Bourdieu reduces embodied practices to symptoms of deeper social structures, missing their intrinsic significance

Evidence

One consequence of this Kantian conception of ethics is the relative lack of attention paid to the manifest form ethical practices take, and a general de.. motion of conduct, social demeanor, and etiquettes in our analyses of moral systems. As Minson points out, even scholars like Bourdieu, whose work fo.. cuses on practices of dress, physical bearing, and styles of comportment things that Bourdieu calls “the practical mnemonics” of a culture-consider these practices interesting only insofar as a rational evaluation reveals them to be the signs and symbols of a much deeper and more fundamental reality of social structures and cultural logics (Minson 1993 , 31). I agree with Minson: when Bourdieu considers the variety ofpractices that characterize a particular social group (such as their styles of eating, socializing, and entertainment), he is primarily concern with how these practices embody and symbolize the doxa and ethos of the group such that the ideologies the members inhabit come to be congealed in their social or class ha (see, for example, Bour.. dieu 1977, 1 990). One may argue, however, that the signifi of an em.. bodied practice is not exhausted by its ability to function as an index of social and class status or a group’s ideological habitus. The specifi y of a bodily law), in virtue of which a human being, through gradual reformation of conduct and consolida� tion of his maxims, passes from a propensity to vice to its opposite. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 195

Categorization

• XREF: Directly anticipates Mahmood’s later argument that pious women’s practices are not merely symbolic of patriarchy but formative of the self — connects to her critique of feminist frameworks elsewhere in this book.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that embodied practice’s significance exceeds its indexical function is the intellectual hinge for the entire book’s project of taking piety practices on their own terms.