Habitus, Ethnomimesis

Habitus, Ethnomimesis: A Note on the Logic of Practice
Author(s): Robert Cantwell

Source: Journal of Folklore Research, Vol. 36, No. 2/3, Special Double Issue: Cultural
Brokerage: Forms of Intellectual Practice in Society (May - Dec., 1999), pp. 219-234
Published by: Indiana University Press
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SESSION IV
Keywords in Cultural Brokerage
Robert Cantwell
Habitus, Ethnomimesis: A Note on the Logic of Practice
Money can't buy me love.

? the Beatles
A natural radiance transforms the base matter of human flesh into the
sublimer element of our sociality, an occult but vital process through w

in various purposeful and accidental ways we originate, communic
circulate, and sustain such aspects of personhood that are the sine q
of every other form of social participation. Ethnomimesis1 is indicated,
not disclosed, in family, clan, and "community," in the pub or cafe life
the myriad varieties of the town pump; but it lives a vaporous, phan
life as well, with an etiology that mostly eludes detection, though
influences are everywhere. It is a web of processes, many-centered, diff
and far-reaching, in essence more social alchemy than social mech
recognizable by its products and outcomes and at best only fleetin
perceptible?but less to sense than to understanding.
"Social alchemy" is Bourdieu's phrase?and like so much of his inc
tal or figurative language, it is not obviously constituitive of his
theory; yet it is rhetorically and conceptually integral to it, and points
only partially disclosed and half-formed notion that both undergir
destabilizes the "systems of durable, transposable dispositions, stru
structures predisposed to function as structuring structures," the "d
installed generative principle of regulated improvisations" now fam
called habitus (1980:53, 57).
Habitus, like folklore, is everywhere and nowhere, haunting the
scene like the memory of an old war, the redundant "structuring s
tures" whose existence we adduce from practice. But such structures
necessarily hypothetical, do not lead inevitably to "dispositions," e
they intimate them, but, on the contrary, leave us perpetually behi
game, tied to already residual objects, performances, and forms who
interest is that they seem to have resisted the transposability that
essence of habitus, having allowed the stream of time and the "ob
Journal oj Folklore Research, Vol. 36, Nos. 2/3, 1999
Copyright ? 1999 by the Folklore Institute, Indiana University
220 Bad, Homburg Symposium 1998
conditions" ("possibilities and impossibilities,

