CONCEPT
Habitus
The sedimentation of cultural practice into automatic bodily competence — what the body has learned to do without thinking.
Habitus names the cultural achievement deposited in the body through sustained practice — the way a swimmer stops thinking about strokes, the way an experienced programmer feels a codebase, the way a senior architect knows a system is wrong before she can articulate why. Mauss introduced the term in its specifically bodily sense in 1934, drawing on Aristotelian and Thomist vocabulary but giving it a new analytical precision. What had been effortful conscious coordination becomes, through repetition and refinement, an unconscious fluency that operates below the threshold of articulation. The habitus is neither innate nor merely learned — it is learned so thoroughly that it becomes second nature, reorganizing the physical organism itself.
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Mauss's habitus was more narrowly physical than Pierre Bourdieu's later sociological elaboration, which extended the concept to class dispositions, taste, and social reproduction. Bourdieu's habitus became one of the most influential concepts in twentieth-century social theory, but the original Maussian meaning retains a specific analytical value: it names the bodily deposit of practice, the specific way in