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Pierre Bourdieu and thePractices of LanguageWilliam F. HanksDepartment of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley,California 94720–3710; email: wfhanks@berkeley.edu

Annu. Rev. Anthropol.2005. 34:67–83

First published online as aReview in Advance onMay 23, 2005

The Annual Review ofAnthropology is online atanthro.annualreviews.org

doi: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.33.070203.143907

Copyright c© 2005 byAnnual Reviews. All rightsreserved

0084-6570/05/1021-0067$20.00

Key Words

habitus, field, symbolic power, discourse, linguistics

AbstractThis paper synthesizes research on linguistic practice and criticallyexamines the legacy of Pierre Bourdieu from the perspective of lin-guistic anthropology. Bourdieu wrote widely about language and lin-guistics, but his most far reaching engagement with the topic is in hisuse of linguistic reasoning to elaborate broader sociological conceptsincluding habitus, field, standardization, legitimacy, censorship, andsymbolic power. The paper examines and relates habitus and field indetail, tracing the former to the work of Erwin Panofsky and the lat-ter to structuralist discourse semantics. The principles of relative au-tonomy, boundedness, homology, and embedding apply to fields andtheir linkage to habitus. Authority, censorship, and euphemism aretraced to the field, and symbolic power is related to misrecognition.And last, this chapter relates recent work in linguistic anthropologyto practice and indicates lines for future research.

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Contents

READING BOURDIEU . . . . . . . . . . . . 68HABITUS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69FIELD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72LANGUAGE

STANDARDIZATION ANDCHANGE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75

LANGUAGE, LEGITIMATE ANDAUTHORITATIVE . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76

CENSORSHIP ANDEUPHEMISM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76

SYMBOLIC POWER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78

READING BOURDIEU

The first challenge for a linguistic anthro-pologist reading Bourdieu is Bourdieu’s ownlanguage. It is terse in papers like “TheBerber House” (1973), dense and reflexivein the Outline (1977) and The Field of Cul-tural Production (1993), and willfully obscurein Reproduction (Bourdieu & Passeron 1977).He argues against theoretical programs andtheir terminologies but advances his own pro-gram and terminology. His vocabulary de-rives from fields as diverse as economics, arthistory, literature, linguistics, philosophy oflanguage, statistics, and social theory (partic-ularly structuralist and Marxist), along withthe layers of specific literature bearing onNorth Africa, French society, and history.Yet he rejects critical presuppositions that at-tach to the language in its own field (e.g.,competition, monopoly, supply, demand, cap-ital) (1985, p. 19). Throughout the writ-ings he uses linguistic-semiotic terms, suchas arbitrariness, generativity, invariance, andstructure, but he dismisses much of the lin-guistics and semiotics from which they aredrawn. He was also embedded in several de-bates over such basic topics as reason, inten-tionality, and political thought and was him-self politically engaged. His linguistic wagerwas that he could absorb selected terms and

concepts from other fields, while excludingmuch of the intellectual baggage they usuallycarry. The result is that readers unaware or un-sympathetic to his wager will find Bourdieu’sprose paradoxical, inconsistent, or opaque. Italso opens him to withering criticism such asHasan (1999), who attacks his claims aboutlanguage.

To understand Bourdieu’s language, wemust situate it in the conceptual universe ofpractice theory, including the empirical anal-yses through which the theory was developedand to which it is adapted (Goodman 2003).The attempt was to join theory and analysisin empirically grounded “scientific” sociology(Bourdieu 1985, p. 11; Bourdieu & Wacquant1992, pp. 224–47) on the basis of “the re-lational mode of thinking” (Bourdieu 1977).This is well illustrated in the ethnographictreatment of honor, kinship, agricultural prac-tice, domestic space, the body, the calendar(Bourdieu 1977), the use of statistics (1977,1979), survey data on audiences and sales(1993, pp. 85, 88, 98), and historical back-ground to generalizations about literature andart in nineteenth-century France (1993, partII). The language of practice is focused not onfinished objects, but on processes of construc-tion, networks of interarticulation, and vari-eties of reflexivity. This is true whether theobject is symbolic structure (Bourdieu 1973),political action (1991b), Flaubert (Bourdieu1993), the French academy (1988), or thejudgment of taste (1979). There is little pointin proposing fixed definitions of his basicterms because they get their sense from therelational work they do in analysis.

A student of language can read Bourdieuin at least two ways. The first way is to focuson what Bourdieu says about language andlinguistics, on topics such as performativityand description, censorship, and “legitimatelanguage” (1991b). Similarly, we could con-front him on his readings of Saussure, Chom-sky, Austin, Benveniste, Labov, and otherlanguage theorists (Hasan 1999). The resultwould be to focus on what Bourdieu claimedabout language and linguistics, usually in the

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course of a polemic. Important though itis, the problem with this way of reading isthat it reveals more about Bourdieu thanabout language. A more productive approachis what can be called a second-degree reading:Bracket what Bourdieu claims about languagedirectly, and focus instead on what he saysabout other aspects of social life. The fact isthat his treatment of a range of social phenom-ena apart from language bears the trace of lin-guistic reasoning, sometimes filtered throughstructuralism and sometimes not. His intellec-tual debt to linguistics and semiotics as a wayof thinking is greatest perhaps when it goesunexplored, for instance in the symbolic anal-ysis of the Berber house (1973), the develop-ment of the field concept (1985, 1991a, 1993),the principle of autonomy applying to fields,the arbitrariness of classification, and the gen-erative capacity of habitus and the competenceof those who have it. Moreover, when talk-ing about language, Bourdieu seldom if everapproaches the level of empirical specificityneeded to assess his claims, whereas on othertopics he does. To borrow his own terms, thefirst degree of reading defines language as theobject or opus operatum about which claims aremade, whereas the second degree of readingtreats linguistic reasoning as a modus operandi,partly independent of what he is talking about.Although both are important, we are con-cerned here about the latter.