opportunities and prohibitions") to which hab
dation to flow around and beyond them. That
with the science of folklore, has it not, that its
however powerfully indicative of originary so
that reason remain elusive, unable to disclose
them?processes that can never be understood exc
impenetrable even while under observation, a
negation and, paradoxically, only thinkable as
What is the social locale of habitus? An orth
merely, an apparently innocent but strategic
explanation, dispositions to structures and stru
is to say, tendencies and qualities to ideas and
purely tactical idea, designed to mediate betwe
and "subjectivism"?a means of isolating the "prelo
prelogicality. Despite its evident utility in accoun
tion of possible actions within equally evident sy
would seem to belong, really, not in the social
with the other products of theoretical reason?
a sump for indefinite deferral, a kind of nece
project what theoretical reason can neither loc
rules, systems, and syntaxes, neither freedom
minor god, presiding over the delicate equilibrium
As habitus \s rooted in practice, it is for Bourd
ist accounts, which though airily abstract nevert
minist logic lingering about them, one indiffe
particular situations. Neither is it accessible to
an entirely free self-interested agent in posses
inventory of practical maneuvers, a master o
mental structures," finally, beg the question
cannot address the distinctive adaptation or ev
practices to or within "possibilities and impossibi
sities, opportunities and prohibitions" (Bourd
embedded in practice, Bourdieu seems to say,
theoretical discovery; it is an immediate exis
carriers, an obviously self-consistent system, e
readily detect consistency, regularity, and rule in
structure, says Bourdieu, adopting an image from
has been planned and executed by fiat, but t
accumulation over time of many expedients,
whose origins are mostly forgotten, ways and
usages and slow adaptations, erosion and accum
tity through time and change.
Cultural Brokerage: Forms of Intellectual Practice in Society 221
Habitus thus releases the social agent from the rigidities of objectivist r
without altogether unfastening the tracery of regulation; the agent
disposed, but not constrained, capable of origination within the range
individual imagination, an horizon of social possibility, and the immed
of situation?like mild-mannered Bartleby, who "prefers not to" becaus
hasn't any choice but to prefer.
Habitus, as William James says of habit, is "the enormous flywheel
society, its most precious conservative agent" (1981:121). It abides in
plastic medium of the neural system, always returning, however com
pressed or distended, to its own form, a shape at once material and me
that impedes and facilitates, a force both for social inertia and for so
momentum?or a kind of plasma that, like the soul or the ghost, retai
even as a disembodied idea, the intellectual form of the social body. W
remains obscured in habitus, except to agents to whom ethnomimesis
disclosed it, is the capillary exchange in which such plasticity consis
what brings the agent into the embrace of "structuring structures" adjust
to the objective world of things and of persons and at the same t
provides a medium for the "transposition" of dispositions. It is ethnomime
that incorporates habits with systems, communicates systems as structure
installs structures in practice.
At one level, ethnomimesis is a triangulation of persons to one anot
and in turn to the social world that transforms the reflexes, reactions, an
inventions arising from, recalled, and originating in situations into
signs, indications, orientations, and representations whose activation
relation to "objective conditions," discloses to the agent a structured relati
and hence a structure: a "structuring structure." Its not-so-secret dom
an intimate and evanescent discourse of voluntary and involuntary m
ments, actions, expressions, postures, gestures, and inflections, as we
various physiological textures, tones, colorations and conditions, orien
tions and proximities?is the transient but sensible activity through wh
social intelligence communicates itself in and through agents, or to
more precise, in and through their bodies. Though not a "practi
ethnomimesis is nevertheless concrete, practical and interactive, like
guage a program of articulations that aligns signification to significan
only apparently arbitary until actually enlisted, in practice and over time,
a system of shared adjustments to "objective conditions," especially
conditions of social relations themselves. Such adjustments, both in th
selves and together, become the indispensable forms of sociality, inte
gible as forms and transposable as such; they produce a range of soc
performances that elaborate themselves redundantly in culture, becom
the tacit "structuring structures" of habitus and as such generating
regular practices of social life as well as the dialectic of representations th
is the engine of social change.
222 Bad Homburg Symposium 1998
Ethnomimesis, then, is both "objective" and

observe and experience it. It is a field of so
action?but one as invisible either to "objectivism
"subjectivism," which must subjectivize, eith
particular, as the incalculably calculated pu
vanquishing glances and looks, the precisely
angularities of heads, ineffable trepidations
meaningful meaninglessness of movements a
both will and fate transform antagonists i
lovers?and with equally unprepossessing prep
tures of amity to which they have devoted s
Only a subjective objectivity, or an objectiv
simultaneously liminal and subliminal, inter
acter of ethnomimesis. We might, on its b
century sentimentalist concept, associated with
recruit from clinical psychology the idea of
express a number of virtues and func
ethnomimesis, including the subjective erup
power of feeling to influence or establish, that
tively in others; the sense of spontaneous adhe
ivity between and among human beings (as
jazz) fundamental to ethnomimesis; and final
of setting forth in a social milieu, "theatrica
social place through inventories of "attitude
are "transposable" configurations of ideas, fe
every kind that embody and transmit them.
To conceive the social system ethnomimetic
affect laterally rather than vertically, not as s
some inferior mental stratum into consciousness but as an extensive field of
interpersonal awareness originating in bodies and consistently and con

tinuously communicated among agents' bodies whose "feelings" or "affe
tions" are always in a sense seismographic "readings" of others' and hen
continually learned and elaborated, reproduced and transmitted, as a to
system of subtle "affections" that are the real, if invisible, ground of associ
tion, relation, affinity and aversion, attachment and, as it were, "affection.
Ethnomimetically speaking, there is no "emotion" or motivation in isol
tion, nor strictly speaking do we produce either emotion or motive subje
tively, autonomously, or individually, but responsorially. Like jazz improvi?
sation, or Bourdieu's "feel for the game," feeling and action erupt out o
mimetically learned anticipations, predictions, and transformations?whi
may explain why pathological "lack of affect" ("I can't feel anything") m
be associated with social alienation, dislocation or disruption, and depres
sion or the retreat from action with frustrated expectations: that is, with a
incongruency of ethnomimesis and habitus.
But "such a practical mimesis," Bourdieu writes,

