In highschool we were introduced to the concept of personality, mainly because by then our toddler personality had evolved in many directions and we were well on our way to having an adult personality — whatever it was — and we were beginning to notice that our own personality — whatever it was — was differentially responsive to the personalities of friends and other classmates and vice versa. Some were more intensely concerned with appearance, some with athleticism, some with winning, some with absurdities and jokes, etc. So, at that point we knew that other people saw in us or about us some characteristics (qualities of mind and behavior) that they could name and usually count on seeing in us, things that they imputed to our inner uniqueness.

We reflected on the words people used to name the kinds of "default" characteristics they found and expected in us and the spectra of possibilities within those kinds, such that a "cheerfulness" could be described as semi-permanent or much less, in other words and more clinically or philosophically, more optimistic than pessimistic, but also possibily blissfully ignoring or ignorant, or wryly sad or lots of shades of not cheerful or happy to be there, alive, enjoying our company

Already, the personal trait of cheerfulness, is becoming a social category in addition to its personal internal sensibility, its generalized semi-conscious feeling of being at open ease and slightly infectious anticipatory presentness as our personal point of view (ppv), and as such, an external social personality takes on its own existence, stable or unstable, in the minds of others.

Telling ourselves what the elements and qualities of our own personalities is very difficult, largely because our vocabulary is social, yet the constructed personality is personal. I am perceived as being perceptive, but, thinking about that, inside I feel curious, and people could have said "curious," too, but believe that curiosity is probably my discontent with my currently available understanding of things, and therefore my motivation, whereas being perceptive is "seasoned" skill and likely more knowable in social terms and norms and a more dependable default-thing to say about me.

Most reasonably well-educated people in the US know about the Myers-Briggs Personality Type categories: Extraversion, Introversion, Sensing, Intuiting, Thinking, Feeling, Judging, and Perceiving, which are fun to think about, but in practice are unreliable because 50% of people retaking the tests are sorted into different categories ... probably because respondants "game" the test. Moreover, can both introverts and extraverts be cheerful or curious or bullies or bulimic? Personality is very, very complicated. I would posit that personality arises from hardwired genetics and softwired effects of character features with other features of character.

To sum up, personality is about the interior default dispositions of a person's character and mind, and it has an external description in the minds of others, it is the core of your reputation, which includes what other people believe you have done and thought out loud (and probably in your head, too.), which leads us to the even more complex idea of "habitus."

The modern word "habitus" comes from the Latin word habitus, which means "condition" or "appearance". Habitus comes from the Latin verb habere, which means "to have, hold, possess", and in a reflexive sense, "to be constituted". Habere comes from the Proto-Indo-Germanic root ghabh-, which means "to grab or take". In modern usage, however, Habitus, is less immediately (or mostly not at all) in one's conscious mind, but nevertheless defined as the way a person in or of a given context perceives and acts in and reacts to the world.

People develop a certain habitus typical of their position.

Habitus is the acquired (socialised) norms or tendencies that guide behaviour and thinking. (Wacquant 2005: 316, cited in Navarro 2006: 16)

Habitus is "the way society becomes deposited in persons in the form of lasting dispositions, or trained capacities and structured propensities to think, feel and act in determinant ways, which then guide them."

"Habitus is created through a social, rather than individual process leading to patterns that are enduring and transferrable from one context to another, but that also shift in relation to specific contexts and over time. Habitus 'is not fixed or permanent, and can be changed under unexpected situations or over a long historical period'"

"Habitus is neither a result of free will, nor determined by structures, but created by a kind of interplay between the two over time: dispositions that are both shaped by past events and structures, and that shape current practices and structures and also, importantly, that condition our very perceptions of these (Bourdieu 1984: 170). In this sense habitus is created and reproduced unconsciously, 'without any deliberate pursuit of coherence ... without any conscious concentration.'" (ibid: 170). It is what we make of our usual daily existence where we are and where we came from.

A given habitus is a kaleidoscope of lenses and frames. Turn to the political and a series of frames interpose themselves; turn to the subject of literature or movies and another set of frames fills your conceptual thinking space. In either case the frames may be considerably more basic than the politics or literature, like the patriarchy frame in religions or the greed frame within the standard of living frame.

For me Habitus is at once vague and nevertheless an extremely useful (re-)discovery of heretofore sorely missing links in the analysis of politics and even epistemology. As far as we know each habitus is unique but like tea cups on a shelf alike, or like matrioshka dolls alike but nested inside one another. Habitus is the result of what happens (to a defined set of us) because we are active, perceptive, and malleable members of a social environment, a culture and society. Even Tarzan developed a habitus out in the jungle with the apes and other animals. You and I have very complex habitus, but now we have a vocabulary with which to posit characteristics and qualities of various kinds of habitus without having to create great envelops of precursory thought.

The very famous French philosopher and historian and political activist Michel Foucault (1926-1984) is known as a Postmodernist and Structuralist,

— a critic of the sweeping certitudes of the Enlightenment (The beginning of The Modern) and concerned, as his fundamental point of view, with the structural relationships of elements of culture each to a broader view of the society, such as the relationships of ivy league college curricula to investments by corporations in university research—

and he was, as a political activist, interested in the relationships between knowledge and power. For him Power is "ubiquitous," by which I believe he means — intrinsic — and beyond personal agency or cultural structure (and a problem for his theories).

The French philosopher and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002), on the other hand,

saw "power as culturally and symbolically created, and constantly re-legitimised through an interplay of agency and structure."

Which is to say that, perhaps, Foucault imagined power like one would be consciously aware that everything at any size or level has "gravity." Whereas, Bordieu, determined to avoid such sweeping definitions and, instead, practiced his analyses more pragmatically. His analyses expanded the concept of Capital to cultural and social and symbolic forms, and Fields, which parallel natural science's introduction of field theories, and he posited the Habitus, the ever-changing locus of practical interfaces of individuals and groups to their own and other cultures.

(under construction) JB

Habitus