Using Bourdieusian scholarship to understand the body: Habitus, bodily hexis and embodied cultural capital

While studying inter-ethnic relations amongst young boys, the problem of ‘the body’ immediately arose. To grapple with its centrality in my analysis I first turned to post-modern and racialisation theories but found them incapable of providing a way to understand action and creativity as capacities of the body. In contrast Bourdieu’s work offered the tools to re-frame practice as centrally located in the body, allowing for a more nuanced framework to develop and reframe its place in analysis. This chapter will argue that postmodernist and post-structuralist analyses have largely re-created Cartesian dualism by splitting the mind from the body and privileging the former over the latter. Using my own research, I will illustrate that within a Bourdieusian approach the body as an object of value is more effectively examined through an embodied cultural capital model and the concept of habitus which recasts embodiment from a denigrated category to the site from which practice emerges.