In Defence of Rules: Pierre Bourdieu en Grèce

This paper tests both the validity and the usefulness of Bourdieu’s theoretical constructs in the context of a body of ethnographic data from Greece. Although sympathetic to Bourdieu’s overall approach, the paper offers a critique of his central notion of habitus and defends the use of ‘rules’ in anthropological discourse by arguing the importance of distinguishing between ‘rule-describable’ behaviour and ‘rule-governed’ behaviour, and by suggesting that Bourdieu’s habitus simply relocates everything traditionally adduced in the explanation of social behaviour within some form of internal state that itself remains a psychologistic ‘black-box’. In the absence of any account of the process of internalization, Bourdieu’s strongly internalized principles’ do no more than reduplicate those rules, rendering his concept of habitus largely redundant.