HABITUS

One of the widely cited concepts developedby Bourdieu was his idea of the habitus. Atbase, habitus concerns reproduction insofaras what it explains are the regularities imma-nent in practice. It explains regularity by ref-erence to the social embedding of the actor,the fact that actors are socially formed withrelatively stable orientations and ways of act-ing. The stability of the habitus is not ex-pressed in rules, which Bourdieu rejects, butin habits, dispositions to act in certain ways,and schemes of perception that order individ-ual perspectives along socially defined lines.

Through the habitus, society is impressed onthe individual, not only in mental habits, buteven more in corporeal ones. Citing Mauss(1973, p. 117), social embedding is realized inways of moving, gesturing, gazing, and orient-ing in lived space (Csordas 1994, Enfield 2005,C. Goodwin 2000, Hanks 1990, Haviland2000, Kendon 1997). For language, the habi-tus bears on the social definition of thespeaker, mentally and physically, on rou-tine ways of speaking, on gesture and em-bodied communicative actions, and on theperspectives inculcated through ordinary ref-erential practice in a given language (Ochs1996).

We can distinguish three lines of thoughtjoined in the concept of habitus. The firstis the Aristotelian idea of the hexis, whichBourdieu treats as the individual dispositionthat joins desire (intention) with judgment(evaluation). This idea will become the modusoperandi of practical action, the guiding frameof reference that aligns intention with judg-ments of good and bad, appropriate and in-appropriate. Speakers have hexis insofar asthey enact through speech expressive inten-tions and the metalinguistic evaluations thatguide both themselves and their understand-ing of others. The second strand in habitusis the phenomenological ideas of habitual-ity and “corporeal schema” (Bourdieu 1985,p. 14; Merleau-Ponty 1962). The critical shifthere is from disposition to embodiment. Thecorporeal schema of Merleau-Ponty (1962) isneither a representation of the body, nor asheerly physical understanding of it. Rather, itis the prise de conscience, the momentary graspthat the actor has of being a body. This in-cludes, grasped jointly, both the actual postu-ral disposition of the body and the backgroundhorizon of other postural arrangements thatare possible but not actual. At this point,Bourdieu, like the phenomenologists, is con-cerned with the familiarity and immediacy ofcorporeal experience, both of which are inher-ited by the habitus. For language, the ques-tion is how speakers grasp their own engage-ment in communicative practice, both verbal

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and gestural. On this point there is overlap be-tween habitus and language ideology as stud-ied in linguistic anthropology. The third lineof habitus is more concrete and detailed. Itis the approach developed by the art histo-rian Erwin Panofsky. In general, Panofskyadapted the scholastic concept of habitusto cultural production in medieval France.Closer to mentalism than to phenomenology,Panofsky defined habitus in terms of “habits ofmind” that lay behind Gothic architecture andscholastic philosophy, arguing in effect thatcultural production is profoundly shaped bythe ways of the thinking of its time. Let uslook more closely at his thesis to better un-derstand the habitus of linguistic practice.

Panofsky (1976 [1951]) developed a con-cept of habitus that is the immediate men-tal counterpart of Bourdieu’s use of theterm. Bourdieu translated Panofsky’s bookinto French in 1967, and wrote a postface tothe French edition, in which he commentson the importance of the art historian’s no-tion of habitus (Bourdieu 1974 [1967]). To myknowledge, this is the first usage of the termin Bourdieu’s published writing. Panofsky’sstarting point is the observation that thereare strong parallels between Gothic architec-ture and scholastic philosophy, which devel-oped within a 100 mile radius of Paris, overabout a century and a half (Panofsky 1976,pp. 4–5). Following a concise overview oftrends in the two fields between 1130 and1270, the “concentrated phase of this aston-ishingly synchronous development,” Panof-sky states his central thesis: that this is morethan mere parallelism—it is

a genuine cause and effect influence, butin contrast to an individual influence, thiscause-and-effect relation comes about bydiffusion rather than by direct impact. Itcomes about by the spreading of what maybe called, for want of a better term, a men-tal habit—reducing this overworked clicheto its precise Scholastic sense as a ‘principlethat regulates the act,’ principium importansordinem ad actum. Such mental habits are at

work in all and every civilization. (Panofsky1976, pp. 20–21).

