Varieties of habitus and the embodiment of ballet

A B S T R A C T The overall aim of our research was to produce anethnography of ballet as a social practice. We draw upon our fieldwork atthe Royal Ballet (London) where we conducted 20 in-depth interviewswith ballet staff, and observed ‘the company at work’, in class, rehearsal,and performance. We explored dancers’ (n = 9) and ex-dancers’ (who arenow administrators, teachers, and character dancers: n = 11)perceptions of their bodies, dancing careers, and the major changes thathave occurred in the world of ballet over their professional lives. In thisarticle, we draw upon Pierre Bourdieu’s notions of habitus, physicalcapital and cultural capital. The main focus of our article is an extendeddiscussion of our threefold distinction between individual habitus,institutional habitus and choreographic habitus. Although ourethnography of the body is set within the elite cultural field ofprofessional classical ballet, we hope that our research adds to debates onthe interrelationships between individuals and institutions, the body andsociety, and on the salience of Bourdieu’s notion of habitus forunderstandings of the social world.

K E Y W O R D S : ballet, body, culture, ethnography, habitus

IntroductionThe broad aim of this article is to provide a counterweight to the excessivelytheoretical approach to the body that is a striking trait of the burgeoning liter-ature on the body (Turner, 1996). This ‘decorative sociology’ is commonplaceacross the whole field of cultural studies (Turner and Rojek, 2001). Relativelylittle research has focused on the ways that ‘specific social worlds invest, shape,and deploy human bodies’ (Wacquant, 1995: 65). Atkinson (2000) also

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Varieties of habitus and the embodimentof ballet

DOI: 10.1177/1468794106068023

Qualitative ResearchCopyright © 2006SAGE Publications(London,Thousand Oaksand New Delhivol. 6(4) 535–558

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S T E V E N P. WA I N W R I G H TKing’s College LondonC L A R E W I L L I A M SKing’s College LondonB RYA N S . T U R N E RNational University of Singapore

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argues against what he describes as ‘sociology at a distance’, and in his recentethnography of Welsh National Opera he explores the cultural production ofopera as a series of social practices. Similarly, our qualitative research aims tounderstand the balletic body as a series of cultural practices. In general terms,there is a dearth of empirical research on the sociology of the body in westerntheatre dance (Thomas, 2003), and especially on classical ballet (Wulff, 1998).In brief, research on the ‘body and dance’ is dominated by postmodern readingsof ‘dance as texts’ (Adshead-Lansdale, 1999; Desmond, 1997; Fraleigh andHanstein, 1999; Goellner and Murphy, 1995), although there is some ethno-graphic literature on ‘ethnic dance’ (see Cowan, 1990). In addition, elements ofBourdieu’s analytical framework have been applied in research on moderndance in the USA (Daly, 1995; Morris, 2001). We hope that our research onballet and the body is a useful corrective to the often peculiarly disembodiedliteratures on dance, particularly ballet, and on the body more generally.

Bourdieu and habitusPierre Bourdieu’s work is widely viewed as a fruitful approach to both theory andresearch on the body (Shilling, 1993; Turner, 1992) as Bourdieu links agency(practice) with structure (via capital and field) through the process of habitus.Moreover, ‘the way people treat their bodies reveals the deepest dispositions ofthe habitus’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 190). Habitus is, in essence, an acquired schemeof dispositions: ‘When habitus encounters a social world of which it is the prod-uct, it is like a “fish in water”… it takes the world about itself for granted’(Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 127). Bourdieu (1984), in brief, argues thatphysical capital (in the form of body shape, gait and posture) is socially producedthrough, for example, sport, food and etiquette. In this article, we are using theterm physical capital as basically a synonym for the fleshy body, and we arguethat the acquisition of physical capital is essential in pursuits where ‘the bodymatters’ – for example, in boxing and ballet (Wainwight and Turner, 2003a).

