STRUCTURING STRUCTURES, and STRUCTURED STRUCTURES

These objective and subjective bases to Bourdieu's theory of practice can be illustrated by understanding of culture. Bourdieu write that there are two traditions in the study of culture: the structural tradition and the functionalist one (1968).

The structuralist tradition sees culture as an instrument of communication and knowledge, based on a shared consensus of the world (for example, the anthropology of Levi-Strauss).
The functionalist tradition, on the other hand, is formed around human knowledge as the product of a social infrastructure.

As noted above, Bourdieu criticizes both traditions.
The first tradition is too static for Bourdieu: STRUCTURED STRUCTURES taken as synchronic forms, and often based on primitive societies.
While the second tradition reifies ideology - as a STRUCTURING STRUCTURE - in imposing the ideology of the dominant class in the critical tradition, or maintaining social control in the positivist one.

Bourdie attempts to reconcile these two traditions by taking what has been learnt from the analysis of structures as symbolic systems in order to uncover the dynamic of principles, or logic of practice, which them their structuring power.

In short, a theory of structure as both STRUCTURED (opus operatum, and thus open to objectigication) and STRUCTURING (modus operandi, and thus generative of thought and action).