Literature, drama, art, and cinema sustained an internalized anti-Muslim habitus across centuries.

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

• DEFINE: Defines Bourdieu’s habitus as the analytical frame for treating Muslim monsters as socially inculcated dispositions rather than deliberate inventions.