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Part I
Capitalism and sociocultures
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1 Sociocultures and history
This first part of the book argues that contemporary society in Laos can be analyzed in terms of historical layers that developed out of major transformations.1 Each transformation reconfigured the earlier layers and created a new layer but did not erase the past. In earlier texts (Rehbein 2007, 2011), I tried to trace the historical evolution of the layers in Laos. Even though I acknowledged that this procedure implied a considerable degree of speculation, I was able to present historical sketches. In the following chapters, I will present a similar empirical argument, albeit this time based on a minimum of speculation, by focusing on the transformations that have actually been documented.
Laos experienced three major transformations in the recent past: the imposition of colonial rule from 1893, a socialist revolution in 1975 and the gradual introduction of a market economy beginning in 1986. One might add the Indochinese Wars, because they too had a huge impact on the population of Laos. The wars can be regarded as quasi-colonialism under the conditions of the Cold War. They certainly laid the foundations for the socialist revolution and the social structure that emerged after 1975. Like China and Vietnam, Laos retains the political system of a one-party state under the leadership of the socialist politburo while at the same time transforming the economy and many associated institutions into a capitalist system. The respective conditions under royal/colonial rule before 1975, under quasi-Stalinist rule after 1975 and in a rather liberalized environment since the mid-1990s differ greatly from one another but occurred within the span of one generation. This is reflected in people’s habitus as the coexistence of a pre-socialist socioculture, which is layered in itself, a socialist socioculture and a capitalist one.
Social structures, cultures and practices are subject to constant changes and sometimes even revolutions. New institutions appear, old ones are done away with, new discourses emerge, economic crises erupt or resources are discovered. Some of these changes are so radical that they produce a new configuration and a new social hierarchy. I refer to these radical changes as transformations. Transformations are closely related to revolutions but, to the chagrin of some revolutionaries, often do not occur in the wake of a revolution. Wars, changes in the social organization and political interventions seem to be more frequent causes of transformations than revolutions.
Even though these changes are radical, they are only transformations and not new creations. This is due to the fact that they build on earlier structures. Social structures are relatively persistent. The aristocracy, the working class, the value of a PhD or the reputation of a doctor do not disappear overnight. They lose part of their value or are reassessed in a new framework but are not simply done away with. This is true for the entire system of structures, cultures and practices. I refer to these systems as sociocultures. Any contemporary practice has a long history that it partly incorporates. Its current form blends transformed and persisting elements with new elements. This is true for society at large as well. It is useful here to think of society as a mountain consisting of layers of rocks and sediments.
Any given society is made up of a contemporary set of institutions and practices on top of many historical layers of persisting and transformed sociocultures. As sociocultures persist, so do those forms of action or institutions that appear outdated. Monarchic rituals, bar associations, village structures, caste associations or sociolects would be examples of this. Practices within their frameworks are determined and assessed against the background of their history. This implies an untimeliness as well. Many institutions and social environments retain practices and values that seem to belong to another time or even another world. Actually, this is the case for a lot of our everyday practices.
All practices are incorporated by the members of society, while institutions and social structures usually have an existence outside the people. However, even institutions and social structures owe their existence to actual albeit mostly unconscious performance (Austin 1975). In performing practices within the framework of an institution or a particular social environment, the existing norms and values are reproduced. Part of an existing socioculture is thereby reproduced too. Performance, however, also includes imprecision, deviance or outright defiance. Defiance can be associated with a social transformation but is more often connected with mere social change and usually remains entirely inconsequential.
Practices change slowly, especially in a particular person. Institutions change even more slowly, while social structures at large are rather persistent. In any event, the constant tiny changes add up to significant differences over the course of generations. In rapidly changing societies, children and parents fail to understand each other, because they are rooted in different sociocultures. Earlier generations have incorporated practices, norms and values of a different historical time and sometimes in relation to a different social structure altogether. This is true of contemporary Laos. Reproduction, rapid change and untimeliness combine to create a peculiar, layered configuration.
Pierre Bourdieu studied Algeria during the war against French colonial rule in the 1950s. In this period, the French were defeated in Vietnam and had to give up their colony of Indochina. Bourdieu investigated a transformation that bears similarities with the capitalist transformation in Laos. He discovered that the Algerians did not simply adapt to capitalism but instead stuck to many precapitalist practices and institutions (Bourdieu 1977). In this context, he rediscovered the concept of habitus, which was introduced by Aristotle and then reinterpreted by many subsequent authors, as a basis to explain that practices incorporated over the course of decades within a relatively stable social environment cannot be replaced by new patterns of action at will (Rehbein and Saalmann 2009). This is why these practices tend to persist even after a fundamental transformation.
Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is widely known and used. The concept is based on the assumption that a human being has the tendency to act in the way in which he or she has learned to act (Bourdieu 1977). It is a kind of psychosomatic memory. Behavior from prior interactions is put to use again once a similar situation arises. In a mostly stable environment, a common practice is acquired and is then incorporated as an enduring and stable pattern. With learning, one adopts a pattern that can then be applied in a corresponding situation. Through multiple repetitions, the pattern becomes imprinted on the person; this pattern becomes habitualized. That implies a standardization with regard to scenarios of use and a somatization of segments of actions. Bourdieu referred to these internalized schemata as dispositions. He emphasized the unconscious character of dispositions, because these dispositions are always somaticized.
In this instance, Bourdieu’s argument follows that of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1964). According to Merleau-Ponty, we do not have a body; rather, we are a body. We do not see with an eye; rather, we are among things in a seeing way. We do not control the hand; rather, the hand has its own somatized memory and practice. As humans, we are bodies that move in the world, and this practical world is concrete, meaningful and socialized. Social organization is really an organization of the body and its conduct (Bourdieu 1977), and it is expressed, for example, in a prideful person’s upright gait and in the cowering of the dominated. The social world imprints a proper and correct program, a character in the truest sense of the word, on a body, just as how a message is engraved with a pen on a writing tablet. Similar to a writing tablet, the body is also a kind of mnemonic device – for the actor and for the observer. Bourdieu develops this argument in line with Merleau-Ponty: One does not possess that which the body learns; rather, that is what one is. According to Bourdieu, all of the activities a person engages in are similar to one another. The habitus establishes a style (Bourdieu 1984). At the same time, behavior represents a structuring of existence, an element of a life-form and a social resource. Because social structures are imprinted on the habitus, it tends to reproduce these structures, especially in those cases in which the present social environment and the conditions from which the habitus arose are identical. If one grew up in a small town in the United States, for example, and continues to live there, most patterns of action would be perfectly adapted to the environment in spite of all the changes on a national and global scale.
The habitus organizes practices in such a way that they tend to reproduce the very conditions from which the habitus emerged. On the basis of the habitus, actions are neither spontaneous nor predetermined; rather, they are the result of a necessary connection between disposition and objective environment. Both are based on similar and sometimes identical social structures. The habitus not only tends to reproduce earlier behavior but rather seeks conditions that correspond to its generation – mainly because it is shaped for these conditions. The explanation of an action is a reconstruction of the precise correlation between the conditions under which a habitus was formed and the conditions of its application. This means that the application can change the social structures, but only if the habitus does not fully coincide with them. The conditions for the generation and application of a habitus are in many ways not singular but are instead valid for various people, groups and classes. The conditions are at least to a certain extent homogeneous in a particular social environment. Within a group, homologous conditions prevail; therefore, habitus are also homologous.
Against this background, Bourdieu attempted to deduce the behavior of a social group from its social conditions of existence. In his most famous book, Distinction (1984), he argued that even very subjective taste – for food, art and even manners – was rooted in the habitus and could thereby be explained through the study of the conditions of existence of a given social group. This line of argumentation presupposes a unity of the habitus and a relative homogeneity of the conditions of its application. The presuppositions only apply if people act the same way in the same situations and only if all members of the social group have a similar life course. Both presuppositions are dubious. The human is fragmented, inconsistent and diverse (Lahire 1998). Regarding the human as a homogeneous entity with a singular identity is a curious and unfortunately well-established tradition, and this tradition corresponds neither to reality nor to a norm. Apart from this, it should be mentioned that social reality constantly changes and is very complex. This is reflected in the fact that the correlations between social conditions and specific aspects of taste presented by Bourdieu (1984) are statistically weak.
In his later work, Bourdieu acknowledged the diversity of social practice and limited his analyses to particular realms of the social world, which he called “fields”. He developed this concept partly in connection to Weber’s sociology of religion and partly on the basis of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of a language-game (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). In his Philosophical Investigations (1984), Wittgenstein tried to show that there is not one uniform language that is used in exactly the same way in every instance but that there are many different possible uses of language that depend on the purpose and the context. He called a recurring context a language-game.