Panofsky is careful to distinguish the no-tional content of cultural products from whathe calls the modus operandi of their produc-tion, the procedures through which they areproduced. It is the modus operandi, not theopus operatum, the procedure not the work,that bears the mental habit (Panofsky 1976,p. 27). Thus, the principle of transparencygoverned architectural design, as clarificationgoverned scholastic thought. Cathedrals weredesigned with an eye to totality, symmetry,and replication of homologous parts, as argu-ments were based on distinctiveness, deduc-tive cogency, the mutual inferability amongparts, and explicitness (Panofsky 1976, pp. 43–58). Using the twin Scholastic principles ofmanifestatio and concordatia, he argues for theexistence of a “visual logic” that would havestructured the Scholastic view of architecture,unifying, for instance, material stability withtextual authority, and subtending the mentalhabits of clarification, contradiction, and res-olution (Panofsky 1976, pp. 68–68).

Bourdieu was sufficiently moved by thiswork to undertake its translation and to de-scribe it as “sans nul doute un des plus beauxdefis qui ait jamais ete lance au positivisme”(“without any doubt one of the most beau-tiful challenges ever leveled at positivism”).As he did repeatedly in subsequent writings,he seizes on the importance of modus operandias opposed to the notional content of culturalworks, quoting Panofsky who described theseas “fundamental principles that support thechoice and presentation of motifs as well asthe production and interpretation of images,stories and allegories” (Bourdieu 1974 [1967],pp. 137–39).1 Among the several basic lessons

1In this review, Bourdieu’s postface is cited as Bourdieu1974. All translations from French by W.F. Hanks, un-less otherwise noted. Bourdieu read widely in Panofsky’sworks, citing this quoted passage from “Iconography andIconology: An Introduction to the Study of RenaissanceArt.”

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Bourdieu draws from Panofsky is the need toreject the dichotomy between individual cre-ativity as embodied in singular works and col-lective values as embodied in the habitus thatguides the creation of those works (Bourdieu1974, p. 142). He goes on to contrast “struc-tural methods,” which catalog homologies be-tween symbols and systems, with Panofsky’ssearch for the underlying, mostly unconsciousprinciples that give rise to those homologies.The latter, inculcated in schools and embod-ied in the habitus, are generative schemes thatcut across different spheres of cultural pro-duction, generating both works and thoughts(Bourdieu 1974, p. 152). Bourdieu suggestsa comparison to Chomsky’s generative gram-mar then later refers to the Saussurian idea ofparole (“speech”) to suggest the existence ofgenerative schemes whose effects can be per-ceived only in the works (parole, performance)in which they are realized (Bourdieu 1974,p. 160).2 He writes,

. . . the habitus of the creator as a system ofschemes constantly orients choices which,while not deliberate are nonetheless system-atic, which without being ordered and or-ganized expressly in relation to an ultimateend, are nonetheless bearers of a sort of fi-nality which reveals itself only post festum:that self-constitution of a system of worksunited by an ensemble of significant rela-tions is accomplished in and through the as-sociation of contingency and sense which ismade, unmade and remade ceaselessly ac-cording to principles that are all the moreconstant that they more completely escapeconsciousness. . .. (Bourdieu 1974, pp. 161–62).

If we substitute “speaker” for “creator” wehave here a cogent summary of his approach

2This is the first time, to my knowledge, that Bourdieucompares the habitus with a generative grammar, a mislead-ing and ultimately failed comparison that was nonethelesssalient to him in 1967, when the “Postface” was written(Hanks 1993).

TABLE 1 Two definitions of habitus

From Panofsky To BourdieuMental habits Embodied habitualityEvaluative perspective Eye, gazeDesire/intention Inclination, postureCultural production Labor of the bodyMental schema Embodied schemaExecution MobilityAchieved via training Achieved via reproductionExercised in expert practice Exercised in ordinary practiceRelative synchrony (“spirit of age”) Diachrony, emergenceDesign of ritual space Occupancy of domestic spaceLinks philosophy to architecture Links actor to fieldsBelief, ideology Misrecognition, doxaRegulates action Regulates practice

to utterance production. The final issue Bour-dieu addresses in this “Postface” is innovation.Must we, he asks, revert to irreducible individ-ual creativity to explain the work of those, likeAbbe Suger, who break from the esthetic tra-ditions of their time? In effect, he responds inthe negative, asserting the necessity of habi-tus as the social, generative, unifying principlethat makes intelligible the singularity of theindividual creator (Bourdieu 1974, pp. 165–66).3

Panofsky’s notion of habitus is focused ondesign and does not extend to the embodiedexperience of being within the built spaces ofGothic cathedrals. By 1972, Bourdieu had ex-plicitly rejected mentalism and proposed thatthe body, not the mind, was the “site” of habi-tus (1977). This shift has numerous entail-ments, summarized in Table 1.

The left column in Table 1 summarizesPanofsky’s approach in terms of its elements,although not in the precise terms that heused. The mental habits that caused the ho-mologies between philosophy and architec-ture have become embodied habits, engaging

3Students of linguistic anthropology will be reminded hereof Sapir’s “Speech as a Personality Trait,” where he spellsout the necessity of social basis without which individ-ual style is unintelligible (Sapir 1985). See also Eckert &Rickford (2001).