implies an overall relation of identification and has nothing in comm
an imitation that would presuppose a conscious effort to reproduce a
an utterance or an object explicitly constituted as a model. . . . the pr
reproduction . . . tends to take place below the level of conscious
pression and the reflexive distance which these presuppose . . . [th
does not represent what it performs, it does not memorize the past,
the past, bringing it back to life. What is "learned by the body"
something one has, like knowledge that can be brandished, but som
that one is. (1980:72-73)
Mimesis certainly presupposes identification, and identificatio

compels mimesis, even unconsciously. But whether or not "explicitly
tuted as a model," the "practical reactivation" springing from bodily
presupposes both a consciousness of one's own body as well as o
meaningful in its configurations?an awareness that is neither me
knowledge in the discursive sense but a "regulated improvisation," lik
of a musician?as well an imaginative sympathy that captures, eve
sciously, the meaningfulness in the attitudes, whether unconsciou
of another's body. Even infants know this. In ethnomimesis th
reflects, impersonates, and represents its relation to other bodies in
to the social world, even if and inasmuch as its meaningfulness m
effect of (say) occupation or environment. While that relati
necessarily a formal or informal "representation" in a fully motivate
(i.e., a sign in one system made to be a signifier in another
nevertheless a signification that rescues symbolic action out of th
merely somatic motions, bestowing upon the body a social legibili
the very definition of the body in society.
Bourdieu's insistence that "practical sense is a quasi-bodily invo
in the world which presupposes no representation [my emphasis]
the body or of the world, still less of their relationship" (p. 66),
vestigial form of the objectivist impulse to deny agency to the a
whom the unconscious character of "bodily involvement" re-regi
"automatic" character of practice because it is embodied. But whil
may be regarded as originating in involuntary reactions or reflex
as in intended or unintended impersonation and formal or i
representation, whether or not visibly registered in the body an
"below the level of consciousness," it is an act of discrimination between
usable social meaning and a counter-realm of the meaningless, always a
burst of recognition.
The mimetic activities of involuntary revealing, indicating, or purposeful
pointing that are particular conditions of the body in relation to objective
conditions signify a particular orientation of self to the world and to the
other and perforce socially, between and among bodies. But mimesis,
understood in this sense, is already at work in the organization of percep-
tion; the reconciliation of the sensory mess

structure of the habitus, which identifies, diff
total structure of orientations whose accum
edge that constitutes it, the embodied adjust
tudes, physical and mental, to situations
insist that the "immediate self-evidence" of the "commonsense world" is
"accompanied by the objectivity provided by consensus on the mea

of practices and the world, in other words the harmonization o
agents' experiences and the constant reinforcement each of them re
from expression individual or collective (in festivals, for example .
(1980:58).
Ethnomimetically speaking, however, "expression" produces consen
even more "harmonization," not merely by reinforcement through
rial demonstrations and objects, but though an affective influence ru
ethnomimetically through the social body apart from which there c
no habitus. Representations are materially installed in objective cond
(even if conventionally distinguished from "real life") and produce
them the mediation of responses that constitute the habitus?i.e., th
no world that is not represented in the very process of its making-r
they acquire social meaning, objects and performances dissolve their
materiality and become tokens in an ethnomimetic economy that ob
fies and sustains objects and performances as such.
To locate Bourdieu's "structured structuring structures" wit
ethnomimesis, then, especially in childhood, argues that the reconcil
of the sensory message can only evolve out of social accommodation
shared lifeworld of habitual linguistic and other orientations. In this
habitus is never static, but anticipates, resists, and adapts to change
strictly speaking an "unconscious" resource but one diffused in social
tice, a sensible, if subliminal, field of achieved significance, natura
conventional, which comprises a total system of orientations, or, to be p
cise, habits or "dispositions" of orientations. Because it is continually rep
sented, sustained, and preserved in social interaction, habitus will of
be in some sense learned, remembered, and known. But its epistemo
cal character, like that of language, cannot be understood apart from
fact that it is also continually modeled, reinforced, and incorporated
like language may also be, when these influences cease, forgotten.
Understood this way, ethnomimesis is irresistibly creative at every poi
There is no naturalizing of the social being in any phase of its activity o
any stage of its life, but always only the imagining body, caught up
web of social life that it at once personifies and desires. All the revel
of and by the body?reflexes and reactions, impersonations and repr
tations?belong to the "objective conditions" that are the sustaining e
ronment of habitus. While enactments and performances, rituals an
ries may "reinforce" what habitus has already made commonsens

