Theory of practice, symbolic violence and violence as a continuum

(1977) theory of practice is an attempt to overcome the agency/structure dichotomy. He proposes a dialectical relationship between these two dimensions whereby egrated into a single conceptual movement rather than isolated as mutually exclusive forms of (Swartz 1997, p.9). This structural theory of practice proposes that objective

structures have subjective consequences, but at the same time individual actors have an impact upon the construction of their social worlds.

The key concepts used within this theory are field, disposition and habitus. The agent is said to be socialised from early childhood in a field i.e. which is a particular social setting. In this process the agent internalises the relationships and expectations for operating in, his or her given field, given his or her role in it, developing attitudes and dispositions accordingly.

These internalised relationships, the social structure, and his or her attitudes and dispositions, . Thus habitus is defined as:

A system of lasting, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is as principles which generate and organise practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them. (Bourdieu 1990, cited in Swartz 1997, p.101)

The semi-conscious status of the habitus, suggested in the above quote should be highlighted.

Bourdieu defines habitus as a set of internalised dispositions that in turn generate and t instead of a conscious decision. This

(Webb, Schirato et al. 2002, p.36). Hence, Bourdieu introduces the idea of agency, in which actors

(Swartz 1997, p.100).

Further into his theory, Bourdieu developed the idea of symbolic violence (Bourdieu 2004a).

This can be seen as a complementary way of understanding structural violence that focuses more on the way the violence operates upon individuals. Symbolic violence for Bourdieu is

th (Bourdieu

and Wacquant 2004b, p.272); it may take the form of agents being denied resources, treated as inferior, or being limited in terms of realistic aspirations (Webb, Schirato et al. 2002, p.36).

Symbolic violence occurs when the dominated ascribe to the views of the dominant position and in this way the dominant position is perpetuated. Building on his ideas of the theory of onditions of symbolic violence efficacy are durably and deeply embedded in the body in the form of dispositions and dispositions (Bourdieu 2007, p.40). Bourdieu points out that with ean not real or not concrete, he means the condition of something that is overseen, that is not recognised (Bourdieu 2007), which leads us to the main mechanism through which symbolic violence operates: misrecognition.

According to Bourdieu the dominated

and injustices (Bourdieu and Wacquant 2004b). Moreover, social agents based on their acquired dispositions, assume that the situation they are immersed in is part of the natural order of things, perpetuating the relation of domination. This has implications for practical interventions aiming to rectify these situations, as change cannot occur unless there is a transformation of the social conditions of production of dispositions that led the

(Bourdieu 2007, pp.41-42). One example of how the mechanism of misrecognition disguises oppressive social relations is given by Bourgois (2004a) in the case of drug dealers, addicts and street criminals who fall into accepting a logic of self-denigration. According to Bourgois

recognise the structural violence that affects them such as racism, exploitation and a lack of appropriate public policies to help tackle their problems.

Drawing on the different takes on violence discussed above, Bourgois (Bourgois 2002b;

2004c) suggests that we should conceptualise the relationship between structural, symbolic and everyday violences as a continuum from macro manifestations of violence to the individual everyday acts of violence or from the political to the institutional to the economic to the social, as conceptualised by McIlwaine and Moser (2001) in a study of urban violence in Colombia and Guatemala. It is important to mention that regardless of their position along this continuum, manifestations of violence should never be understood solely in terms of their physicality; hence assaults on the personhood, dignity, sense of worth or value of a person, should be incorporated into the violence continuum (Bourgois and Scheper-Hughes 2004c).

For Bourgois (2002b) treating violence as a continuum is a good way of moving away from a unidirectional conceptualisation of causation and process in the relationship between the different forms of violence, and avoids the danger of associating a particular form of violence with

everyday violence mediate experience on a phenomenological level and thereby shape the (Bourgois 2002b, p.233) is offered by Bourgois in a study conducted with drug addicts in San Francisco (Bourgois, Prince et al. 2004b). In the analysis, Bourgois suggests that pervasive everyday violent practices in their lives exacerbate their misrecognition (symbolic violence) of the structural violence that generates their subjective expressions of violence (abusive behaviour directed to themselves and beloved ones). By the same token Wood (2003) found in her ethnographic study about sexual health and violence in South Africa that violence has a logic b

Violence is rarely if ever meaningless. While violence is often experienced and witnessed chaotically at its moment of enactment, even that committed casually and without intermediate apparent logic is embedded in a network of meanings and practices which, more often than not, make sense of the protagonists. An

over-riding theme in this thesis is that violence is a dimension of everyday living, a form of communication that configures lives and subjectivities and that is productive of relationships. (Wood 2003, p.242)

(2004) argues that it conflates different types of forms of violence that need to be differentiated. I consider this a valid point, however I propose that once this is acknowledged, the term can be used as a compound term that helps to address the group of conditions of exclusion characterising poverty and inequalities in less privileged settings. Wacquant (2004) further warns us that by conflating different types of violence we might lose sight of the particular mechanisms in which they operate. Bearing this in mind, I present a theory on social stigma as a form of violence and exclusion, which operates at the base of other mechanisms such as