The usual contrast between "civilized" and "primitive" is based on the disregard of the distance established by the social sciences between the observer and the observed. Anthropology can only be completed as a science if it also conceives its activities and tools of scientific practice as its object: more specifically, the relationship of the researcher to his object, a particular expression of the relationship between knowledge and action, interpretation and use, symbolic and practical control. Pierre Bourdieu shows here what forces are hidden in the second member of such opposing pairs and what it means to recognize and incorporate one's own position in research.

What we call "primitive", "pre-logical" or "wild" thought is nothing but the practical logic to which we resort daily with our actions and judgments. But while it seems very natural for ethnographers to use the language of rules and ritual in order to speak about marriage or magic in so-called traditional peoples, we react when sociologists describe our own behaviors in the same language. And yet ritual practice, like most others, is a symbolic exercise in which the body thinks for us.

In this classic work, published a year after "Distinction" (1980), the pioneering French thinker and researcher exercises a catalytic critique of the structuralist tradition from the perspective of human action and strategy, introduces the concept of "habitus" into the social sciences, and offers the most comprehensive formulation of his groundbreaking theory of practice.