also erect an imaginary milieu of unintended intentions: various
vocabularies and lores, formal and informal narratives, as well as
cally grounded representations of family life, marriage, and gen
of ethnic, class, and racial others or stereotypes, of political/cultura
and counter-heroes whose social "styles," undefended by evalua
cially secured and sanctioned, enter the domain of tacit exp
predictions, anticipations, what Bourdieu calls "closed doors," "
prospects," and "dead ends" that may or may not answer to the dispo
of the habitus even as they arise from them.
7/as Bourdieu writes "a very close correlation is observed between
objective possibilities . . . and agents' subjective aspirations," it
suggests because "possibilities and impossibilities, freedoms and
ties, opportunities and prohibitions . . . generate dispositions o
compatible with these conditions"; these represent "a kind of i
submission to order that inclines agents to make a virtue of ne
(1980:54). But if the ethnomimetic field of orientations, indicati
and so on both reflects objective conditions and perpetuates the
tions and aspirations compatible with them?i.e., "the cultur
erty"?then habitus may not only embody such adaptations but
conditions ethnomimetically on its own behalf, altering both "
conditions" and the adjustment to them. This is perhaps precis
region of folklore, what Robert St. George calls a "zone of exch
information,"3 where enthnomimesis works not only within soci
tions but between and among them, the essentially stable "dispos
habitus producing consistent structures which, while they perp
sidual adaptations, also in effect adapt the adaptations to new co
essentially the situation of diasporal cultures submitting unfami
tices to adaptive reuse at the same time as they apply old uses
opportunities: the condition of, say, African-American music.
It is in the mystery of such correlations that Bourdieu ident
"immanent law" which because he cannot locate it in the resonances and
sympathies of ethnomimesis he must ascribe to the cold embrace of "his?
tory": "The practices of the members of the same group or, in a differenti?
ated society, the same class, are always more and better harmonized than
the agents know or wish. . . . The habitus is precisely this immanent law, lex
insita, inscribed in bodies by identical histories, which is the precondition
not only for the co-ordination of practices but also for practices of co?
ordination" (1980:59). This apparently ineradicable residue of objectivism
strictly limits the concept of habitus to traditional societies such as the
Kabyle, where evidently unchanging objective conditions theoretically pro?
duce uniform histories. But interpersonal mimesis ("orchestration") among
legible bodies, ethnomimesis, more than "objective conditions," ties prac-
tice to history through representations per

itself. Within habitus there are no illegible b
only the ethnomimetic transfiguration of th
into new forms of intelligibility
The idea of ethnomimesis, then, relieves to som
cism as well as the incipient rationalism in the n
of assessing likelihoods" (Bourdieu 1980:60), e
otherwise purely speculative remark such as
same class is more likely than any member o
confronted with the situations most freque
harmonization of a class habitus reflected on
regularity. Surely it is not the frequency or the
but the consistency of association that through
such consistency of association may of course
material conditions in which the community
the community as such may also outlive the
habitus. A collective "sense of future," or any
not arise directly from those conditions, in
experiences to individuals, but from comm
within a matrix of associations. This is not to
histories" does not point to the embeddedness
collective "history" ethnomimetically distri
incongruence between "individual histories"
lated messages of ethnomimesis that produces
flowing out of the gap between habitus, as
idiosyncratic messages of individual experien
mimetic field and another, such as (say) fam
institutional cultures, to which individuals m
It is nevertheless the case that habitus "ensu
by choosing "a relatively constant universe
because habitus summons situations and in a
reinforcing its own matrix of association, esp
imperil its cohesion. No human community ca
stances in which it has its existence, however vi
but it can sustain its own sociality, deliberate
under new, perhaps alien conditions. Yet Bour
of groups to persist in their ways" to the "fa
individuals with durable dispositions that ca
social conditions in which they were produc
No. Groups "persist in their ways" only inso
persist as groups in consistent actual or sym
groups can they ultimately alter or abandon t
durable, even in a sense ineradicable, do not d
dispose consistently and predictably, even "outliving" objective cond

