Practice Theory and Habit - An Explanation through Example

Despite our best efforts, many of us cannot help but become creatures of habit. On a day to day basis, a large number of our individual daily activities are repetitious and mundane due to their inherent natures and continued presence in our lives. Tasks like putting the gas in the car, going grocery shopping, and attending church on Sundays are just a few examples of activities we can be a part of on autopilot.

Fortunately, the spicy and exhilarating anthropological field of practice theory addresses these issues and offers an explanation for why and how these kinds of activities exist. If you are struggling with the feeling that every day is the same in your own life, then perhaps awareness of this theory will help you. Practice theory is the product of trying to resolve weaknesses in structuralism, structural-functionalism, and poor versions of Marxism. These fields struggle with the concept of change. A structure can be recognized and understood, but how can it change over time? To remedy the static approaches of other schools of thought, practice theorists introduce a model relating flexible ideology, structure and practice. Through this model, dualistic approaches that have been used in the past can be improved upon or tossed entirely for better ones. The relationship presented can be understood as ideology impacting practice, thus reproducing structure. Each part of this system is malleable and subject to change. Ideology can become internalized and veiled over time, but is still subject to change at conscious and unconscious levels if necessary. Key to practice theory is habitus, a concept explained by the theorist Pierre Bourdieu. Habitus is “an acquired system of generative schemes objectively adjusted to the particular conditions in which it is constituted.” Habitus is vital because it is a responsive system that can adjust to external or internal changes.

So let’s explore practice theory in the context of everyday routine. For the sake of discussion, I will describe some things I do routinely in my life, but you can think about your own life. Every weekday morning, I do almost the exact same thing. I wake up an hour and a half before my first class, I spend 15 to 30 minutes guilt-tripping myself out of bed because I need to go to class, then I put on clothes, brush my teeth for exactly 2 minutes, look over any notes or homework I have relevant to my first class, and leave my dorm for class 15 minutes before it is scheduled to start. I do not eat breakfast, I shower the night before, and my hair is short so I do not take the time to style it or anything like that. So this is a succinct summary of my morning practices. But now let’s look at the why of this structure. What kind of ideology exists behind it? My morning is based on maximizing sleep. I sacrifice morning activities like a warm breakfast, a wake up shower, and additional preparation time for class for extra time in my warm bed. This allows me to stay up late the night before with minimized consequences, or sleep for extra time if I managed to go to bed at a reasonable hour. Further, when I have a job instead of classes, I will most likely have hours that I have to be at work so I will not have the luxury of sleeping in because I feel like it, so this is possibly my last chance to do so. I do the activities I do in the morning because they are the minimum requirements I need to meet to feel ready for the day. However, I do these activities without going through the process I am explaining here; I just go through the motions. This is the structural part of this example. But what about habitus? Consider me brushing my teeth for exactly two minutes. This is a recent change in my morning habits due to receiving an electric toothbrush as a gift. For my entire life until about a month ago, I have brushed my teeth until they felt clean, an obviously variable amount of time. But now I have this brush that vibrates for exactly two minutes, with momentary differential oscillations every 30 seconds to inform me it is time to change to another oral quadrant. This change came with changes in practice, ideology and structure. I now believe that to properly clean my teeth with this brush, I should follow the instructions that say to brush my teeth in the aforementioned manner. My desire for clean and cavity-free teeth has not changed, but my beliefs and standards for achieving this goal have. Note that this is not a claim of improvement, only of difference. My old method may have worked as well or even better than my new one. But the structure of my morning routine has been slightly restructured due to a small change in underlying presuppositions.

Practice theory is beneficial because it is a fluid solution to the static problems inherent to structural theories. It addresses the changing nature of ideology, structure and practice by relating these three dynamic concepts in a model. By stepping back from our habits and evaluating them with the tools of practice theory, we can become cognizant of why we do the things we do, and how these habitual activities can be subject to change.

-Phillip