Theory of Practice - Pierre Bourdieu

The dominant French intellectual thought, in the 1940s and 1950s at least, was characterized by two opposing traditions - structuralism and existentialism - which respectively might be seen as representing the objectivist and subjectivist traditions.

The former cam from a background of anthropology and was exemplified in the work of Levi-Strauss who was preoccupied with the workings of diverse and often exotic cultures.
The latter subjectivist tradition was more philosophically grounded, rooted in the German philosophy of Kierkegaard, Husserl and Heidegger, and was more concerned with issues of personal freedom.

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The argument between these opposing traditions resolved around two fundamentally distinct views of human action.

On the one, the anthropological tradition undertook to establish the social rules that determined how individuals behaved. For example, there were rules concerning who one could and could not marry - the incest taboo - as well as cultural presciptions involving what was considered sacred and profane.

On the other hand, the existentialist tradition foregrounded individual choice and decision-making as an ultimate act of personal freedom. Here, men and women are free when they choose because they accept the consequences of their decisions and the repercussions.

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But, neither tradition explained what Bourdieu observed in his early studies in the Bearn and Algeria. In case of rural France, there were indeed "rules" of matrimony which prescribed who young men and women should marry. However, such "rules" did not always seem to apply, or at least were interpreted with a degree of flexibility.

There was a similar situation in Algeria; cultural traditions were distinct but the underlying issues were identical. What became clear for Bourdieu was that, in both cases, the outcome of the social issue of who any one individual would marry depended on a whole series of personal and contextual conditions; and the best way of thinking about this question was not in terms of a rule or personal choice, but a STRATEGY.

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In other words, while individuals were not free to act simply in accordance with their own personal will and conscience, the notion of RULES implied both an explicit respect and conscious application that were rarely realized in practice.

Rather, individual action emerged from an unconscious calculation of profit - albeit symbolic (in the first instance at least) - and a strategic positoning within a social space to maximize individual holdings with respect to their availability.

Bourdieu needed a theoretical approach to account for this hybrid activity of socially shaped strategic, but individually constituted personal practice - which then formed common trends.