One of the key texts to prompt a re-examination of anthropological theories of mind, at least among European anthropologists, has been †Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977). He argued that the anthropologist observer was bound to produce a distorted account because, in making the lives of others an object of analysis, the anthropologist re-ordered the dynamic flow of people’s day-to-day practice into a set of explicit ‘representations’ or worse, ‘rules’ for behaviour. But in going about our own everyday lives, in doing the things we do and saying what we say, our behaviour is so highly nuanced, so subtly accommodating to novel situations, that we cannot be following ‘rules’ or acting in terms of ‘representations’; it follows that there is no reason to suppose that others are doing so.
Bourdieu proposed the idea of the †‘habitus’ a set of predispositions to certain behaviours inculcated in the course of socialization, to account for the way that people everywhere come to have a ‘sense’ of how to behave, and thus to take for granted their own ideas and practices as right, as the only proper way of being in the world. But Bourdieu’s habitus, while it almost managed to collapse the mind-body distinction, was not sufficiently well theorized to bring about a paradigm shift in respect of theories of mind.
Nevertheless, Bourdieu’s theory of the habitus as embodied practice has been fruitful in forcing anthropologists to recognize that mind is constituted in practice by persons relating to one another as subjects. In other words, I do not relate to others as if they were simply objects in my world, but as persons who, like me, are the active subjects of their own actions. Moreover, I do not have to reflect continually upon what I do because my habitual mode of being in the world—for example, the way I walk, eat, talk, feel and in general relate to others is constituted by me over time and embodied in me as taken for granted, as ‘the way I am’, and as such may never be made the object of conscious scrutiny.
But how, exactly, is ‘the taken for granted’ (or what Bourdieu calls doxa) constituted in active, intersubjective relations between particular persons? Lave (1988) on arithmetic as social practice and Toren (1990) on cognitive development as a microhistorical process offer ethnographic attempts at an answer.
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