Institutionalized behavior, morality and domination: A Habitus in action model of violence

Abstract

This work focuses on lessons about habitus violence can teach and on implications of habitus‐based action for understanding violence. A habitus model of violence partially explains not only group differences but also individual and within‐individual variation in violence participation. In this model, experience with violence provides persons with embodied institutional competences to respond with violence should they perceive a situation as calling for it. Because violent institutional practices, principles, and relations are not necessarily incorporated into habitus simultaneously—as they rely on different memory systems—the habitus concept can be dissected. A typology of habitus elements corresponding to different institutional elements is developed distinguishing behavioral templates, moral templates, and relational templates from one another. Habitus fragmentation allows cross‐institutional transfer of habitus elements dependent on nondeclarative memory. The case of gender‐based violence and political violence illustrates how habitus elements developed in one institutional environment can direct action in a different institutional context calling for taking gender seriously in politics on theoretical grounds. As an embodied structure produced by involvement in multiple institutional domains and comprising transferable embodied institutional competences, habitus is a mechanism linking the so‐called ‘private’ spheres of family and gender relations and the ‘public’ sphere of politics.