National Habitus Research Articles

Against the Nudity in Art: Eliasian Reading of National Conservative Catholic Habitus

Abstract The Cleaner Marina Abramović Retrospective Exhibition in the Centre of Contemporary Art in Toruń, Poland, sparked much protest. This article analyses the protesters’ attitudes to capture their habitus. The analysis employs Norbert Elias’ sociological theory on national habitus. Demonstrations of protest invite interpretations of the peculiar national conservative Catholic habitus that – in the light of my study – stems in Poland from selective post-Tridentine pre-Vatican II Catholic magisterial thought and a sociopolitical historiography of traditional Polish culture. I recognise that the aim of the national conservative Catholics is to preserve a specific kind of Polish culture based on its early-modern image: strong state influenced by the Catholic Church in both policy and culture, with the accompanying theology of art taken from the Tridentine Council and the post-Tridentine debate. As a result, the national conservative Catholics invest much energy in remembrance politics and historical politics. I conclude that this habitus requires theological and religious reworking of national conservative Catholics’ understanding of the term “catholic.”

Experiences of culture and cultural negotiations among Russian-speaking migrants: National habitus and cultural continuity dilemmas in child-rearing

How migrants negotiate and adjust to new cultural settings and how they transmit culture to their children are key questions for migration researchers. This paper explores how culture is experienced and negotiated among Russian-speaking migrants, drawing on interviews and observation data collected in Perth, Australia, and Madrid, Spain, together with online forum data and documents. Analysis reveals that long-term socio-historical processes taking place within the post-Soviet space generate certain similarities among its inhabitants. These shared features, which Norbert Elias (1996) called ‘national habitus’, include internalised dispositions and behavioural patterns evident and reproduced in everyday life, such as hygiene and healthcare practices, norms of conduct in public places, and practices and beliefs related to the control of children’s behaviour and discipline. Many migrants come to realise that they are bearers of these similarities only in the process of the migration experience. This process of recognition of their habitus, including realising the cultural nature of certain standards of behaviour perceived as ‘civilised’ and ‘rational’ in the past, and the making of decisions about what is important to keep and what is not, we refer to as ‘cultural continuity dilemmas’. Participants resolve these dilemmas in three main ways: reinforcing their cultural classification systems through condemnation or attempts to correct; adopting the new standards; or adjusting perceptions to find a compromise. In these processes, certain practices and norms may come to be recognised as Soviet in both positive and negative senses, as being acceptable, or outdated remnants of a totalitarian system. Solving such dilemmas creates a unique combination of practices, forming a common cultural hybridity and generating new awareness of cultural and national identities.

The metamorphoses of cultural capital in a neoliberal and multicultural era: Towards a comparative approach

This review essay of Fields, Capitals, Habitus first discusses how this in-depth inquiry into the lifestyles and cultural practices in Australia contributes to the rich discussions sparked by the publication and translation of Bourdieu's Distinction. It then turns to research directions that this survey opens up, especially in comparative perspective, in the context of neoliberalism and multiculturalism. One of these directions is to study the rise of Indigenous capital. A second is to compare the way that transnational, Indigenous and migrant cultures challenge the national habitus. A third invites researchers to compare more systematically gendered practices across fields and countries, a study that should be supplemented by the impact of the feminisation of cultural intermediaries.

When One Becomes Two

In the Netherlands, where cycling is part of the “national habitus,” bicycle infrastructure is remarkably similar to car infrastructure. This article explores man–machine hybridization in the context of this spatial environment made for bikes, analyzing it through notions of human/nonhuman hybrids, cyborg bodies, and automobilized persons. The perceptions of urban cyclists who temporarily cannot cycle are explored, based on interviews with bike repair shop customers in Amsterdam. How does a broken bike impact their perception of themselves and the city? Within the sample, cyclists attribute an essential, corporeal value to their vehicles, regarding them as extensions of the body. Cycling is considered the natural way of moving through urban space, associated with freedom and independence; switching to public transportation induces feelings of dependence and handicap.

Social Workers Migrating between England and Australia: Linking Social Hierarchies, Bureaucracy, Trust and Politeness

AbstractFor many years, several Western countries have been relying on migrating social workers to fill local shortages. While studies documented the assumption that migrants moving between Commonwealth English-speaking countries will find it easier to integrate, scholars found that such transitions are often more complicated than assumed. Despite this general awareness, research has neglected to explore the impact of the specific culture migrating social workers are coming from and the new culture in which they find themselves. This is the gap we aim to fill. Using a mixed method approach that included online questionnaires and semi-structured interviews, we explore the experiences of migration and integration of Australian trained social workers in England and English trained social workers in Australia. Using National Habitus as a key theoretical concept, the findings highlight cultural differences connected with the acceptance of social hierarchies in England compared with the cultural emphasis on egalitarianism between white people in Australia. Such hierarchies produce in England a strong top-down approach which is more bureaucratic and procedural while also emphasising a less direct and more inhibited form of interpersonal communication with line-managers, colleagues and service users compared with Australia. Our findings will help better support future migrating social workers.

