWN, RIVER, STORE (place where you buy), and
MOUNTAINS, plus verbs whose spatial inflections in the signing space add
indexical components: CROSS (THE RIVER); GOING (FARTHER ON,

N
Town

ekta ARRIVE AT
> ~~~~~~~~Milk
hik River

Zeci W GOING W E

1. s~~~~~~~~~~~to Lodgep ie
> ~~~~~~AA A7
mounta AA A
A

s4patca I FARTHER ON

rte

mini RIVER ekta. OVER THERE

ka v idx

*WATER Ltahe 8 MOUNTAINS

Aqasam TOWN (i T wopetuju BUY/PAY FOR

(index)

N 3, q> @se
Aqa.sam mini ne s*pata. Zeci yawqa hik ekta L wopetLAL
Across water this farther on. Then going and there at store.
From town [across] cross this river and go a little further. Then, go this way [a long way]

Lqahe ka ekta.
Mountains over there at.
and you'll get to a little store. It's over there in the mountains.

FIGURE 3. Route directions from Harlem to Lodgepole in Nakota and Plains Sign language.

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 412 BRENDA FARNELL

THIS WAY); GOING (A LONG WAY); ARRIVE AT (THAT PLACE) and

OVER THERE.13 The directions begin with the spoken aga'sam (across),
together with OVER THERE (N) (i.e. the hand points north towards the
town of Harlem). These are an alternative to saying tiota (town) or 'Harlem',
and refer to the fact that one must first go 'across the (Milk) river' to Harlemn
in order to start the journey. The elder thus started her narrative using the
normative constant frame of reference based on the cardinal directions. Then
she switched her frame of reference so that now her action signs point forward
from her body to indicate travelling SOUTH.
It is difficult to account for this creative move in terms of Bourdieu's dis-
positions. Do we say that she made a mistake and selected the wrong dispo-
sition? Or misapplied the correct disposition? Or applied a non-standard
disposition correctly? Are we supposed to say that she was disposed to respond
mistakenly (Pleasants 1996: 244)? In addition, what are the criteria for apply-
ing a tacit disposition correctly? Clearly the only criteria available for correct
use of dispositions are those observable, 'accountable' actions displayed in
public, which means that the postulation of the habitus and its dispositions is
redundant. This makes the habitus explanatorily empty, for it merely describes
again the phenomenon to be explained. Bourdieu tells us that people say and
do things habitually according to the ways in which they have been social-
ized because of their habitus, which thus becomes an artefact of the social the-
orist's own practice and his theoretical interest to transcend objectivism and
subjectivism. Not unlike reified notions of culture, it becomes a device that
gives theoretical discourse a spurious appearance of authority over what is
actually happening. Wittgenstein's rebuttal of his rationalist interlocutor applies
equally well to the use of any form of tacit knowledge on the part of social
theorists, be it Giddens's (1979) 'practical consciousness', Bourdieu's 'habitus',
'tacit rules', or the Freudian 'unconscious'. That is, 'you interpret a grammat-
ical movement made by yourself as a quasi-physical phenomenon which you
are observing' (Wittgenstein 1968: #401).
The semasiological point is that my Nakota consultant is not being acti-
vated by her habitus. Rather, the semiotic modalities of vocal and action signs
provide her with culturally shaped means of conceptualizing (using) her cor-
poreal space.This provides a resource for thoughtful (but not niecessarily reflec-
tive) action according to context and purpose, through which norms can be
adhered to or creatively transgressed. In contrast with Bourdieu's talk about
the body, in the form of third-person descriptions of normative practices that
are activated by the dispositions of a habitus, we have talk from the body,
accounts of persons enacting their bodies using vocal signs and action signs
in dialogic interactional processes.

Concluding remarks

I have argued that even though Bourdieu's concept of habitus has been an
important sensitizing construct, it is theoretically problematic from the per-
spective of a realist philosophy of science. The habitus turns out to be a hypo-
thetical cognitive and transcendent causal nexus that has no ontological
grounding because it exists somewhere between neurophysiology and the person.