Moreover, Bourdieu’s concept of habitus: ‘illuminate[s] the circular processwhereby practices are incorporated within the body, only then to be regener-ated through the embodied work and competence of the body’ (Crossley, 2001:106). Our ethnographic study of the Royal Ballet (London) explores the pro-duction of the dancer’s habitus within the cultural world of classical ballet.Although the main focus of our research is on injury (Turner and Wainwright,2002, 2003, 2004; Wainwright and Turner, 2004a; Wainwright et al., 2005)and ageing (Wainwright and Turner, 2003b, 2004b), in this article we discussthe value of the notion of habitus for understandings of both the balletic bodyand of the social world more generally.

Habitus is the coping-stone of Bourdieu’s conceptual system, or, to changethe metaphor, habitus ‘is the conceptual pivot of Bourdieu’s theoreticalsynthesis’ (Seidman, 1998: 154). Habitus is the outcome of the sedimentationof past experiences, shaping the agents’ perceptions and actions of the present

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and future and thereby moulding their social practices: ‘It is because this worldhas produced me, because it has produced the categories of thought that Iapply to it, that it appears to me as self-evident’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant,1992: 127). Habitus ‘tends towards reproducing existing social structures’(Shilling, 1993: 129), being ‘durable but not eternal’ (Bourdieu andWacquant, 1992: 133). Hence, a useful way to think of habitus is as ‘a pro-cessing of structure’ (Ball, 1998: 3), ‘the embodiment of social structure’(Sweetman, 2003: 532, original italics). Habitus is, therefore, both a mediumand outcome of social practice. In Bourdieusian language, the habitus consistsof ‘systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predis-posed to function as structuring structures’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 53). Similarly,‘[t]he habitus, the product of history, produces individual and collective prac-tices, and hence history, in accordance with the schemas engendered byhistory’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 82). On one level, because biographies are alwaysdifferent, then everyone has a unique habitus. However, on another level, eachindividual habitus also bears the stamp of a group’s collective history.Moreover, the habitus is not simply a state of mind, it is also a bodily state ofbeing. The body is a repository of ingrained and durable dispositions and thisincorporation of our history is demonstrated, for instance, in the differences inposture that men and women adopt (Bourdieu, 2001).

In this article, we argue that it is possible to tease out three forms of habitus(individual, institutional and choreographic) in the field of ballet. Furthermore,we suggest this tripartite schema is an important counterweight to one of thefrequent criticisms of Bourdieu’s work. For instance, Shilling (1993: 149)claims that:

The concept of habitus has a lot of work to do in Bourdieu’s conceptual scheme. Itis something of an overburdened concept whose meaning tends to slip, slide andeven disappear, as it is deployed in different contexts.

As a short illustration of our threefold distinction, the dancer Wayne Sleep’sstature, speed and his remarkable ability to turn, or his ‘individual habitus’was accentuated by his schooling [Royal Ballet School] and training [RoyalBallet] that together formed his ‘institutional habitus’ as a ‘Royal Balletdancer’ (Sleep, 1996). This, in turn, was further reinforced in the roles createdfor him when he was a star dancer at the Royal Ballet via his ‘choreographichabitus’ e.g. as Kolya in Sir Frederick Ashton’s (1978) ballet A Month in theCountry (Brinson and Crisp, 1980), and this meant that his (considerable) abil-ities as a ‘lyrical adagio’ dancer were underdeveloped. Furthermore, WayneSleep’s height (5’2”) meant he was seen as a demi-caractère dancer rather thanas a danseur noble (Sleep, 1996). In other words, his stature meant he dancedthe Jester, and not the Prince – for example, in Ashton’s (1948) balletCinderella. To coin an aphorism: his balletic body sealed his dancing destiny. Aswe shall see, the same maxim can be applied to female dancers too, and wetherefore give a range of male and female examples in our article. Of course we

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accept that ballet is a gendered art form, but an in-depth discussion of this isbeyond the scope of this article (see Banes, 1998; Burt, 1995). Although ourthree varieties of habitus are interlinked, we turn next to outline individualhabitus, before proceeding to discuss institutional and then choreographichabitus. We conclude our article with an overview of the linkages betweenthese three types of habitus, and we end with a broader discussion of some ofthe sociological writings on Bourdieu’s notion of habitus.

