Habitus and Field (Bourdieu)

Pierre Bourdieu's twin concepts of habitus and field provide the analytical architecture for understanding how social structures perpetuate themselves. Habitus is the system of durable, transposable dispositions — ways of thinking, perceiving, acting — that are inscribed in the body through years of socialization. Field is the structured space of positions in which agents compete for stakes they regard as valuable. Together, these concepts reveal that what appears as individual merit is actually the expression of social position: the habitus produces practices appropriate to the field, the field rewards those practices as merit, and the circuit closes invisibly. In the AI transition, this framework exposes how the capacities the new regime rewards — judgment, taste, questioning — are not individual virtues but socially produced dispositions concentrated among those whose formation conditions were already privileged.