State, Emotion, Authority, and National Habitus: State-Related Problems of Our Time and Methodological Discourses in Sociology and Historical Sociology

State, Emotion, Authority, and National Habitus: State-Related Problems of Our Time and Methodological Discourses in Sociology and Historical Sociology

The Culture of Distrust: On the Hungarian National Habitus

The Culture of Distrust: On the Hungarian National Habitus

Islamic Habitus in English Language Textbooks Produced by Boards in Pakistan

The textbook is an important and powerful tool used by the state to reproduce the social and cultural habits of a group, most often, of the majority group’s social and cultural imaginations. The habitus produces and instills the world-view about society, the social and cultural values that a state valorized and would like pupils to internalize and make it part of their world-view. This study analyzes the English textbook published by the state textbook boards (Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Sindh) for the academic year 2018-2019 for pupils of classes four to eight. The textbook content was analyzed using the Qualitative Content Analysis method. The content of 15 textbooks was digitized (scanned and made readable) to electronically categorized the text into categories using Nvivo 12 Plus software. The analysis revealed that the content is focused on developing and promoting Islamic habitus through stories weaved around family, making it a core component of a Muslim country. The family members practiced Islamic values, social and cultural, not only through their everyday lives at home, in school, and at other public places but also within their community through the celebration of cultural and religious festivals. The textbooks presented the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and his family’s life as an ideal life to be lead by all, whether Muslims or non-Muslims. The textbook highlighted the ‘good,’ the ‘bad,’ valorizing the former and stigmatizing the latter to encourage pupils to develop an Islamic world-view. The textbooks fail to look into the micro-level national habitus, that is, portraying the habitus of its minorities, ethnic and religious, as the content did not integrate their habitus into the national habitus of Pakistan, making it the habitus of the majority. The current fast globalizing world needed to be presented to pupils a world-view, and this required, broadening the scope of textbook content to make it reflective of true Pakistani habitus aligned and rooted in the humane global world-view.

Quebeckers and Québécois. Evolution and changes in identity and national habitus in Quebec (1960–2016)

ABSTRACTThe aim of this article is to enrich the concept of national identity by employing the concept of habitus proposed by Pierre Bourdieu to establish a dialog between aspects of identity construction from above and its acceptance or rejection from below by national subjects. Taking the case of Quebec and the study of individual trajectories as a starting point, a debate is conducted amongst the proposals of the different levels of government, the political parties and civil society organizations, and compared with the identitarian transformations of the interviewees. The article concludes with the evidence of the differences between the proposed identity and the national habitus and suggests some of the reasons for these transformations.

Ready for the homeland? Ritual, remembrance, and political extremism in Croatian football

In the case of Croatia, sport has proved to be a highly politicized form of national expression, functioning as a salient social field in which its “national habitus codes” are most intensively articulated, debated, and contested. An incident emblematizing this argument occurred on 19 November 2013, when the Croatian national football team secured their qualification for the 2014 Football World Cup in Brazil. In front of the 25,000 people at Zagreb'sMaksimirstadium, the national team player, Josip Simunić, grabbed the microphone and “greeted” all four stands with a loud chanting ofZa dom(For the home(land)), to which the stands thunderously respondedspremni(ready), the official salute of the Independent State of Croatia, a fascist WWII quisling-state. This paper argues that the issue extends beyond politically radicalized football hooligans and has to be understood from the standpoint of “social memory.” By focusing on football, the article scrutinizes debates in the Croatian public sphere dealing with the saluteZa dom – spremni.Providing an insight into its complex and multi-layered nature, this paper illustrates that Croatian football has to be understood as a field in which social memory is prominently constructed, heatedly articulated, and powerfully disseminated.

Neoliberal Globalization and Heightened Perceptions of Class Division in Iceland

This article uses the case of Iceland to study how neoliberal globalization impacts class discourse in the political field and broader perceptions of class division. Analyzing a leading newspaper and parliamentary debates from 1986–2012, I show how neoliberal globalization—especially by increasing economic inequality—created a disjuncture between an increasingly differentiated social space and a national habitus cultivated in a small, homogeneous, and egalitarian society. This undermined taken-for-granted assumptions of relative classlessness and heightened perceptions of class division during a neoliberal ascendancy period from 1995 to Iceland's economic collapse in September 2008.

