Overview

All of its subtlety and sophistication notwithstanding, Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice may, for introductory purposes, be boiled down to a handful of its most fundamental concepts. The first is practice, or what people do in society. Invariably, practice takes place in any number of the interrelated and sometimes overlapping fields that together constitute society. So much of what people do, furthermore, amounts to self-interested pursuits of forms of capital, whether material or symbolic, relative to the respective fields in which their practice unfolds. And the ways in which people perceive of and pursue capital are chiefly generated by their habitus, which is that part of their personhood that filters their perceptions, molds their tastes, and casts their inclinations and dispositions.