The dancer’s individual habitusThe pre-eminence of Balanchine as a choreographer and founder of the NYCB(New York City Ballet) has had a profound effect on the look of the modern bal-lerina (Shearer, 1986). To cite a famous example from the great American bal-lerina Gelsey Kirkland’s (1988: 56) painfully honest autobiography:

[George Balanchine] halted class and approached me for a kind of physical inspec-tion. With his knuckles, he thumped me on my sternum and down my rib cageclucking his tongue and remarking ‘Must see the bones’… He did not merely say,‘Eat less’, he said repeatedly, ‘Eat nothing’… Mr B’s ideal proportions called for analmost skeletal frame, accentuating the collarbones and length of neck… Mr B’smethods and taste have been adopted by virtually every Ballet Company andschool in America… ‘Thin-is-in’… For those who refuse to go along with the crowd,professional employment is unlikely.

In our terms, this illustrates the interconnection and reciprocity between indi-vidual and institutional habitus. Even if a dancer meets the broad physicalrequirement for ballet, there is still a tendency to ‘catalogue’ dancers in termsof their body – as we saw with our example of Wayne Sleep. In addition, alldancers find some steps and movements easier to perform than others. Forexample, Darcey Bussell, one of the leading ballerinas in England, writes that:‘I find bourrées [small running steps on Pointe] hard... I have very bendy feetwhich makes it hard for me to stay on the tips of my toes’ (1998: 117). In otherwords, differences in physical capital produce differences in individual habitus,and these are then developed (and usually reproduced) in the way a choreog-rapher inscribes his steps upon a dancer (as we will see later, when we discusschoreographic habitus). Antoinette Sibley and Lynne Seymour were contem-poraries at the Royal Ballet and yet, ‘we were brought up in completely differ-ent spheres: me [Sibley] totally as a classical ballerina, she [Seymour] totally asa dramatic ballerina’ (Newman, 1986: 150; Seymour, 1984). In other words,their shared institutional habitus was overridden by the interconnectionbetween their individual and choreographic habitus.

Gelsey Kirkland, again, has written of how her body and the way she dancedprofoundly influenced her development as a ballerina:

I thought of myself as a soubrette or allegro dancer, known for speed and preci-sion. In my struggle to become a lyrical or adagio dancer, I was trying to take on


those qualities of character that I associated with the drama of classical dance. Iknew that I had to work against my training… My physical type and technical pro-ficiency decreed a specific place for me in the Balanchine repertory. My figure sealedmy fate. (Kirkland, 1988: 82, our italics)

To escape this fate, Kirkland left NYCB and joined ABT (American BalletTheatre). Her transformation can be seen as an example of the reflexive natureof Bourdieu’s sociology:

[Bourdieu’s] constructivist structuralism suggests that the aim of social science isto enhance the constructivist power of social agency over social structures.Bourdieu’s structuralism thus involves the freeing of agency from oppressive socialstructures by raising to the level of reflexivity the degree to which existing forms ofcultural production are limited by social structures. (Delanty, 1997: 115)

In other words, and in our terms, Kirkland transformed her individual habitusby changing the institutional habitus and the choreographic habitus that sheworked within. Her move enabled her to evolve into a different type of balle-rina. This sense of transformation is captured in Dame Marie Rambert’sfamous account of watching Vaslav Nijinski in both class and performance:

One is often asked whether his jump was really as high as it is always described. Tothat I answer: ‘I don’t know how far from the ground it was, but I know it was nearthe stars.’ Who would watch the floor when he danced? He transported you atonce into higher spheres with the sheer ecstasy of his flight... And then there washis unique interpretation. He wafted the perfume of the rose in Spectre de la Rose;he was the very spirit of Chopin in Les Sylphides; he looked like a Hamlet in hisGiselle; his Petrushka broke your heart with his sorrow, and his Faune had the realbreath of antiquity. (Rambert, 1972: 60)