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both mind and body. The evaluative perspec-tive, once embodied, emerges as active per-ception, and the intentional states of desireand purpose become the inclination of bodyposture. On these points, which together de-fine hexis, Bourdieu comes to rely more onMerleau-Ponty (1945) than on Panofsky. Thecultural production of the philosopher and ar-chitect becomes the labor of the body. Themental schemas become embodied schemesof perception and understanding. The activeprocess of production works through the bodyin motion and gesture. The inculcation ofthe mental habits through specialized trainingbecomes the discipline of the body throughthe repeated regularities of ordinary practice.Whereas Panofsky sought to define the “spiritof the age” as a relatively synchronous systemof ideas, Bourdieu foregrounds the temporalopen-endedness of habitus. Where the for-mer examined the design of monumental rit-ual spaces, the latter was concerned with theactual occupancy of ordinary spaces, particu-larly the household. Panofsky derived the reg-ularities of philosophy and architecture fromhis version of habitus, and Bourdieu derivedthe regularities of ordinary embodied practicefrom his redefined habitus. Finally, althoughPanofsky does not speak of belief or ideol-ogy, the habitus he discerns is an intellectualformation complete with principles, premises,and self-justifying judgments. These elementsemerge in practice sociology as misrecogni-tion and doxa, that is, the false belief that so-ciety operates on reason and merit and theunquestioning adherence to its order.

From a language perspective, habitus cor-responds to the social formation of speak-ers, including the disposition to use languagein certain ways, to evaluate it according tosocially instilled values, to embody expres-sion in gesture, posture, and speech produc-tion (Arno 2003, Bucholtz 1999, Farnell 2000,Ochs 1996, Ruthrof 2000, Streeck 2003). Itwas developed to explain reproduction with-out rules. It follows that in a practice approachto language, regularities of “usage” are notexplained by rules, codes, or conventions but

by embodied dispositions and schemas, whichare not “followed” or “obeyed” but are actu-alized in speech. Obviously, such an approachmust have a way of treating context becausethe habitus neither arises in a vacuum, nor isit actualized in a vacuum. This leads to Bour-dieu’s idea of the “field,” to which we nowturn. Habitus, he says, emerges specifically inthe interaction between individuals and thefield, and it has no independent existence apartfrom the field (Bourdieu 1993, p. 349).

FIELD

As defined in practice theory, a field is a formof social organization with two main aspects:(a) a configuration of social roles, agent po-sitions, and the structures they fit into and(b) the historical process in which those posi-tions are actually taken up, occupied by actors(individual or collective). For instance, if “de-manding instructor” or “motivated student”are positions in the academic field, they aretaken up in the course of such situated activ-ities as seminar discussion, grading, and eval-uation. Ready examples of fields are primaryeducation, the academy, the field of artisticproduction, discipline-based fields such as an-thropology or linguistics, and the field of or-ganized religion. The idea is that each of thesecan be treated as a space of positions and po-sition takings. Like the duality of perceptionschemes and practices of perceiving in thehabitus, the duality of position and positiontaking make any field a dynamic form of orga-nization, not a fixed structure. Within a field,positions are defined by opposition, such asteacher �= student, author �= literary agent �=reviewer, or judge �= jury �= defendant in alegal proceeding. This sense of opposition is acase of relational thinking, derived primarilyfrom structuralism. Among his sources, Bour-dieu cites Trier (Bourdieu 1993, p. 314), Ty-nianov and the Russian formalists (Bourdieu1985, p. 17), Cassirer, and Jakobson (Bourdieu1977). Thus the linguistic analogs of the con-cept are readily apparent: semantic field, anyparadigmatic array of opposed terms, any

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“system” of literary genres. Moreover, like alanguage for the Prague School linguists, a“field” is durable but not fixed; it exists in a“dynamic synchrony.”

If the positions in a field are related to oneanother by opposition, the agents who take uppositions are related by struggle and compe-tition. [Compare Eckert & McConnell-Ginet(1992) on “communities of practice.”] Fromthe viewpoint of action, any field is a space of“strategic possibilities” in which actors havepotential moves and courses of action, an ideaBourdieu (1993, p. 314) credits to Foucault.This shift from structure and dynamic syn-chrony to action and history is intended tomove beyond classic structuralism (Brubaker1993; Calhoun 1993; de Certeau 1984, 1988;Comaroff & Comaroff 1991). It also impliesanother key element, namely that values cir-culate in any field and are the basis of compe-tition among agents. This circulation of valueincludes such things as prestige, recognition,and authority, but also material wealth andcapital. Relative to a field, any agent has a tra-jectory or career consisting of the positions ithas occupied, how they were taken up, howthey were vacated, etc. Hence from a prac-tice perspective, speaking and discourse pro-duction are ways of taking up positions in so-cial fields, and speakers have trajectories overthe course of which they pursue various values(Bourdieu 1993, pp. 345–46; compare Spitul-nik 1996, Urban 2001). In so doing, they areformed by the field.

This is the point at which habitus and fieldarticulate: Social positions give rise to embod-ied dispositions. To sustain engagement in afield is to be shaped, at least potentially, bythe positions one occupies. The speaker whoproduces discourse in a field like the academycomes to be shaped by the positions (s)he takesup and the forms of discourse they call forth.Already molded to the field, the habitus shapesthe individual in a way similar to Elias’s (2000)“civilizing process” or Pascal’s formation ofthe believer through the practice of prayer andthe pomp of spectacle (Pascal 1976, pp. 116,118, 127, 139–143; Bourdieu 1997). The field

thus becomes not an external feature of con-text but a formative input that shapes the in-dividual through the habitus.