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 BRENDA FARNELL 413

I have also suggested that the invention of an analytical construct like the
habitus is necessary to Bourdieu's theory of practice, because he does not
have an adequate conception of the nature and location of agency and the
nature of human powers and capacities. If the implicit conception of causa-
tion as either internal or wholly external to individuals is no longer satisfac-
tory, it follows that Bourdieu's habitus contains residual Cartesianism and
Durkeimianism.
Social theory has had a propensity to create ontologically problematic enti-
ties such as internal mechanisms and macrosocial forces. A systematic con-
ception of causal powers, and the notion of the 'powerful particular' in Harre's
approach, helps control this. Since the ascription of causal powers depends on
satisfying certain stringent ontological conditions, it offers social theory a new
and potentially fruitful meta-theoretical constraint.
Unfortunately, Bourdieu's theory of practice gives us an essentially
ungrounded and mind-less notion of human action that is restricted to habit-
uated practices.Without any deeper understanding of the performative power
of action and vocal signs as equally available resources for meaningful action
in social life, Bourdieu is stuck on the twin river-banks of objectivism and
subjectivism.We can characterize this by saying that although Bourdieu's the-
oretical resources allow him to include talk about the body, he is unable to
include 'talk'from the body.
One important reason why Bourdieu's theoretical project fails in this regard
is that he never lets go of the dualistic terms he wishes to transcend, despite
his desire to 'reject all the conceptual dualisms upon which nearly all post-
Cartesian philosophies are based: subject and object, internal and external,
material and spiritual, individual and social and so on' (Bourdieu & Wacquant
1992: 122). He continues to use them in ways that compromise his theoret-
ical goals. The habitus as 'socialized subjectivity' is the source of 'objective prac-
tices' but is itself a set of 'subjective generative principles' produced by the
'objective patterns of social life'. Bourdieu appears unable to think in terms
other than those rooted in the dualism, and it is precisely in this kind of talk
that we see him jumping from one bank to the other.
I have also indicated how we might be able to connect saying with doing
and thus tackle what Giddens (1984: xxii) identified fifteen years ago as the
next major problem in social theory. Once conceived as powerful particulars
at work in a non-Cartesian metaphysics, human beings become persons, embod-
ied agents in a social world of signifying acts, using vocal and action signs.
These two kinds of semiotic practices (among others) are the means by which
social action is carried out; that is, learned, passed on, imposed by and onto
others, changed and reinvented. As Bourdieu himself advocates, the important
shift from structure to process and practice involves situating ourselves theo-
retically and methodologically within 'real activity as such', but I suggest that
this also entails getting out of the habitus and following Wittgenstein's direc-
tive that 'it is our acting that lies at the bottom of our practices'.

NOTES

My thanks to Rom Harre, Alejandro Lugo, Andy Orta, Charles Varela and Drid Williams for
their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. The usual disclaimers apply. I am also

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 414 BRENDA FARNELL

deeply indebted to the generosity of numerous Nakota teachers and friends on the Fort Belknap
Reservation, as well as the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research who sup-
ported the long-term field research.
1Figures 1 and 3 use Labanotation. The graphic signs designate specific body parts, the
direction of their movement and the relationships between them (e.g. touching, passing near
etc.). The flow of action and speech through time reads from bottom to top. Williams and
Farnell (1990) and Farnell (1995c) describe this system.
2For discussion and overviews of the absent body in social theory, see Frank (1991); Shilling
(1993); Turner (1984; 1991). For discussion of the absent moving body in social theory, see
Varela (1994; 1995a) and Farnell (1994; 1995a; 1999). For a new paradigm of embodiment in
anthropology, see Csordas (1994); Lock (1993); Scheper-Hughes and Lock (1987).
3Bourdieu's move to embody social theory relies on the dual notions of habitus and hexis,
the latter with a meaning similar to the Latin habitus.'Bodily hexis' denotes a personal manner
and style in matters such as deportment, stance, gait, and gesture that 'combines with the social'
(Bourdieu 1977: 83, 87, 94).
4A disclaimer is necessary here. European social thought has frequently grounded the
legitimacy of its hypotheses and conclusions on its imitation of the natural sciences. The
argument I present here does not seek to imitate the natural sciences, nor does it intend
to provide a new foundationalism based on the biological realities of human life. Instead, I
illustrate how a reflexive anthropology requires an explicit philosophy of science to clarify its
ontological and epistemological presuppositions about personhood and agency. While human-
istic anthropologists have been correct in rejecting objectivist and positivist versions of doing
science based on natural-science paradigms, a wholesale rejection of science throws the baby
out with the bath water. There are post-positivist philosophies of science that distinguish the
natural and social sciences on more adequate grounds. New realism provides an example of
how, in seeking to understand the lives of human beings, we can be scientific in the same sense,
but not in exactly the same ways as the natural sciences (Bhaskar 1979: 203). This is because
the social sciences are 'internal' with respect to their subject-matter in ways in which the
natural sciences are not. Since the social sciences are in principle incapable of realizing
experimental decisiveness, precision in meaning assumes the place of accuracy of measurement
(Bhaskar 1978: 59).
5The social nature of human being afforded by the new ontology reorients theories of
person, self, and agency away from an ethnocentric, individualist psychologism and towards
socio-cultural dimensions of interaction, cross-cultural variability (Hill & Irvine 1993) and the
enactment of indexical dynamics (Miilhausler & Harre 1990; Urciuoli 1996). Accordingly, the
locus of'meaning' shifts from internal mental structures and the individual, towards the dia-
logic processes within which meanings are constructed and construed. See Farnell and Graham
(1998) for further references to such'discourse centred' approaches to culture, and Harre (1995)
and Harre and Gillett (1994) for application to 'discursive psychology'.
6Geertz (1973) recognized that we are 'naturally cultural', and essays in MacCormack and
Strathern (1980) problematize the nature-culture divide. Their calls are, however, programmatic.
They do not provide the necessary epistemological and ontological grounding to make such a
conceptual move.
7Bhaskar's 'critical realism' takes a direction rejected by Harre (see Davies & Harre 1990;
Varela & Harre 1996). Harre locates structures in human activity whereas Bhaskar locates struc-
tures outside human activity. The heart of the difference lies in the conception of causal powers
(see Potter & Lopez in press).
8Durkheim had a realist notion of causation, but it remained intuitive. He clearly struggled
to convince himself that the reality of 'the social fact' was an external determinism, that the
necessityfor social rules must mean the necessity of the social rules (Varela & Harre 1996: 319).
Although Bourdieu renounces the notion that 'rules' constitute an implicit realm behind social
behaviour, he invents new analytic constructs that commit the same conceptual errors.
9Ryle's (1949) distinction between 'knowing that' and 'knowing how' is helpful. Knowledge
that can be put into discursive or propositional form is 'knowing that', but this is always under-
pinned by our large stock of 'knowing how' that is not in propositional form.
l?See Williams (1975; 1982; 1995; 1999) and Varela (1993). 'Semasiology' is derived from
Greek and refers to signification and meaning. Williams employed the term in order to dis-
tinguish her theory from other approaches to semiotics that include the sign functions of non-
human animals and machines. In contrast, semasiology conceptualizes the signifying body and