This is a paradigmatic example of the transfiguration of physical capital intothe artistic capital of balletic genius. In other words, the technical abilities offleshy bodies (physical capital) are combined with an embodied culturalknowledge (artistic capital). Not all dancers reach the level of genius ofNijinski, of course, but the embodiment of artistry and the sheer physical slogand buzz of acquiring it, together with the joy of dancing, are defining char-acteristics of the cultural world of a ballet company, as Megan (now a leadingballet coach, once a great dancer) remarked:

Megan: We’re surrounded by beautiful, talented, young people. Unusualpeople. We all have the same identity in a sense. We love beingpushed. We love being challenged. We don’t mind getting hot andsweaty and killing ourselves. We get a buzz from being exhausted,and still managing to get up and do it again. It’s a drug. All of us havethat in common.

The example above is a powerful depiction of the way in which the social worldof the professional ballet company becomes embodied in its dancers. It is this


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intersection between body, career and institutions that contributes simultane-ously to a sociological understanding of dancing careers and to the embodi-ment of dance. Ballet is an art that is literally inscribed on the body as bothballet technique and, especially, ballet artistry, is handed from one generationto the next (Bland, 1981; Guest, 1988).

As we have already intimated, the close correspondence between an indi-vidual’s ballet habitus and a choreographic habitus is invariably most closelyaligned when roles are created on dancers:

When steps are created on you, they are inevitably the sort of steps you favour.When the second cast tries to step into your shoes it feels completely alien. Chris[Saunders, Royal Ballet] worked at it until his body couldn’t take any more. I doubthe’ll be walking in the morning. (Bull, 1999[1998]: 151)

The discipline required to literally exhaust your stocks of physical capital is thedancer’s daily price for the acquisition of their lifetime’s artistic capital. For asMargot Fonteyn (1978: 106, our italics) recalls, ‘new roles are the stuff of life fora dancer, and when such plums are landed it is a sure thing that every sparemoment will be spent perfecting them’ – even if, apparently, this means thatyou are, like Christopher Saunders, unable to walk the next day. The individualhabitus of the truly great dancer tends to eclipse any shortcomings that theymay have in, say, technique. So, with the young Rudolf Nureyev:

The viewer was so transfixed by the sweeping scope of his movements, his confi-dence and feline grace, that even the most vigilant eyes failed to catch his techni-cal imperfections. They were in fact of no importance given the thrill of hispresence. (Smakov, 1984: 227)

The dancer’s institutional habitusNureyev was a product of the discipline and schooling of what is now theVaganova ballet school of the Kirov Ballet in St Petersburg (Craine and Mackrell,2000). His individual habitus was moulded through this (Russian) institutionalhabitus. Similarly, although Gelsey Kirkland danced with the dramatic flair of aRussian-trained ballerina in her later career, she laments how ‘I would not havethe benefit of years of memorization to take on the style and shape that seemedto be the basis of the Russian theatre. I would never be a Russian ballerina’(Kirkland, 1988: 92, our italics). Kirkland was one of Mikail Baryshnikov’sfavourite partners when he first defected from the Kirov to the West. She states:

Watching him [Baryshnikov] rehearse the variations for his upcoming appearancein La Bayadère I was stunned again by his technical virtuosity, the liquid puritywith which he executed his steps. His body was more than an object of physicalattraction, it was a fountain of wisdom. (Kirkland, 1988: 122)

There is of course a reciprocal relationship between individual and institu-tional habitus. One example of this is an extract from our discussion withRoyal Ballet dancer Jessie, about body types and ballet companies.


Jessie: I think it’s interesting because in this company we do have very differentshapes and sizes, men and women, whereas in a company like the ParisOpera Ballet, they are much more uniform. Much, much more uniform.And the Russians too. Very much more uniform. And it’s, it’s almost adeliberate thing for us. If you’re looking at the corps de ballet in Swan Lake,you’re not going to get here the same uniformity that you do in the Pariscompany or in Russia. But because so much of our rep is the Ashton andthe Macmillan rep, which is based around characters, you know, realpeople. And real people aren’t all the same size and shape, they are all dif-ferent. And so for our repertoire it really works that we have a wide rangeof shapes and sizes and I think we really don’t want to lose that.