while patterns of association remain consistent. But when pattern
association change, habitus, while remaining essentially unchanged
self, will dispose inconsistendy and unpredictably until it ultimately ach
ethnomimetically, the necessary accommodation. If it fails to do s
any successful accommodation presupposes failure?it is either beca
dispositions, thrust into a world without either continuities or corr
dences, cannot dispose, or because habitus has remained invested i
patterned associations of social life, never subjectively incorporate
memory: precisely what the concept of habitus, shaped in and by tradit
practice, predicts. Culture, like nature, must replicate to live.
If shifts in objective conditions, then, do not directly produce ad
ments to habitus, but are mediated by the ethnomimetic field, ho
changes in objective conditions eventually reflected in social expecta
If as Bourdieu writes "the genesis of a system of works or practices"
"from the necessary but unpredictable confrontation between the h
and an event that can exercise a pertinent incitement" upon it, how
habitus rescue such an event from the "contingency of the accide
constituting it "as a problem by applying to it the very principles
solution?" (1980:55-56).
Replication implies variation. As replication can only occur ethno?
mimetically, habitus cannot produce change until idiosyncratic variations,
arising at random, from immediate practical expedience, or transmuted
from existing forms, have assumed through ethnomimesis a social charac?
ter. The social/cultural "pioneer" emerges then not only from a simple
reaction to new objective conditions but from the new patterns of associa?
tion arising from it, the nascent social style dilating into an emergent
ethnomimetic field that gradually harmonizes and consolidates into a
frangible mode of individuation in a context of social identity: a phenom?
enon most notable in the "second generation." If new conditions seem to
summon new individuals, it is because those conditions have engendered
new patterns of association through which the cohort both recognizes the
individual as such and constructs him dialectically as a new social type,
typically through conscientious representations of imaginary heroes and
models extrapolated from social life.
With the concept of "symbolic capital," Bourdieu's science reaches be?

yond habitus to the interactions between and among society's constitutive
groups. Through a dialectic of "distributions" and "distinctions," between a
"material logic of rarity" and the "symbolic logic of distinction," society
seeks to maintain the alliance of reality and appearance, of power and
representation, favorable to the habitus whose representations have be?
come the touchstone of social power and material advantage.
But Bourdieu's sociology, absent the idea of

practical limits of the social, figuring a net
springs or centers linked to one another by com
internally differentiated but essentially un
Here Bourdieu enters a purely semiotic worl
of "cultural capital"?limited social resour
"logic of scarcity" and distributed accordin
becomes a kind of reflective reflector, a sym
and posterior to the social, in effect placing "c
the social as in Derrida 'Svriting" is to langu
inversion the secondary becomes primary, the
wants explaining becoming itself the explanator
That society should produce a ductile symb
nizes and accounts for itself, as if capital were
as writing for Derrida is the telos of languag
thoroughly self-consistent theory, as it turn
social text into a complex scheme of "misrec
the authentic operations of a latent content
of the reified forms of value and of meaning.
symbolic value. Bourdieu's sociology thus an
which social prestige, power, knowledge, st
always what capital desires to be transform
transformed into capital as property, goods,
formed into it?thus releasing capital as a th
essentially irrational relations of social value ma
rational economic exchange: a social alchemy
Bourdieu explicitly rejects, in fact, what
applies to precapitalist societies the "catego
which are the historical product of capitalis
transformation of their object, similar to
from which they arose," capital being at on
mobility, dislocation, atomization, and alienatio
its own ends. "Economism," as Bourdieu poin
tion of the social as such. "As the relationsh
he writes, "that is, as one moves out from the
that between virtual strangers ... so a transacti
established at all but it can, and does, becom
closer to its economic truth" (Bourdieu 1980:11
What economism does not reckon is "sym
reproducing established relations ... no less
group than the reproduction of the econom
labor required to conceal the function of the
the labor needed to perform this function.
specificity located precisely in the socially maintained discrepancy