Each game has its own rules and goals. Wittgenstein argued that this is true for language use as well. It varies according to context and there are “countless” contexts, but they are not random. Just like games, they have a certain stability and regularity (1984: aphorism 207). This stability is linked to the fact that contexts do not emerge spontaneously but are socially regulated and to a certain degree standardized. “The word ‘language-game’ serves to emphasize that language use is part of an activity or a form of life” (23). Whoever learns to play a language-game needs to learn a form of practice and a set of norms. Just like Austin and Bourdieu, Wittgenstein insisted that this process need not be conscious (202). A language-game has a regularity and stability, because its participants have incorporated the ways of playing it.
The use of language in an utterance resembles a move in a game. There is not one basic structure for all games, though. For example, chess has little in common with volleyball or hide-and-seek. The goal of the game can vary as well as the number of players, the types of action and the rules. Wittgenstein argued that this applies to language as well. He listed such diverse types of language use as saying thank you, asking, ordering, praying, describing, guessing, playing theater, telling a joke and translating (23). Each has a different context and is linked to a different set of practices. Wittgenstein called the set of practices including language use a form of life (19).
The form of life cannot be clearly delimited or reduced to a basic type. This also means that the goals and the required abilities differ in each form of life. It is not guaranteed that the same habitus has the same “value” and plays out the same way in each form of life. However, according to Wittgenstein, it is likely that it works the same way at different times in the same form of life. This claim is implied in Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, and I will concur with it. Wittgenstein also hinted at how to resolve the contradiction between the relatively uniform concept of habitus and the diversity of observable practices and contexts. He implied that forms of life extend to a highly variable number of people. While some contexts are limited to small in-groups, others seem to comprise the entirety of humankind. Wittgenstein (1989) argued that this is the precondition for understanding people from other societies, cultures and language families. This also implies that there are some components of the habitus that are shared by many people and others by very few.
Therefore, I wish to analyze habitus and its objective conditions by breaking it down into several layers. The basic layer is common to everyone, while the top layer is individual and not fully determined by biology and society. This means that a sociological study deals only with the intermediate layers. This is in fact what Bourdieu does, and I will follow him in this book. It implies, too, that he was misguided in his endeavor to deduce the top layers from lower layers, since the preconditioning is not a full determination and does not allow for a deduction. The preconditioning, though, entails statistical correlations and allows for an explanation. Finally, Bourdieu used the concept of habitus only for the intermediate layers, precisely because it expresses social differences. Where the form of life is so basic and all-encompassing that few social differences emerge, the concept makes little sense. This is true for peasant villages in Laos to a certain degree. It makes little sense to distinguish between peasant habitus, but one can distinguish the peasant habitus from other habitus types in Laos. I will operationalize the layers of conditions and habitus in Chapter 5 and will insert them into a larger conceptual framework in Chapter 9.
When studying the capitalist transformation in Algeria, Bourdieu (1963) found that the local population did not adopt capitalist practices according to textbook knowledge but always interpreted them against their local background. Each local configuration blended elements of capitalism and earlier forms of economy. Within the national economy as well as within each habitus, different forms of economic action and thinking coexisted. On the basis of this observation, Bourdieu began to read Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic (1978, vol. 1) and applied its guiding question to Algeria: How could the attitude that Weber called rational develop in Algeria (Bourdieu 1963: 315)? In other words, how could capitalism come to determine and shape all minds and institutions?
Instead of basing his answer on history books and religious texts, Bourdieu applied ethnographic methods. He discovered that the adoption of capitalist practices and thoughts depended on class. Algerians did not have one uniform attitude toward capitalism; rather, each social class adapted to the transforming conditions differently. This point is central to my argument. There is neither one capitalism nor one religion in any given society. And we have to determine empirically which forms there are and how they relate to social structures.
Bourdieu interpreted the social structure of Algeria in terms of class. He came up with a multidimensional concept of class that is much more sophisticated and appropriate than the economistic Marxist and the descriptive liberal notions. For Bourdieu (1963: 382), conditions of work, economic necessity, contact with Europeans, income, education and ideology all had to be taken into account. Against this background, he found only those Algerians who had passed a certain level of financial security to be “rational” actors in Weber’s sense. For the majority of Algerians, this implied a stable contract for wage labor, even though very few were able to secure one.
Bourdieu classified the groups of potential candidates for wage labor as subsistence peasants, the unemployed and laborers. Only the tiny class of laborers, the “proletariat”, had any chance of developing a “rational” attitude adapted toward capitalism. The structurally unemployed class, the “subproletariat”, had no realistic possibilities for participating in the capitalist economy. The subsistence peasants clung to traditionalism as far as possible. The peasants were oriented to the goal of subsistence on the basis of tradition. The subproletarians were forced through capitalism to reach the goal of a minimum means of existence. Neither class developed a horizon of plann...