Disciplining religion: the role of the state and its consequences on democracy

This article presents the concept of hegemonic religion and its relationship with democracy. This concept entails not only a certain type of institutional relation between state and religion but, more importantly, a kind of national culture with religion at its core. Utilizing Norbert Elias’s figurational sociology, this article analyses how postcolonial states have built a national habitus that plays a decisive role in the politicization of religion. It focuses on examples from Islam and Buddhism and discusses how hegemonic types of politicised religions have negative impacts on democracy.

National habitus: an antidote to the resilience of Hofstede’s “national culture”?

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to scrutinize Geert Hofstede’s conceptualization of national culture and provide an alternative beyond purely constructivist conceptualizations of culture for cross-cultural management scholars and practitioners. Design/methodology/approach – Hofstede’s conceptualization of national culture is discussed and criticized. Subsequently, alternatives are being discussed. Eventually, a more feasible alternative is suggested and the ways in which it can be applied are briefly mentioned. Findings – Several objections to Hofstede’s idea and measurement of national culture are listed: it assumes people are cultural dopes, it ignores the influence of non-cultural factors, it reifies culture, it assumes internal coherence, it does not account for change, it arbitrarily uses the nation-state as the preferred locus of culture, and it has an in-built Western bias. Several authors have argued for a constructivist conceptualization of culture, which sees culture as a repertoire, from which ideas and possible actions can be selected. The downside, however, is that it has no practical value for managers. In an attempt to solve this, the paper explores the possibilities of using the concept of national habitus, which shows how dispositions are shaped on a national level and how these dispositions change under the influence of other, non-national social forces. Practical implications – The paper briefly explores how a national habitus-centered approach can help cross-cultural managers. Originality/value – The paper’s added value lies in the use of a relatively recently extended sociological concept for cross-cultural management.

The Germans: Cultural trauma and the Israeli habitus

This article reports results from a qualitative study of Israelis living in Germany, focusing on their traumatized national habitus. The study is based on 80 in-depth interviews and on replies of more than 100 respondents to an online questionnaire. The present article focuses on one specific aspect of the Israeli traumatized habitus: ‘the wounded eye and the scratched ear’. Specifically, it explores the ways by which the trauma of the Holocaust is inscribed in Israeli senses. It details how respondents’ eyes, ears and thoughts are activated by German mundane episodes, linking day-to-day experiences to the trauma of the Holocaust. Trains, suspect on-boarding Israelis, might end up in Auschwitz; snow brings up associations of the death marches; old people are perceived as Gestapo officers; and contemporary child-rearing practices ‘explain’ to Israelis the obedience and collaboration of ordinary Germans with the Third Reich. Using thick description from the interviews I expose the suspicious Israeli habitus – which always looks for ‘signs’ that might explain what happened in Germany 80 years ago.

“For lack of accountability”: The logic of the price in Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries

Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries are now infamous for the damaging impact they had on the lives of the women who passed through them throughout the twentieth century. The relationship between the state and the Laundries was constituted using a deliberately informal frame characterised by an excision of the “logic of the price”. This wilful disregard for the economic was significant in form and function, and was mirrored within the institutions where the women were “accounted for” in ways that rendered “accounting to” them unthinkable. The Laundries functioned for the emerging Irish state as a tool that helped to orchestrate a shared national habitus and to moderate the state’s own account of the role and record of women. The way in which the relationship between the state and the institutions was constructed almost 100years ago continues to mute accountability and to serve the interests of power. The closed nature of the institutions now permits an examination of the impact of this deliberate informality. This reveals the potentially devastating consequences of the removal of accounting ways of thinking from relationships between the state and private bodies to which pivotal services have been outsourced. Analysis of the case using a Bourdieusian frame has implications for accounting as a discipline in public contexts and for the way in which we understand the limits of state responsibility in the case of outsourced or privatised service provision and policy formation.

Documents and detachment in the figurational sociology of sport

This article discusses the methodological implications of using a figurational approach to the study of Gaelic games (the Irish sports of hurling and Gaelic football) and their organisation and governance from the late nineteenth century onwards. Following Norbert Elias, we argue that data generation guided by theories, and potentially modifying such theories, are essential components of research endeavours. The problem of generalisation or representativeness of historical documents can be addressed by treating documents as part of a fi guration of evidence, thereby constituting a mutually supporting network of data that serves as a scaffold or structure for theoretical and empirical findings. Based on the experience of using documents such as newspaper and referee reports of matches, and also organisational documents such as the minutes of meetings at various levels of governance, we contribute to the discussion concerning borders and boundary maintenance between history, sociology and historical sociology. While we elaborate on the Eliasian perspective on emotional detachment, and secondary involvement, when conducting research, we also note the dificulties in avoiding ‘preferred’ readings of national history given that Gaelic games have been intertwined with the narrative and project of national self-determination in Ireland. Researchers are compelled to recognise the theoretical significance of sports as a motor and symbol of emotional identifications, but must also create distance from their own national habitus in order to prioritise participation in intergenerational knowledge generation over further national myth-making.