the 'objective' reality and the social representation of produc
exchange" and "removes the conditions of possibility of the insti
organized and guaranteed misrecognition that is the basis...o
symbolic labor aimed at transmuting the inevitable and inevitab
ested relations imposed by kinship, neighborhood, or work, into
relations of reciprocity, and, more profoundly, at transforming
relations of exploitation . . . into durable relations, grounded in
(1980:112-13).
It is not economism, then, that inspires Bourdieu's metaphor, b
a trace of it, the "inevitable and inevitably interested relations" that
ism exposes as an economy of "interested calculation, compe
exploitation." By winning this subtle exemption from economism, Bo
commutes the motive proper to one domain of symbolic exc
another, placing "symbolic capital" at the heart of a society, w
consequence becomes a displaced or sublimated system of "in
calculation, competition, or exploitation" collectively misrecogni
economy of deference, reciprocity, ceremony, and assent. What i
then, in this formulation, but the total body of "cultural capit
"structuring structure" of a cultural marketplace organized by th
lated improvisations" of collective misrecognition and driven by the
rable "dispositions" of interested calculation, competition, or exp
Bourdieu's cultural capitalism is a welter of local and situational as
systemic impersonations, a collective "make-believe" in which e
relations are continually figured as social relations and particul
nomic exchanges (as in advertising) symbolically situated in an im
social space. As capitalism more sweepingly and penetratingly ac
economic ends, then, so does it increasingly figure itself in
imaginary social relations, with its own habitus, or extensions of hab
ethnomimesis generates in conformity with the imaginary (i.e.,
cial) character of those relations.
Within ethnomimesis, then, under capitalism, there is an odd
recursion, where society's representations of itself in politics, media
tising, or news and the like produce an appearance of particula
relations (families, groups, classes and races), ethnomimetically d
through commercial and electronic narratives and images,
pseudopolitics that obscure the economic reality: an historical s
that Bourdieu's analysis extrapolates as theory, as if the con
capitalism in postmodernity were at once the telos and ontos of
process. It is a world in which the "durable transposable disposi
habitus have been expropriated and projected into a commercia
collective recognitions/misrecognitions of public ritual, the "official
strategies in effect returning, recursively, to generate an habitus of
scious complicity: "Social formations in whi

made, unmade and remade in and through
with those in which such relations are media
ized mechanisms such as the 'self-regulat
system or the legal apparatus, where they have
of things and lie beyond the reach of indiv
(1980:113).
Yes; but these institutionalized mechanisms become themselves fields of
social relations, ethnomimetically extending, differentiating, and adapting
the displaced cultural contributions of its participants (i.e., an office bu?
reaucracy that perpetuates authoritarian and patriarchal cultural and reli?
gious structures). The social distinctions thus achieved as through educa?
tion or money (1980:131-32), moreover, are subjected to persistent tests,
both in practice and in official procedures that are games of practice or
practices of practice, to wrest legitimacy out of legitimization (i.e., "old"
wealth as against nouveau-riche; learning as against certification)?in effect
a reinhabiting or disalienation of the reified form of power.
"Interest" in Boudieu, even as distilled from economism, carries a re?
siduum both of Hobbsian self-interest and Marxian class struggle, a compe?
tition euphemized by the protocols, ceremonies, obligations, and policies
of social life; all become an extensive ritual of "misrecognition" and "con?
cealment" that, though Bourdieu identifies them with mimetic processes
such as public ceremonies and demonstrations, are at bottom transfigura?
tions of violence. Whereas Bourdieu wants to locate the basis of self-interest
in the real economy, which symbolic capital perpetuates in the structures of

social relations, as well as in what constitutes the "objective conditions" o
the "limits of the possible" to which those structures are oriented and
adjusted, ethnomimesis generates habitus entirely within the domain o
actual and symbolic human affiliation, originating certainly in the family
and elaborated ultimately in every form of the social relation where "inter?
est" is not directly constituted by needs (i.e., for nurture, comfort, protec?
tion, affection) but by the natural and learned behaviors that provide for
them, as all needs are supplied by the human labor secured by socia
membership.
Ethnomimesis implies not competition or violence, but adhesion, com?
pliance, conformity, membership, affiliation, affection. The primary per?
sonal interest, then, from the ethnomimetic viewpoint, is to be loved; but
within that interest ethnomimesis pursues its own social end and aim,
which, beyond imitation or impersonation, is identification, a total surren?
der of the subject to the ethnomimetic influence, which is to say, to love.
Love is the answer that ethnomimetic sympathy makes to the primary
personal need to be loved; it is the affective tendency of ethnomimesis
itself, which both in its origins and its ends absorbs self into other, assimi-
iates subject and object. Habitus, in these senses, is a wor