To describe a social phenomenon as a“field” is therefore to focus on certain of itsfeatures: the space of positions, the histori-cal processes of their occupancy, the valuesat stake, the career trajectories of agents, andthe habitus shaped by engagement. Comparedwith a term like “context,” field is both morespecific and more consequential. The factorsalready cited give rise to additional featuresfound in any field, including three specifiedby Bourdieu (1985, pp. 20–21): (a) a languagegame in which certain ends are pursued withcertain discursive resources according to es-tablished guidelines, (b) a set of beliefs andassumptions that undergird the game, and (c)the specific stakes at play (what is to be lostor gained, how, and by whom). These factorscould be illustrated with the language gamesof argument, publication, and discussion inthe academy, all based on the beliefs that ra-tional analysis and effective rhetoric are skillsthat mark “good work,” and productivity ismeasured by discourse production in recog-nized genres (Kroskrity 2000, Schieffelin et al.1998, Woolard & Schieffelin 1994). These be-liefs further feed into the definition of thehabitus and are activated in the choices, hopes,and expectations of agents in the field. There-fore, struggles over particular stakes reinforcethe ground rules of the game as well as thedispositions of its players (Bourdieu 1991b,p. 57). This circularity is a type of reflexivitycentral to practice theory. Irrespective of theintentions, aims, or understandings of any ofthe players, practice in the field reproducesthe demands of the field in the embodied dis-positions of the players.

One final feature contrasts the concept offield from that of context as usually under-stood in language studies. Any field is rela-tively bounded, not by walls or natural barri-ers but by constraints on who can engage inwhich positions. This bounding is illustratedin institutional settings by certifications,specialized training, competitive selection,

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class-based exclusions or inclusions, and eco-nomic or symbolic resources. The idea is notthat any field has a discrete, accepted borderaround it, but that access is always differen-tial and selective. Thus the degree grantingtraining of scientists, the exclusivity of eliteschools and companies, the religious trainingand disciplines of organized religions, and thelimits on access to the media in politics areall boundary mechanisms that help define thefields in which they operate. Whereas “dis-course context” as usually understood is thesurround of an utterance or form, the fieldwith its boundaries assumes no discursive actat its center. It exists prior to and apart fromany particular utterance or engagement and isin this sense objective.

There are many fields in any society, andthis raises the question of how they relate toone another. One important relation is sim-ilarity of organization, which Bourdieu callshomology. There are homologies between theliterary and artistic fields, in which evaluationand consumption of genres is differential inparallel ways. Similarly, access to capital andleisure is differential in the economic field.The outsider artist is to the field of artis-tic production as the poor are to the fieldof economy because both stand in a rela-tion of marginal exclusion (Bourdieu 1993).Bourdieu’s interest in homologies is alreadyat work in the habitus and probably derivedfrom his reading of Panofsky, reinforced bythe premium he placed on relational thinking.For our purposes, it points toward comparisonamong different fields in terms of their posi-tions, position takings, distributions of valueand resources, habitus, and so forth. A studyfocused on language would compare fields interms of their discursive resources, the kindsof effects they have when put to use, the sortsof strategies producers (speakers) pursue andthe ends they achieve.

Beyond their “topological” similarities,fields may be concretely articulated in whatwe can call embedding relations. For instance,the field of literary production is embedded inthe field of power, which is, in turn, embed-

ded in the field of class relations (Bourdieu1993, pp. 38, 319). Here there is more thanhomology at stake because the embedded fieldis, to a degree, organized by the embeddingone(s). A field based on, contained within,or constrained by another field is, to thatdegree, nonautonomous, whereas one whoseorganizing elements are specific to itself isautonomous. For example, an academic de-partment in a public university in contem-porary U.S.A. can be looked at as a fieldembedded within the broader fields of the dis-cipline, the institution, higher education, andthe sources of research funding. To the extentthat the departmental field is organized by themandates of these other fields it is nonau-tonomous, whereas it is autonomous insofaras it has its own functioning principles. (Seealso Bachnik & Quinn 1994.)

One kind of field central to linguistic prac-tice is the deictic field, namely the socially de-fined context of utterance in which languageis used for various purposes, including ref-erence and description, the performance ofspeech acts, and ordinary verbal interaction(Hanks 2005). The positions in the deicticfield include minimally the participant framesof Spr, Adr, Object, and their numerous multi-party analogs (Goffman 1981, Goodwin 1981,Hymes 1972); the spatial and temporal set-ting; and the indexical parameters in whichparticipants have access to each other and thesituation around them. In the course of speak-ing, interactants take up and vacate positions,and they act within them and upon them. Em-bedded within the deictic field are settings,defined by interactive relevance, and situa-tions, defined by the mutual perceptibility ofthe parties. Given that linguistic practice takesplace in virtually every sphere of social life, thedeictic field is in turn embedded in one or an-other social fields: The interactant in verbalpractice speaks as a proponent of a positionin political debate, as a boss or worker, as apreacher, as legal counsel, as therapist or pa-tient, as a kinsman in the domestic field. Thedeictic field is relatively autonomous insofar asit is defined by language, but nonautonomous

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in those features imposed by the embed-ding social fields. In this perspective, verbalfunctions such as reference, description, il-locutionary forces, and indirection are recastas ways of taking up positions in the field.The boundary processes in play in all fieldsconstrain participants’ differential access topositions, and individuals have meaningfultrajectories of position taking over time (atwhatever level we measure). Values that cir-culate through the deictic field are varied,according to the embedding field. Perhapsmost important, sustained engagement in spe-cific deictic fields helps shape the interactants’habitus, their dispositions to construe settingsin socially formed ways.

