Cultural fields like literature and art sustain internalized social dispositions producing Muslim monsters
Evidence
Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus complements Foucault’s focus on the body as an instrument of power relations. Bourdieu defines the habitus as those “principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them.” Habitus refers to the ideas and behaviors internalized by a given society, described as “the set of symbolically structured and socially inculcated dispositions of individual agents,” which interact with fields, modes of cultural production that exist as a result of “symbolically mediated relations of domination.” In this study, I show how the fields of cultural production—literature, drama, art, cinema—helped to sustain a habitus about Islam that relies upon Muslim monsters. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 67
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- DEFINE: Defines Bourdieu’s habitus and fields as the analytical frame for how the Muslim monster image operates.
- XREF: Connects to Bourdieu’s habitus/feld theory and parallels the social-construction analysis in the reader’s other sources on how images precede reality.
Related
- Literature, drama, art, and cinema sustained an internalized anti-Muslim habitus across centuries. (similarity 0.96)
- Modern American media continues the medieval archive’s Muslim-monster archetypes (similarity 0.79)
- Cinema is now the primary generator of Muslim monster imagery in America (similarity 0.79)
- Medieval Muslim monsters were assembled from classical, biblical, and ethnic-other sources (similarity 0.79)