ethnomimesis its necessary and perpetual condition of becomi
interiorizing processes of human experience tending toward
achieving the condition of objective knowledge its own pract
"Money can't buy me love"?love admits of symbolic disp
capital, but cannot be supplanted by it. Affection in this broad
social engine of developmental learning, of all its different
elaborations, and ultimately of all deference to authority or
authority of whatever kind that may issue in the officializati
Bourdieu describes?which is simply to feel, within particular
tions, that worthiness to be loved guarantees actual or symbo
"Ethnomimesis" captures this relation; it implies the priority of
identity, affiliation, and loyalty over differentiation and differe
tion, competition and violence, and further, suggests that a
violence derives its analytical power from the specific social
capital: precisely where Hobbes and Marx derive it. Actual wealth
ness achieved through sociality, and in this sense "symbolic capita
collective misrecognition/recognition of a "real" economy b
thing itself, what "actual capital" wants but consistently fails to
When the conditions of ethnomimesis break down?as (say) w
tional societies move into cash economies?sociality itself brea
agents imagine themselves to have become economically indep
autonomous. But the material and psychological interdepend
mental to society will eventually reassert itself: for survival is not
assured by the acquisition of capital, symbolic or actual. It is assu
securing of membership, necessarily implying deference to
social authority as well as enactment, demonstration, and repr
that deference (this is the "labor" that Bourdieu figures as misrec
even as these foster the acquisition of "capital." For the reduc
relations to "callous cash payment" is never thorough and com
in the special domains of capital exchange (nor, I would s
there). Rather it tends to recur to underlying social relations
explains why racial and other kinds of discrimination bar acce
while "privilege," socially understood, opens access to it (i.e.
within capitalism social discriminations tend to reproduce th
economic terms), and why even the appearance of privilege or
of it can be deployed to manipulate access to capital.
Between habitus and ethnomimesis, then, lies a crucial distinctio
social relations as such and the relations, economic, technical,
between ethnomimetic communities and the larger system of
and distributions. "In fact, the institutionalization of distinction,
it in the hard, durable reality of things or institutions, goes
with its incorporation, the surest path towards naturalization
writes. That "distinction that is called natural

tive relationship with more 'common,' that i
dispositions" (1980:139). Ethnomimesis, ho
"statistically more frequent" effect, but the exh
ethnomimesis, where rarification of the socia
ening of the social message forms the ethnom
as such, which only technical extensions of it
"legitimizing theatricalization" thus secures its o
through ethnomimesis elements of habitus
nomic, and not, except accidentally and techn
This "social alchemy" is the engine of Bour
distinction in The Logic of Practice:
a permanent struggle between those who, be

occupy within the distributions, have an inte
modifying the classifications in which they a
and those who have an interest in perpetuating
cognition that looks at the world through the
and apprehends the social world as a natural
unaware that it produces what it recognizes, doe
makes the most intrinsic charm of its object,
product of the countless crediting operations th
to the object the powers to which they submit
But such "crediting operations" are precisel

agents have of their own and other agents'
also the representations they give of them, c
through their practices or their properties)."
system of schemes of perception and appreciatio
porated product of a class condition (that is
distributions of material properties and s
They are, in other words, at once the means
with the Joneses," the impetus behind ever-fine
a race, a class, or religion (as hair-splitting
spiritual doctrine, consumer "lifestyles"). "The v
of power," Bourdieu writes, "contributes to
sible, because its true conditions of possibili
that it can be perceived not only as the legiti
but as the foundation of its legitimacy. .
'lifestyle' . . . are not, as Weber thought, a d
classes, but dominant classes that have denied
themselves and so legitimated themselves" (
And yet while the struggle for distinction is c
esis and the most effective negation of the stru
which the class itself is constituted," it is not th
simply sublimated forms of structural dominance. All the forms

distinction are themselves enunciations of membership in som
imaginary community and entail subjective identification wit
munity as well as "theatrical" projections (i.e., representatio
membership in it on behalf of adjacent communities. Social gr
are formed ethnomimetically out of real association (inciden
such as "social neighborhood" suggest Bourdieu's sense of this)
may not conform at different times and places to the objective d
that are the material basis of social class ("the material logic o
with the symbolic identifications ("the symbolic logic of distincti
which agents assert and/or achieve or do not achieve symbo
ship in the (to them) distinctive group.
At different historical moments a social class (i.e., "working
(say) under industrial conditions arise ethnomimetically out o
at the same time as it becomes discernible on the social landsca
at other times dispersal of the class (as understood in terms o
distributions, as when an urban industrial working class ris
suburban middle class) may weaken ethnomimesis so that th
tent identification, which is to say, assertion of affiliation,
anything but symbolic?i.e., "lifestyle." This is certainly the
elusive "consumer" class, discernible as an effect of distributions but
ethnomimetically diversified into multiple real memberships and symbolic
assertions of membership. Where ethnomimesis carries symbolic assertions
of identity outside the range of actual social interaction?when it be?
comes "common" and hence no longer registers the coherence or
continuity of the ethnomimetic group?a "struggle for distinction"
arises again as an effort to bring into congruency the incongruency
between habitus and ethnomimesis that ethnomimesis has itself brought
about. In the former case (the industrial "working class"), multiple enuncia?
tions of affiliation (i.e., "ethnic-American," "working man," "taxpayer,"
"citizen," "white man," "veteran") reflect a "symbolic logic of distinction"
underwritten by an assertion of larger imaginary memberships in which
the ethnomimetic membership has its legimacy; in the latter case (i.e.,
the consumer class, especially today's mobile executive-managerial class),
mobility and dispersal generate a kind of spurious, specular, standard?
ized "habitus, "a sort of life-style esperanza of standardized tract "homes,"
stereotyped church membership and deracinated religious "faiths," recre?
ations (golf), "conservative" ideas and values that reflect the almost total
subordination of habitus to the economic expedients of the corporation.
Ethnomimesis is a vital human need, the lifeblood of the social process.
The "economic truth" of social interaction lies in the affectionate ties,
affiliations, and interdependencies in which wealth in the deepest sense
consists; the deterioration of such ties inevitably produces, against a back-
ground of the psychodynamics of isolation, exc