LANGUAGESTANDARDIZATION ANDCHANGE

Much of traditional linguistics treats languageas the product of an irreducible inner logic,sometimes called a code. The grammar of alanguage like English or Maya states the cor-responding code in terms of categories (Sen-tence, Noun Phrase, Verb Phrase, etc.) andthe processes that derive and operate on them.In traditional grammar, it is standard to as-sume that this code is perfectly shared by thespeakers of the language, this sharedness be-ing a common sense requisite for mutual un-derstanding. In a move congenial to sociolin-guists and anthropologists, Bourdieu notesthat the apparent unity of any language is theproduct of a historical process of unificationor standardization, and languages vary acrossthe society in which they are spoken. Accord-ing to Bourdieu, standardization is producedby suppressing nonstandard variants, a pointon which sociolinguists have provided moresubtle accounts (Eckert & Rickford 2001,Silverstein 1998). Whereas a grammarian usesthe term code analytically, for Bourdieu itechoes the legal code in which conduct isregulated and “rules are to be followed”(Haviland 2003, Mertz 1994). Behind theunity of most standard languages lie power

relations, unifying administrations, economyand state formation, or governance (Herzfeld1996). Dictionaries, grammars, and their au-thors are part of the same process, as is theinculcation of standard in the educational sys-tem. Access to the standard through educationprovides access to the positions of power inwhich it is used. The entire process is a kindof symbolic domination in which nonstandardvarieties are suppressed, and those who speakthem are excluded or inculcated. Thus indi-viduals acquire the disposition to acquiesce tothe standard as a matter of their own interestbecause it gives access to power. Thereby, theyuphold the system of domination, just as com-petitors in a field uphold the game in whichthey compete. Discourse strategies aimed atsecuring ends involve attunement to the de-mands of the field, and thereby underwritethe field with its hierarchies. The result is thatsocial hierarchy, based on access to power, istransposed into stylistic hierarchy, on the ba-sis of the association of different verbal styles,registers, or varieties with different positions(Agha 1994; Bourdieu 1991b, p. 55; Errington1988; Heller 1992; Kataoka & Ide 2003;Rumsey 2002; compare Ochs 1992, Eckert1998, Cameron 1998 on gender).

Just as a practice approach splits “the lan-guage” into social varieties, it also distin-guishes among discourse genres (Eckert 2000,Eckert & Rickford 2001, Hanks 1987, Feld &Schieffelin 1998, M. Goodwin 1990). Gen-res are historically specific, relatively stabletypes of discourse practice corresponding todifferent positions in social fields. Frenchliterary genres, for instance, are hierarchi-cally ordered, each one defining a position,and to write in a genre is to take up aposition (Bourdieu 1993, pp. 312, 326; seealso Bauman 2001, Briggs & Bauman 1992,Hanks 1987). From this perspective, indi-vidual discourse works instantiate genres orgenre blends drawn from a space of discur-sive possibilities (Bourdieu 1985, p. 21). Thedefinition of the literary in terms of formalproperties, such as the poetic function of Ty-nianov and Jakobson, is inseparable from the

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broader field of cultural production. By de-limiting the literary, it in effect affirms theautonomy of the literary field itself, whichonce again illustrates the principle that ac-tion tends to reinforce the field in which itoccurs, regardless of the intentions of theactors.4

LANGUAGE, LEGITIMATE ANDAUTHORITATIVE

The processes at work in standardization andhierarchies of styles and genres also giverise to what Bourdieu calls legitimation andauthorization. Both of these turn on howlanguage is socially evaluated. Legitimacy isaccorded to selected ways of speaking or writ-ing in that they are recognized by other pro-ducers, by the dominant classes and by massaudiences (Bourdieu 1993, p. 331; Garnham1993). Inculcated in education (Collins 1993,Lave & Wenger 1991, Mertz 1996, Wortham& Rymes 2003) and the family (Ochs 1988,Ochs & Schieffelin 1995), the dominant lan-guage is legitimated in that it receives recog-nition and is the measure by which other vari-eties are evaluated (in at least some situations).Differences in social and economic positiontend to be reproduced in unequal knowledgeof legitimate language, which in turn rein-forces constraints on access to power. At thispoint, Bourdieu cites Labov’s work on Englishvariation in New York (Labov 1966), suggest-ing that members of a speech community canshare allegiance to the same standard, despitedifferences in the (nonstandard) varieties theythemselves speak. Thus, even though non-standard varieties are an unavoidable effectof social differences, it is the standard that isaccorded recognition as legitimate. The dis-crepancy between what speakers do and whatthey consider legitimate is a force of language

4It is questionable whether the poetic function actually re-inforces the autonomy of the literary field, given that thisfunction is at work in much of ordinary language use, apoint emphasized by Jakobson (1960) and carried forth inthe ethnography of speaking.

change in the form of distinctive deviationsfrom the standard.