Another example of the influence of an institutional habitus is the contrastbetween two of the greatest male dancers of the 1960s, the Danish Eric Bruhnand the Russian Rudolf Nureyev:

As the epitome of the Bournonville dancer, Bruhn was Nureyev’s polar opposite, theApollo to his Dionysius, poetic not powerful. Where the Soviet school favoured big,soaring, powerful jumps with sustained poses, the Franco-Danish style of Bournonvilleshunned fire for finesse, calling for crisp, nimble footwork, quick changes in direction,fluttering beats and incremental steps building to a crescendo. Bruhn moved audi-ences with the effortlessness of his dancing; Nureyev thrilled them with the effortful-ness of his dancing … With its emphasis on buoyancy and precision, on boundingbeaten steps and quicksilver shifts of weight, it [Bournonville] contrasted sharply withhis own pliant, expansive style of dancing. (Solway, 1998: 192, 280)

In our study, one of the people responsible for auditions and selection of RoyalBallet dancers supports this distinction between schooling and national stylesof ballet:

Megan: We all know that when someone comes for an audition you really haveto look at their initial posture at the barre to have a pretty good idea ofwhere they’ve trained. You can tell whether it’s Russian training, orFrench, Danish, American. They all have a different way of standing.They support their arms differently. They use their heads differently.

This theme, of embodied differences in dance style, which are a sign of differencesin institutional habitus between the leading ballet companies, was something thatwe were particularly interested in hearing Zelda’s views upon, because she trainedin France and danced with the Paris Opera Ballet before joining the Royal Ballet:

Interviewer: What about the difference between the Royal Ballet and the ParisOpera?

Zelda: The Paris Opera is a beautiful, beautiful company – absolutelybeautiful. Beautiful dancers. As dancers the Royal has alwaysdanced much faster…


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Interviewer: So did you find that difficult coming from your French training?Zelda: Yes I did, because for us it’s completely different. It’s all much

more the flexibility, not so much the flexibility as the high leg andthe length of the leg. You are not as fast because you have thatlength. It’s a different quality of dancing. I love the talent ofbeing really quick, but I know that I don’t have that Royal Balletwork [training] that is necessary.

So physical capital, ‘suppleness and length of leg’, enables the production of thedesired line and extensions of the Parisienne company; and this type of body andthe embodiment of French schooling (the intense dance training at a companyballet school from the ages of 11–18) acts as a constraint on dancers if they thenswitch to the relatively ‘fast footwork’ of the Royal Ballet. Zelda went on to talkabout other influences on the institutional habitus of the Royal Ballet:

Zelda: …there’s people like me who are foreigners…and they’ve all kinds of dif-ferent trainings and it makes a huge difference in the company becauseit means that it is more difficult to get a similar style, basically…and theRoyal used to. I mean when I joined, eight years ago, you could still reallysee the style of the Royal Ballet, because you had all the…dancers likeTracy Brown, Nicky Sedgefield, Nicky Roberts – all these people still intheir 30s, still dancing. And they had a quality that now you don’t see.Because the oldest person now is about 22! That’s me! The company hasgone much much younger. I had the chance to see all these people danc-ing and they are the ones that I copied and that I kind of sucked all thisinformation from. But now the younger ones don’t have the same thing.They do in a way because they have Darcey [Bussell], but they don’t havethe middle layer of people that make the company really important.

What is noticeable here is the way in which the signature of the Royal haschanged with the influx of a younger and more diverse group of dancers. Theinstitutional habitus has been diluted by an influx of dancers with a morewidely varied individual habitus than, say, 20 years ago when almost thewhole company of around 80 dancers were products of the Royal BalletSchool.

Another dancer we interviewed had spent almost seven years with NYCB(New York City Ballet) before moving to the rival, and very different, ABT(American Ballet Theatre) – a point we highlighted in a question to Errol:

Interviewer: Did you find it difficult when you moved from NYCB to ABT asthey have very different styles and a completely different rep?