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 BRENDA FARNELL 415

the spaces in which people move as specifically human; that is, as meaning-making practices
specific to language-using creatures (Williams 1991: 363-4).
"Williams developed the concept of the 'action-sign' for an anthropology of human move-
ment systems utilizing programmatic ideas from Saussure's original vision of a scientific study
of 'the functioning of signs within social life' (Saussure 1916: 33; Williams 1999; see Farnell
1999). Action signs are units of human body movement that take their meaning(s) from their
place within a system of signs. Like spoken languages, action-sign systems are open-ended
semantic systems, and encompass all human uses of the medium of bodily movement. They
range from the unmarked (i.e. ordinary) uses of manual and facial gestures, sign languages,
posture, skills, and locomotion to highly marked deliberate choreographies of the kind that
occur in rituals, ceremonies, dances, theatre, the martial arts, and sports.
2Although English has, on the whole, taken over the inter-tribal communicative function
of Plains Indian Sign Language or 'sign talk', it remains important in story-telling, oratory,
during ritual events and in communicating with the deaf and elderly (see Farnell 1995a; 1995c;
Taylor 1996).
13Words in capital letters are translations of action signs into English vocal signs (a word
gloss).

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Sortir de l'habitus: un modele alternatif de l'incarnation

dynamique de I'action sociale

Re'sumnel

Bien que la theorie de la pratique de Bourdieu ait attire une attention considerable sur le
r'le du corps et de l'espace dans la vie sociale, le concept d'habitus est problematique pour
rendre compte et expliquer l'incarnation dynamique car il est depourvu d'une concep-
tion adequate de la nature et de la situation de l'action humaine. Je presente un modele
alternatif qui situe l'action dans les pouvoirs causatifs et dans la capacite qu'ont les per-
sonnes incarnees de s'engager dans des actes dialogiques et signifiants. Sur les bases d'un
concept non-cartesien de la personne et d'une philosophie des sciences 'neo-realiste' et

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 418 BRENDA FARNELL

post-positiviste, les signes vocaux et les signes d'action, et non les dispositions d'un habitus,
deviennent les moyens par lesquels les humains exercent leur capacite d'action dans des pra-
tiques incarnees dynamiquement. Des donnees ethnographiques sur les pratiques commu-
nicatives des Nakota (Assiniboines) du Montana du Nord (USA) corroborent et illustrent
cette discussion theorique.

Anthropology Department, University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), 109 Davenport Hall, 607 5th
Mathews Ave., Urbana, IL 61801, USA Bfarnell@uiuc.edu

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