Legitimacy is closely related to autho-rization in Bourdieu’s approach (Bourdieu1991b). The key difference is that authorityis invested not in language varieties, but inthe agents who use them (compare Ahearn2001). This is also the main difference be-tween Bourdieu (1991b) and Austin (1962),as Bourdieu himself presents it. For the mostpart, Austin’s speech acts are recast as practicesin the field, and Bourdieu derives from thefield itself the illocutionary effects that Austinattached to performative speech. To be effec-tive, any speech act must be recognized as ef-fective, it must be legitimate for those uponwhom it has an effect. Whereas this constraintcould be treated as an Alpha felicity condi-tion by Austin, it is the core phenomenon forBourdieu. Moreover, the speaker gets the au-thorizing effect from the field, not from thelanguage nor from his or her own best inten-tions. To produce authorized language is thento draw on the social field for authority and,in so doing, to reinforce it.

CENSORSHIP AND EUPHEMISM

The flip side of authoritative and legitimatelanguage is censorship and euphemism. Tospeak a language is not to command a code,but to act in a world that one accepts tac-itly. Standardization and legitimation sanc-tion certain ways of speaking, rewarding somewhile silencing others. The effect is to intim-idate and censor speech without any discreteacts of intimidation or censoring. Any fieldautomatically censors the discourse that cir-culates through it. It calls for what Bourdieu(1991b, pp. 137–62) describes as euphemism,namely the muting of critique and individualexpression according to what is rewarded orsanctioned in the field. Through euphemism,the sanctions of the field become part of lin-guistic practice itself, not external conditionsbut internal elements. A game joining formwith field, euphemism requires competenceto play effectively. Like censorship, it helps

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shape the habitus of speaking agents, boththeir own expressive dispositions and theirevaluations of others’ expression. To euphem-ize one’s speech, consciously or not, is to self-regulate: The individual is fitted ever moreclosely to his or her position in the field. Thisis one of the mechanisms by which the habitusis formed at the point where actors engage infields.

SYMBOLIC POWER

Censorship, authorization, and the reinforce-ment of dominant languages are all trace-able to the pervasive effects of power (com-pare Gal & Irvine 1997, Lindstrom 1992).Insofar as the power is symbolic, Bourdieu(1991b, p. 164) describes it as “that invisi-ble power which can be exercised only withthe complicity of those who do not want toknow that they are subject to it, or even thatthey themselves exercise it.” This complicitylies at the heart of practice and is explainednot by any conscious concealment but by thestructural relations between semiotic systems(including language), the habitus (includingthe perspectives it embodies), and the field.Bourdieu arrives at this analysis stepwise.First, structuralism (from Saussure to LeviStrauss) demonstrated that symbolic systemsare internally structured, have their own his-torical dynamics, and are logically prior tothe acts in which they are instantiated. Sec-ond, citing Kant, Cassirer, Sapir, Whorf, andAmericanist anthropology, he observes thatthese systems construct the worlds inhabitedby those socialized into them. As developedunder the guise of linguistic relativity, rou-tine language use provides ready-made termsin which actors apprehend and represent re-ality, including language itself (Gumperz &Levinson 1996, Hill & Manheim 1992,Lucy 1992, Silverstein 2000). Hence throughspeaking a language one is embedded in auniverse of categorization, selective distinc-tions, and evaluations. Symbolic systems arestructuring as well as structured. Inspired byDurkheim and Mauss, Bourdieu joins the two

steps in a circular relation that foreshadowsthe complicity cited above: It is because sym-bolic systems are structured that they canorder experience in the ways they do, andbecause they order experience they are rein-forced by practice. The third step is to linkthe first two steps to class divisions on the ba-sis of relations to labor and production, andtherefore to a political economy (Irvine 1998).Bourdieu took the political economy to be asociological precondition and source of anysymbolic system, thereby rejecting the arbi-trariness assumed by structuralism. By bring-ing to bear their own categories on relationsof power from which they are ultimately de-rived, symbolic systems reinforce domination.Much as stylistic hierarchies are motivated bysocial hierarchies, symbolic systems arise fromand reinforce power differences. By engag-ing in linguistic practice, and quite apart fromtheir intentions or aims, actors are complicitwith the pervasive power relations in whichtheir language is embedded. Competence inthe standard emerges as a form of symboliccapital, often rationalized as the intrinsic valueof “refined” or “proper” speaking, but ulti-mately derived not from language but frompower relations.

Why does Bourdieu claim that this elabo-rate circularity is invisible to the people in-volved in it? The chain of reasoning goeslike this. Systems of distinction, including lan-guage, present themselves to native speakersas natural. This is a by-product of the circu-larity between distinctions made in a languageon the one hand, and divisions in the socialfield to which they are applied on the other.The two are partially independent but mutu-ally reinforcing. Furthermore, in the courseof ordinary practice, speakers tacitly assumesystems of distinction and division from mo-ment to moment (Cicourel 1993). Speech isproduced and understood against this socialhorizon, whose very tacitness shelters it fromscrutiny. Assumed, habituated, and schema-tized in the habitus, systems of difference ap-pear self-evident. They are too thoroughlyincorporated and too obvious to be easily

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noticed in ordinary practice. When they arenoticed, they are usually rationalized in termsof arbitrary convention (why does “table”stand for table?), the functional requirementsof communication (why does language havethe properties it does?), or local communica-tive motives (why did he say that?). Further-more, as linguistic anthropologists have es-tablished, commentary on language is itselfformulated in language. Consequently, theontological complicity between linguistic andsocial categories makes each of them appearnatural.