ous assertions, actual and symbolic, of ideolo
other forms of social affiliation. Bourdieu's s
mark of a postmodern society nebulized by
relations, torn not by competition for cultural
affiliation, with its promise of actual mem
represents. It is the "material logic" of distri
bolic logic" of distinction that underwrites t
race, class, sex, ethnic, occupational or other ac
however invidious in themselves, to declare o
a milieu of displacement and dispersal. Far from a "collective
misrecognition," such affiliations, or declarations of them, reflect precisely
an awakening from the hegemonically-enforced "misrecognition" Bourdieu
describes. Ethnomimesis thus mitigates the rule of capital at the same time
as it facilitates its integration with the social body.
But where capital has eroded or washed away, where its forward march
has been breached or fractured, ethnomimesis rediscovers itself, new-
minting the tender of human value in the flame of our social being. With
the everywhere acknowledged penetration of capital into the originary
areas of the cultural, to nurture the social medium of culture would seem to
be the proper aim of cultural work in postmodernity?not in any sense to
capture and "preserve" but rather to foster a social environment in which
the power of culturality may work a transforming influence on the mania?
cal energy of capital. In a society deranged by the struggle to reconcile the
irreconcilable logics of lopsided distributions and phony distinctions, the
material with the symbolic, and actual with the imaginary, one in which we
are both petitioners to the larger imagined community dominated by its
meretricious spectacles, and participants in relations of affection, affilia?
tion, and identification, a story of actual social relations of which we
ourselves are the outcome, ethnomimesis?which is simply the God-given
instrument of human sociality?works to supply the need for acceptance,
to define the conditions of inclusion, and to bestow the gift of belonging.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
NOTES
1. See Cantwell 1993, pp. 4-7, 80-84.

2. SeeBarthes 1972, p. 135.
3. Internal document, University of Pennsylvania Department of
Folklife (January 1997), p. 21.

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Habitus, Ethnomimesis: A Note on the Logic of Practice

Author(s): Robert Cantwell

Keywords in Cultural Brokerage

Habitus, Ethnomimesis: A Note on the Logic of Practice

Money can't buy me love.

sublimer element of our sociality, an occult but vital process through w

conditions" ("possibilities and impossibilities,

Ethnomimesis, then, is both "objective" and

interpersonal awareness originating in bodies and consistently and con

But "such a practical mimesis," Bourdieu writes,

Mimesis certainly presupposes identification, and identificatio

tion; the reconciliation of the sensory mess

"accompanied by the objectivity provided by consensus on the mea

ries may "reinforce" what habitus has already made commonsens

tice to history through representations per

dispose consistently and predictably, even "outliving" objective cond

With the concept of "symbolic capital," Bourdieu's science reaches be?

But Bourdieu's sociology, absent the idea of

specificity located precisely in the socially maintained discrepancy

scious complicity: "Social formations in whi

in the real economy, which symbolic capital perpetuates in the structures of

iates subject and object. Habitus, in these senses, is a wor

writes. That "distinction that is called natural

a permanent struggle between those who, be

But such "crediting operations" are precisel

simply sublimated forms of structural dominance. All the forms

ground of the psychodynamics of isolation, exc

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

1. See Cantwell 1993, pp. 4-7, 80-84.

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