{"id":49057,"date":"2012-12-26T12:58:59","date_gmt":"2012-12-26T17:58:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=49057"},"modified":"2021-02-28T22:33:51","modified_gmt":"2021-03-01T03:33:51","slug":"stairs-and-the-new-york-city-habitus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2012\/12\/26\/stairs-and-the-new-york-city-habitus\/","title":{"rendered":"Stairs and the New York City Habitus"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the last week of December, we\u2019re re-posting some of our favorite posts from 2012.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Pierre Bourdieu was an amazingly influential thinker who, among other things, theorized a concept called “the habitus.” \u00a0The term refers to our often unconscious bodily knowledges and habits. \u00a0According to Bourdieu, our habits reflect where and how we grow up. \u00a0The kid of a rancher, in other words, will have a very different habitus than the kid of a New York finance elite.<\/p>\n

I thought of the habitus when I saw this quick video<\/a> of people in New York, exiting a subway platform, tripping — one after the other — on the same step. Brooklyn\u00a0Filmmaker\u00a0Dean Peterson<\/a>, who recorded this for us, remarks that the step in question is just a fraction of an inch taller than all the others. But that’s all it takes.<\/p>\n