Outline of a Theory of Practice was first published in French in 1972 (Esquisse d'une théorie de la pratique). However, this English text incorporates most of the changes which Pierre Bourdieu has made since then. The argument is carried further, particularly as regards the concepts of practical logic and symbolic capital, the order of exposition is recast, and, partly for reasons of space, the ethnographic chapters with which the French edition opens have been curtailed.

This text is the cornerstone of an oeuvre which encompasses numerous major works in both anthropology and sociology – which crosses and challenges the boundary dividing their objects, tasks, and theories, and forces attention to the social conditions in which such sciences are possible.

The fieldwork in Kabylia which provided the ethnographic basis for this text and the starting-point for its reflections was carried out amid the tragic circumstances of the Algerian war, which brought to a head the contradictions inherent in the ethnologist's position. This was one factor in Bourdieu's subsequent move into the field of sociology, where the separation which is the hidden condition of all academic activity – most insidiously so in the behavioural sciences – could itself be grasped scientifically in the course of inquiry into the social functions of scholarship and the mechanisms of cultural and social reproduction.

Methodological objectivism, a necessary moment in all research, by the break with primary experience and the construction of objective relations which it accomplishes, demands its own supersession. In order to escape the realism of the structure, which hypostatizes systems of objective relations by converting them into totalities already constituted outside of individual history and group history, it is necessary to pass from the opus operatum to the modus operandi, from statistical regularity or algebraic structure to the principle of the production of this observed order, and to construct the theory of practice, or, more precisely, the theory of the mode of generation of practices, which is the precondition for establishing an experimental science of the dialectic of the internalization of externality and the externalization of internality, or, more simply, of incorporation and objectification.

A false dilemma: mechanism and finalism

The structures constitutive of a particular type of environment (e.g. the material conditions of existence characteristic of a class condition) produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively “regulated” and “regular” without in any way being the product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them and, being all this, collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor.

Objectivism constitutes the social world as a spectacle presented to an observer who takes up a “point of view” on the action, who stands back so as to observe it and, transferring into the object the principles of his relation to the object, conceives of it as a totality intended for cognition alone, in which all interactions are reduced to symbolic exchanges. This point of view is the one afforded by high positions in the social structure, from which the social world appears as a representation (in the sense of idealist philosophy but also as used in painting or the theatre) and practices are no more than “executions”, stage parts, performances of scores, or the implementing of plans.

Doxa, orthodoxy, heterodoxy

There is, perhaps, no better way of making felt the real function of classificatory systems than to evoke as concretely as possible the abrupt and total transformation of daily life which occurs on “the return of azal”. Everything, without exception, in the activities of the men, the women, and the children, is abruptly altered by the adoption of a new rhythm: the movements of the flock, of course, but also the men's work and the domestic activities of the women, the place where the cooking is done, the rest periods, the food eaten, the times and the itinerary of the women's movements and outdoor work, the rhythm of the men's assembly meetings, of the ceremonies, prayers, markets, and meetings outside the village.

In the wet season, in the morning, before eddoḥa, all the men are in the village; with the exception of the meeting sometimes held on a Friday after collective prayer, this is the time of day for meetings of the clan assembly and all the conciliation committees (before a divorce, or to prevent a divorce, before division of an estate or to avoid division); this is also the time when announcements concerning all the men are made from the top of the minaret (summoning them to participate in collective work, repairing roads, digging drains, transporting flagstones, etc.).

SECTION I: ANALYSES

The practical privilege in which all scientific activity arises never more subtly governs that activity (insofar as science presupposes not only an epistemological break but also a social separation) than when, unrecognised as privilege, it leads to an implicit theory of practice which is the corollary of neglect of the social conditions in which science is possible. The anthropologist's particular relation to the object of his study contains the makings of a theoretical distortion inasmuch as his situation as an observer, excluded from the real play of social activities by the fact that he has no place (except by choice or by way of a game) in the system observed and has no need to make a place for himself there, inclines him to a hermeneutic representation of practices, leading him to reduce all social relations to communicative relations and, more precisely, to decoding operations. Charles Bally remarked that linguistic research takes different directions according to whether it deals with the researcher's mother tongue or with a foreign language, emphasizing in particular the tendency to intellectualism implied in observing language from the standpoint of the listening subject rather than that of the speaking subject, that is, as a “means of action and expression”: “the listener is on the side of the language, it is with the language that he interprets speech”.