This naturalness is illusory though becauseit misrecognizes the role of power in the mak-ing of semiotic distinctions. Indeed, one ofthe signal concepts developed by Bourdieuis this circle of masking and misrecognition(Bourdieu 1990). Linguistic anthropologistshave long known that native speakers arelargely unaware of the systematic workingsof their language, but misrecognition is morefundamental than awareness. It is the socialeffect whereby power divisions and the im-posed rules of the game are underwritten bypractice, however strategic, and by the ratio-nalizing ideas people have about language andpractice. Thus common sense doxa regardingcorrectness, elegance, clarity, or effectivenessin speech hides what is more accurately seenas the market value of speech styles relative tothe dominant language. In the literary field,for instance, the belief in individual creativ-ity is a misrecognition based on the illusio thatwhat is valued is intrinsic creativity. In a moreaccurate account, as Bourdieu sees it, what isvalued is what fits the demands of the field, andthe effective producer is the one best attunedto the field. Bourdieu & Passeron (1977) makethis point in relation to education when theyargue that success in school depends not on in-dividual ability, as usually claimed, but on theselection effect whereby successful studentscome from the social milieux that the educa-tion system is designed to legitimate. They de-scribe this misrecognition as “genesis amne-sia” (Bourdieu & Passeron 1977, pp. 5, 9). Indiscussing the historicity of reason, Bourdieu

generalizes the point, arguing that what le-gitimates reason is not reason, but rather re-ceived convention, ultimately linked to powerand pageantry (Bourdieu 1997, Ch. 3).

It is a small step from power misrecog-nized to symbolic violence. The speaker cen-sored or obliged to euphemize in order to earncredit, show loyalty, or maintain confidence isthe object of symbolic violence because hisor her speech is curtailed, whether by self orother. Obviously, to be classified, evaluated,stereotyped, or portrayed as such and such isto be the object of symbolic violence. Just asmisrecognition is a structural relation moregeneral than any instance of misrecognizing,symbolic violence is a structural relation. Theviolence in question depends neither on vi-olent acts nor on the intentions that mayanimate them. Masking relations of force,symbolic violence dominates by defining aslegitimate limitations that derive from and re-inforce differences of power.

CONCLUSION

Many of the linguistic anthropologists citedhere have addressed one or another element inBourdieu’s approach to language, sometimesto great effect [Irvine (2001) on style and dis-tinction; Ochs (1996) on socialization; Haeri(1997), Hill (1987), and Woolard (1985) onlanguage markets; Cicourel (2001) on medi-cal knowledge]. For the most part, broad dis-cussions of the approach have been critical ofBourdieu’s claims about language, sometimesfor good reason (Hasan 1999). He is usuallyvague where a linguist needs specificity and of-ten specific where linguists do not tread. Butif we look beyond such claims, there is a deepconsonance between much of practice the-ory and the intellectual framing of linguisticanthropology (Goddard 2002, Hanks 1996).This is evident in the occasional citationsto linguistic sources, but more pervasively inthe way Bourdieu reasons about such criti-cal concepts as habitus and field. From thesetwo concepts and their interactions emanatea range of phenomena of great interest to

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students of language, including standardiza-tion, domination, authorization, legitimation,and their opposites. To this we add censorship,euphemism, and symbolic violence, whose re-lations to discourse production are direct.This list is unfinished, as is Bourdieu’s legacyfor language, but it indicates some of the sitesat which work has been done and more couldbe done. The meanings of these terms are ob-viously specific to Bourdieu’s approach, and itis difficult to map precisely from his paradigminto the approaches typical of linguistic an-thropology (Duranti 2003). Phenomena thatappear unified under one view are split apartunder the other. Language ideology, style,and interaction correspond to multiple ef-

fects of the relation between habitus and field.For the linguistic anthropologist, by contrast,Bourdieu’s habitus splits apart into many dif-ferent factors that run the gamut from gram-mar to speech, gesture, language ideology, andspace. The contemporary focus on indexical-ity derives mostly from Peirce’s semiotics andits development in the ethnography of speak-ing. By contrast, Peirce and indexicality arevirtually absent from practice sociology, just asPanofsky and Merleau-Ponty are all but miss-ing in linguistic anthropology. These absencesare generative sites for future research intolinguistic practice, understood as both objectand modus operandi, form and occupancy, oursand others’.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The research on which this article is based has benefitted from contributions from a number ofstudents and colleagues. I am grateful for extended discussions with Berkeley graduate studentsin the seminars on colonial history, practice theory and linguistic anthropology between 2000and 2004 and from discussions with Liu Xin, in our co-taught seminar. Special thanks toRob Hamrick and Alysoun Quinby who have assisted me in all phases of this article frombibliographic research to final editing. Thanks finally to Jennifer Johnson-Hanks, extraordinaryinterlocutor.

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