Explaining sociology with travel examplesfrom @maisonrickie

Transcript

How you go about travel says a lot about you. But depending on how you grew up, you may not have even known there were different ways to begin with. In a previous video, to illustrate the concept of conspicuous leisure, I made the comparison between Noemi, who mentioned she spent most of April in Paris, not for a particular reason, and Thomas, who packed an incredibly interesting itinerary with Michelin star experiences and beautiful nature for his trip to Japan. And I wanted to dissect this distinction a little further. But there was a detail that I left in that video that I chose not to touch upon. When someone asked Noemi about why she was in Paris, she at first was puzzled before responding she just wanted to be in Paris. The question almost didn't even compute for her, and it's that initial puzzlement that I want to focus on. What is it about her response that's so incredibly revealing of her? Well, to answer this, we need to go back to the work of French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu and his concept of habitus. But it's a lot more than just that. Trust me. So habitus, according to Bourdieu, is a set of dispositions you absorb from your social position. It's your taste. It's a sense of what is for people like me and what is not. It's acquired through your upbringing. And by the time you're old enough to question it, it's already guiding your decision making. But the thing about habitus is that it doesn't feel like a social position to the person inside of it. It just feels like tier. Noemi's unjustified afternoon reading at a cafe near the Palais Royal is not from her own vantage a class disposition. It's just how she likes to spend her time. So when the dinner table question arrives, she can't retrieve a reason because there is no reason, only disposition. And the disposition cannot be articulated, for that would require stepping outside of the body in which it's housed. But Habitus alone doesn't fully explain her puzzle. To really understand it, we need to define Doxa, which Forgill describes as what goes without saying because it comes without saying. It's everything you assume about the world without ever noticing you're assuming it, where there aren't any arguments to make because in your view, this is the only way. At that dinner table, it was the meeting of two Doxas. For Thomas, the Doxa was that time must be accounted for. His travel, like every other use of one's hours, has to return something, and his packed itinerary was that expression. Whereas for Noemi, the Doxa was the opposite, that one's hours don't have to be accounted for, that being in Paris is its own answer. And I wanna make clear that I'm not saying that one is better, or that Thomas can see what Noemi can't. He is also in his own Doxa. His logic of labor is just as invisible to him as Noemi's logic of being is to her. He doesn't experience the density of his itinerary as a class position either. He just experiences it as how a serious person travels. But for Noemi, her freedom from having to justify her time is so total that she doesn't even register it as freedom. It's just the air she breathes. Now there's a lot more that we can talk about with this example, and in a future video, I want to talk about the different kinds of capital on display on Noemi's trip versus Thomas's trip. So if you want that, please like and follow, and let me know your thoughts in the comments.