Outline of a Theory of Practice

1977/06/02 by Pierre Bourdıeu · 119 citations
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Multiculturalism, Politics, Migration, Gender #Cultural Identity and Heritage #French Urban and Social Studies

paper · doi:10.1017/cbo9780511812507

openalex publication_date 1977/06/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04

Abstract

Outline of a Theory of Practice is recognized as a major theoretical text on the foundations of anthropology and sociology. Pierre Bourdieu, a distinguished French anthropologist, develops a theory of practice which is simultaneously a critique of the methods and postures of social science and a general account of how human action should be understood. With his central concept of the habitus, the principle which negotiates between objective structures and practices, Bourdieu is able to transcend the dichotomies which have shaped theoretical thinking about the social world. The author draws on his fieldwork in Kabylia (Algeria) to illustrate his theoretical propositions. With detailed study of matrimonial strategies and the role of rite and myth, he analyses the dialectical process of the 'incorporation of structures' and the objectification of habitus, whereby social formations tend to reproduce themselves. A rigorous consistent materialist approach lays the foundations for a theory of symbolic capital and, through analysis of the different modes of domination, a theory of symbolic power.

Cited by

• The Multilingual and Multi-Orthographic Taiwan-Based Internet: Creative Uses of Writing Systems on College-Affiliated BBSs
• The ambivalent role of Urdu and English in multilingual Pakistan: a Bourdieusian study
• Julius Nyerere, Ujamaa, and Political Morality in Contemporary Tanzania
• Chequered Fortunes in Global Exports: The Sociogenesis of African Entrepreneurship in the Nile Perch Business at Lake Victoria, Uganda
• Community, patriarchy, honour: Raghu Bhanagre's revolt
• US Print Culture, Literary Narrative, and Slow Reading in the Age of Big Data: Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland
• Genocide in the African Diaspora
• Just Practice
• What Does a Culturally Sustaining Learning Climate Look Like?
• Time-geography: a new beginning
• Making the “American Acropolis”: On Verticality, Social Hierarchy, and the Obduracy of Manhattan Schist
• Bridging the Gap
• The intersection of digital practices and environmental orientations: exploring digital-environmental habitus
• Fanatical football chants: Creating and controlling the carnival
• The Role of Boundary-Spanners in the Control of a Chinese Garment Factory in Myanmar
• “Collective Forgetting” in the News: Racialized Space, Media Framing, and White Racial Ignorance
• Graves, groves and gardens
• Does religion always help the poor? Variations in religion and social class in the west and societies in the global south
• DSM-III and the transformation of American psychiatry: a history
• Of Roots and Race: Discourses of Body and Place in Japanese Taiko Drumming
• In the Belly of Dan
• Legacies of Derrida: Anthropology
• Maya Farmers and Export Agriculture in Highland Guatemala
• Religion and the Body
• Engaging with Cultural Sport Psychology to Explore Systemic Sexual Exploitation in USA Gymnastics: A Call to Commitments
• The Sound of Stigmatization: Sonic Habitus, Sonic Styles, and Boundary Work in an Urban Slum
• Big Business and Fascism: A Dangerous Collusion
• Creole Architecture: A Comparative Analysis of Upper and Lower Louisiana and Saint Domingue
• Understanding Bourdieu - Cultural Capital and Habitus
• The Cognitive Origins of Bourdieu's Habitus
• Violent Hypocrisy
• Distant Colonies and Explosive Collapse: The Two Stages of the Tiwanaku Diaspora in the Osmore Drainage
• Cities as battlefields: understanding how the Nation of Islam impacts civic engagement, environmental racism, and community development in a low income neighborhood
• Social Construction of Pain and Aging: Individual Artfulness Within Interpretive Structures
• The Philistines and Acculturation: Culture Change and Ethnic Continuity in the Iron Age
• Paradox Research in Management Science: Looking Back to Move Forward
• Bosumpra revisited: 12,500 years on the Kwahu Plateau, Ghana, as viewed from ‘On top of the hill’
• Night and Day: the Symbolism of Astral Signs on Later Iron Age Anthropomorphic Short Swords
• Disciplining Youthful Methodist Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Cornwall
• Elements of practices in digital publics: a model for identifying collective doings on social media platforms
• An Anthropology of Knowledge
• Chinese in East Timor : Identity, society and economy
• Solidarity and Schism: A Study on Bihar’s Backward Classes’ Movement
• Zones of refuge: Resisting conquest in the northern Philippine highlands through environmental practice
• The balance of power in the governance of the global maritime safety: the role of classification societies from a habitus perspective
• Gender and Material Culture: the Archaeology of Religious Women
• Ancient Maya Politics: A Political Anthropology of the Classic Period 150–900 CE
