habitus, part two.

me in jasper, inhabiting the snowy woods. january 2011, photo by jason.

The word 'habitus' is a lot like 'habitat', and it always makes me think of a place -- the coziest, most natural little nest-niche of a place where you feel utterly at ease, at home. However, as early anthropologists and sociologists developed the term, it came to encompass all of one's cultural practices that are part of the body, the daily practices -- the non-discursive knowledge we absorb through socialization (our family upbringing, often tempered by formal education), which is then rooted to a place, of course. It is everything from tastes and bodily positions and styles and habits and routines; basically, it is all of those things that never need explanation, and perhaps evade explanation. And so we never think of them, but we always know when they are absent, when our habitus does not align well with those of others, & we realize when our own habitus has been thrown off its centre.

This is because, according to Bourdieu, the habitus is our schema, a bare skeleton that fleshes out with all our lasting perceptions, thoughts and actions. And this is how we relate to a field, a social structure or space -- through this inhabited body, this habitus.

Since arriving here in the Sakha Republic last September, I have been observing the little changes I have adapted to life here fairly well under the circumstances, I think, but I still feel off-kilter, and decentred. Of course I miss the people I love, the people to whom I can truly reveal myself, to whom I am not--when all is said & done--the foreigner, the fieldworker, the academic (even if we get along well)... I miss certain foods, as well, everything from green vegetables to the taste of tapwater in my hometown , the usual things that travelers and expatriates miss.

But I also notice more subtle things, these aspects of the habitus that are difficult to isolate. They are all tied up in how I walk differently here, much more tensely and apprehensively. How I interact with people differently (I am less assertive but far more outgoing and enthusiastic), I miss the sort of polite friendliness you can show to passing strangers and workers in Canada, but is out of place here in Yakutsk. I miss feeling a balance of power within an interaction, of feeling like I am being asked instead of told. It tires me to have to always have to fight and repeat myself to express my needs, to untangle these nuances that no one ever explains to me--never even thinks to explain-- because to them, they are part of the habitus of this culture, this place.

It's the knowing that I will always fit out, on the deepest level, even if I fit in superficially, even if I am certainly adapting, often subconsciously, to this new habitus. How I dress, how I talk and interact (requests, questions, everything), how I walk, how I approach someone. I just miss my own habitus, because all these little things add up to a larger incongruency, & I don't feel real sometimes, just not quite like myself.

And maybe I think too much, instead of just trying to be, but thinking too much is really my job right now, & so is noticing all of these things, I suppose, because in subjectively understanding the changes in my own behaviors, I can better identify what it is that characterizes the habitus (especially as it relates to communicative practice). And maybe this is different, what makes me stand slightly apart from someone moving to another country to live, to make a life, rather than to study it in minute detail -- do they notice it quite like this, beyond the initial, more overt symptoms of culture shock? I don't know. It just makes me tired, sometimes, this creeping sense of dépaysement (another lovely French word that describes how things in another country, another place, never seem quite right), which I think links well the nostalgia for a place with the longing for how you feel when you are there, when you inhabit it, you dwell within it -- a sense of (in)habitus.