Plugging in: Power sockets, standards and the valencies of national habitus

This article examines why it is not possible to plug a British plug directly into a Dutch power socket. The author traces the development of the British Standard BS1363 plug-socket assembly and compares it to the European arrangement in order to demonstrate how the ‘banal nationalism’ of everyday life is formed and can be seen to be manifest in everyday utilitarian artefacts. A concept of nationhood that is formed in terms of ‘national habitus’ is elaborated, the nation is envisaged as being constituted by the socio-technological infrastructures upon which it depends, which are established as being formed by the governmentalities that have allowed them to come into being, and it is suggested that such a system will operate at a range of scales or valencies. By tracing the history of the two examples given, the intention is to demonstrate how each national habitus depends upon a particular technical development shaped by social forces.

Bicykl Jejího Veličenstva: O národním habitu a sociologické komparaci

Translated title: Her Majesty’s bicycle: On national habitus and sociological comparison. Why are things different on the other side of national borders; and how can this be explained sociologically? This inaugural lecture tries to answer these questions, starting from the example of the bicycle in the Netherlands. It distinguishes four processes that have contributed to increasing similarity within nations: growing interdependence within nations; increasing density of networks and institutions; vertical diffusion of styles and standards; and the development of national we-feelings. Together, these processes have contributed to the development of national habitus: increasing similarities within nations, and increasing differences between people living in different countries. These processes have reached their apex in the second half of the twentieth century. Since then, they have diminished, leading to increasing variations within countries, and growing similarities between comparable groups in different countries. This analysis poses new questions and challenges for sociologists. First, it leads us to rethink comparative research: what are we comparing when we compare nations, and is this still a viable unit of analysis? Second, it leads us to consider how the transfer of styles and standards occurs in our informalized, globalized, and mediatized age. Third, sociologists should analyse the new forms of inequality resulting from these processes, such as the growing rift between ‘ locals ’ and (bike-loving) cosmopolitans.

Israeli Diplomacy: The Effects of Cultural Trauma

Summary Israeli politicians are diplomatic agents provocateurs. Presidents, prime ministers and foreign office executives craft diplomatic scenes that betray diplomatic protocol. This article exposes the deep cultural codes that explain the unique behaviour of Israeli diplomacy. It documents different occasions of Israeli exceptional diplomacy and suggests that they reflect the cultural traumas that underlie Israeli culture. The analyses apply a new theoretical framework that dwells on the cultural codes of ‘Israeliness’ while suggesting that the unique style of Israeli diplomacy reflects four such codes: existential anxiety; upright defiance; a dugri (frank) speech culture and a fear of seeming to be a sucker (‘fraier’). By interpreting prominent cases with a cultural lens, the authors provide new insights into Israeli unilateralism, its seeming ‘paranoid’ character, and the reason for Israeli ignorance of international diplomatic codes. Essentially, they suggest that: (a) there is a cultural mismatch between diplomatic protocol and the Israeli national habitus; (b) the more that Israel’s strategic interests are threatened, the more locked it becomes to its post-traumatic habitus and the further its politicians move away from protocol. Israel’s persistent cultural trauma is thus likely to maintain the deviation of Israeli diplomacy from diplomatic protocol.

Defining the Volk: Willy Hellpach's Völkerpsychologie between National Socialism and Liberal Democracy, 1934–1954

This article introduces the Völkerpsychologie of the German psychologist and liberal politician Willy Hellpach. It shows how Hellpach used the once venerable approach of Völkerpsychologie, introduced by Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal in the nineteenth century, to adapt to the Third Reich and distract the authorities from his political career. The article provides a close reading of Hellpach's main text on the subject, the Einführung in die Völkerpsychologie published in 1938, and explains the ease with which he was able to make this approach compatible with Nazi ideology. Hellpach's case thus illustrates the proximity of national-liberal thinking to ‘Nazi ideology’. Moreover, on account of the post-war reception of Hellpach's Völkerpsychologie by scholars such as Ralf Dahrendorf, the article examines the uneasy and incomplete repudiation of Völkerpsychologie after 1945. It concludes that the origins of widely used concepts such as ‘national habitus’ or ‘national identity’ can be traced back to the tradition of Völkerpsychologie and related studies of national character.