• The Construction of Public and Domestic Spheres in the Preclassic Maya Lowlands
• The Harvard Lawyer vs the Bad Boy from the Bronx: Explaining the Political Performance Gaps between Rubén Blades and Willie Colón
• Social justice and spatial inequality
• The Dreaming, Human Agency and Inscriptive Practice
• Jay Gatsby, Failed Intellectual: F. Scott Fitzgerald's Trope for Social Stratification
• Aboriginal Histories, Aboriginal Myths: An Introduction
• on scriptural essentialism and ritual variation: Muslim sacrifice in Sumatra and Morocco
• The Critical Theory of Herman Dooyeweerd?
• Revolution in Telengana (1946–1951): (Part Two)
• Critical rhetoric: Theory and praxis
• The semiotics of language ideologies in Singapore1
• Menstrual Taboo and Women’s Agency
• Embodying Texts and Tradition: Ethnographic Film in a South Indian Advaita VedāntaGurukulam
• Monuments as landscape: Creating the centre of the world in late Neolithic Orkney
• Theorising masculinities and men’s health: A brief history with a view to practice
• Becoming Roman, staying Greek: Culture, identity and the civilizing process in the Roman East
• Hegemonic Field Effects in World Politics: The United States and the Schuman Plan of 1950
• Divination and Power
• Health Literacy for Improved Health Outcomes: Effective Capital in the Marketplace
• ANATOMY OF A TOMB‐WEST KENNET REVISITED
• Making Sense of the Design of International Institutions
• Rape and Rape Avoidance in Ethno‐National Conflicts: Sexual Violence in Liminalized States
• Gendered Memories and Masculinities
• Islam, Ethnicity, and Conflict in Ethiopia
• Highlights and Overview of the History of Educational Ethnography
• Bronze Age ‘Herostrats’: Ritual, Political, and Domestic Economies in Early Bronze Age Denmark
• Decentralized Complexity: The Case of Bronze Age Northern Europe
• Houses, graves and the limits of kinship groupings among the Sa’dan Toraja
• Street Gang Recruitment
• Music-making in the social world of a Cretan town (Heraklion 1900–1960): a contribution to the study of non-commercialrebetiko
• The engenderedlyra:Music, poetry and manhood in Crete
• Embodied Spirituality
• Te Kai Paka-Anuta: Food in a Polynesian Outlier Society
• 'Winning Ways': Globalisation and the Impact of the Health and Wealth Gospel
• When customers get clever: Managerial approaches to dealing with creative consumers
• Ritual, belief and habituation
• Persistent deathplaces and mobile landmarks: The Holocene mortuary and isotopic record from Wadi Takarkori (SW Libya)
• ‘Tiger in Paradise’: Reading global Mauritius in shifting time and space
• Power, discourse and the appropriation of god: Christianity and subversion in a Melanesian context∗
• The trap of intellectual success: Robert N. Bellah, the American civil religion debate, and the sociology of knowledge
• Temple and Human Bodies: Representing Hinduism
• Distinguishing Between China and Vietnam: Three Relational Equilibriums in Sino-Vietnamese Relations
• Using Technology and Constituting Structures: A Practice Lens for Studying Technology in Organizations
• “Revenge” and “Rescue”: Workplace Deviance in the Taxicab Industry*
• Parent and teacher educational expectations and adolescents' academic performance: Mechanisms of influence
• Derision, Exorcism, and the Ritual Production of Power
• The Underside of Order: Race in the Constitution of International Order
• Gay, bisexual, and queer trans men navigating sexual fields
• The “Actors” of Modern Society: The Cultural Construction of Social Agency
• Legacy and legitimacy: historical ethnography of a judo dojo in Montréal, Canada
• A Theory of Cultural Values and Some Implications for Work
• The Life of the Law in the Islamic Republic of Iran
• Knowledge and Action
• Living with the Dead as a Way of Life: A Materialist Historiographical Approach to Cemetery Asceticism in Indian Buddhist Monasticisms
• University as vocational education: working‐class students’ expectations for university
• Bridging power resources and social movements: The role of emotional power in collective action
• The making of online Kurdistan: redefining nationhood and belonging among Kurdish Generation Z
• Participant Objectivation*
• Genocide's Aftermath: Neostalinism in Contemporary Crimea
• Ideology and the Harappan civilization
• conversion by affiliation: the history of the Karo Batak Protestant Church
• Gender, representation, and power in San ethnography and rock art
• Beyond Stereotypes: Violence and the Porousness of Ethnic Boundaries in the Republic of Macedonia
• Tod's Rajast'han and the Boundaries of Imperial Rule in Nineteenth-Century India
• Representing poverty and attacking representations: Perspectives on poverty from social anthropology
• Understanding international practices from the internal point of view
• Degrowth by means of technology? A treatise for an ethos of releasement
• Can’t see the wood for the trees, can’t see the trees for the numbers? Accounting education, sustainability and the Public Interest
• Psychological Universals: What Are They and How Can We Know?
• Skin, Kin and Clan: The dynamics of social categories in Indigenous Australia
• Embodiment theory in anthropology [wikipedia]
• Structure and agency [wikipedia]