Errol: Yes and no. The first time I danced for ABT it was a bit weird. Itwasn’t because of what I could or couldn’t do, but because I wasthinking exactly what you just asked me. I doubted myself… In


this profession you look at yourself all the time under a microscope.There definitely was a transition period though. I understoodthat, and I wanted to be patient with myself. There’s got to be aperiod of development.

Interviewer: So how long was it before you really felt comfortable dancingfor ABT?

Errol: Probably when I was about three months into it… Coming fromCity Ballet it was going to take time to convince some people.Whether it [his dancing] was good or bad didn’t really matter. Itwas going to take that amount of time. The first night I wasdoing Sleeping Beauty and I was just sweating and sweating…That was probably the worst experience I’ve ever had, to be honest.

Errol felt comfortable in his old and familiar dancing home at NYCB, but veryuncomfortable when he moved to his ‘new dancing home’ at ABT. The nervesof his first night illustrate the embodied nature of the balletic habitus and theway that a dancer’s habitus is the product of a very particular field, for, asCrossley (2003: 62) notes, there are ‘fields within fields’. In this case, Errol hadmoved from the abstract style of NYCB, where he was one of the company’sstar dancers, to ABT, which is famous for a very different repertoire of ballets,and where the emphasis is on narrative and drama. For Bourdieu, ‘being a fishin water’ is one key sign of habitus (Bourdieu, 1984). This becomes increas-ingly difficult when there is an increasing movement of star dancers betweenthe leading ballet companies, who are inevitably, to some extent, ‘fish out ofwater’. In contrast, Casper, a ballet coach, talks of how the institution is liter-ally able to mould the corps de ballet into one body:

Casper: I think where the strength of this company lies is actually in the mainbody of the company: the corps de ballet, the soloists. It’s that strengthof that group of people staying together over a period of time, againwe’re back to the family thing, the cohesiveness of the company,they’re not transient dancers so they actually work together for a con-centrated amount of time and become much better performers. Thenwe can get a depth to them.

Comparative sociology compares phenomena over both time and space. Thenotion of institutional habitus can also be viewed as a continuum along thesetwo dimensions. In other words, the institutional habitus varies both betweenballet companies (spatially) and within a ballet company (historically). Severalinformants commented on the dramatic changes in what we describe as theinstitutional habitus of the Royal Ballet. Many of our interviews were withpeople who had spent their entire careers with the Royal Ballet. They arguedthat some of the particular changes that they noted reflected broader changesin British society. One striking theme was the increased participation of dancers


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in decision-making. Both Dexter and Megan joined the company over 40 yearsago. At that time:

Dexter: Then there was no question of being asked. Dame Ninette [de Valois,the legendary founder and first director of the Royal Ballet] made medo two Albrechts [the demanding lead male role in Giselle] in one day.I’d just done a matinee and she said, ‘You’re on again tonight!’…itnever occurred to anybody to argue with her. You were told what youwere doing, and now you are asked if you will do it.

Megan: In those days I think it really was that we served the company. I don’tthink that there was a policy then of anyone on the managementactually feeling that they had a real responsibility to fulfil our lives forus. Whereas I know Anthony [Dowell, the Director of the company atthe time of the interview] does… As time’s gone on, everywhere insociety, no longer does one sell one’s soul for a company. You wannaknow what they are going to do back for you.

The role of the Director of the Royal Ballet is a striking example of this changein the institutional habitus of the Royal Ballet being a mirror of broaderchanges in organizations and society over the last four decades.

The dancer’s choreographic habitusAll choreographers need to work out their ideas on real bodies (Brinson andCrisp, 1980). There is a reciprocal relationship between the choreographer’sideas of what movements he (typically) wants, on how they look on the bodiesof the dancers he is inscribing his choreography on, and with how these stepsfeel for the dancer. This is true even when dancers are rehearsing an estab-lished ballet (it was apparent in every rehearsal that we attended). In a similarway, no two pianists will play, say, Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 11 in exactly thesame way, even though the notes on the page are the same. However, withdance then, the process of creation is often inspired and always changed byworking with dancers’ bodies. For the choreographer George Balanchine:

First comes the sweat. Then comes the beauty... I need to have real, living bodies tolook at. I see how this one can stretch and that one can jump and another one canturn, and then I begin to get a few ideas. (Balanchine, in Taper, 1984: 4)

Balanchine makes the link between the individual dancer and the choreogra-pher when he argues: ‘Steps are made by a person. It’s the person dancing thesteps – that’s what choreography is, not the steps by themselves’ (in Taper,1984: 321). The choreographer John Cranko notes how the physical capitalinvested in the steps needs to be converted into artistic capital through themelding of the individual, institutional and choreographic habituses (althoughhe didn’t use those terms to express this idea). Cranko writes:


There’s a limit to the amount of jumping around people can do... One has to con-vert this extremely physical image – a physical way of expressing oneself – into aspiritual way of expressing oneself. In the great Balanchine ballets – Serenade,Concerto Barocco, Apollo – the flesh becomes spirit while you’re watching them.(Percival, 1983: 139)

The institutional habitus is partially determined by the predominant choreo-graphic habitus – for example, at the Kirov Ballet via the heritage of MariusPetipa, at the Royal Danish Ballet via August Bournonville, at the Royal Balletvia Frederick Ashton and Kenneth Macmillan, and at the NYCB via GeorgeBalanchine. A favourite saying of Nureyev’s was: ‘My body has Petipa, myhead has Bournonville, and my heart has Balanchine’ (in Solway, 1998: 462).So, on his appointment as Director of the Paris Opera Ballet in 1983, Nureyevintroduced classes in Bournonville and Balanchine techniques to complementthe existing ‘Petipa’ inspired French style of the Paris company (Craine andMackrell, 2000). Lisa sums up the factors that have produced the ‘Englishstyle’ of the Royal Ballet:

Lisa: English style is mostly wrapped up in its choreography of course. Sincecoming here I do notice a serious lack of good port de bras [movement ofthe shoulders], but I also notice a serious advantage of technical ability.So there are pros and cons, and if we could just marry the two, then wecould have a wonderful ballet company. The rep, probably has changedmore. We’ve kept Ashton; we’ve kept Macmillan, which has been ourstaple diet I would say in trying to keep the style. The classics changebecause they become different combinations of style. I mean dealingwith the corps de ballet, from worldwide. And I suppose in that way it’smade us like every other company in many ways.

In this case, the choreographic habitus is seen as trumping the rather inchoateinstitutional habitus produced via a range of international teachers, and theincreasing international nature of companies like the Royal Ballet, both interms of dancers, and especially in terms of the globalization and homoge-nization of the core ballet repertoire (Newman, 2004; Wainwright et al., inpress). The quotation above also reinforces the difficulty that current balletmasters and ballet mistresses face in producing a stylistically uniform and reg-imented corps de ballet.

The difference between rehearsing and performing in a certain style (achoreographic habitus) and being taught daily class in a certain style (aschooling habitus) was brought out by one of the world’s leading ballet teach-ers in his comments on the production of an English and an American style ofballet:

Dudley: I was asked about this in America. What was the difference betweenBalanchine and Ashton? Balanchine established an American way


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of moving. Ashton created a choreographic style of moving that wasvery coordinated with the English, sort of, rather reserved way ofmoving. He developed his choreography along those lines. Balanchineinvented a style of American movement that involved the classroom.Ashton did not. Ashton wasn’t interested in that. So it was a very dif-ferent kind of development. Balanchine came from Russia, and itwould have been a very interesting thing had he not of gone toAmerica. How would he have developed in Russia? But he went toAmerica at a very important time of his life and he spent a lot of timein Hollywood – which a lot of people don’t realize. He did a lot ofmovies. All of that old Busby Berkely stuff. When you look atBalanchine’s choreography in terms of formations and all that onething after the other, it’s all Busby Berkley influenced. Ashton’s influ-ence was Anna Pavlova and Margot Fonteyn, not reserved, butproper is a good word. ‘Nothing a little bit too much dear. No don’t dothis! Oh no no no no, we don’t do that!’ So a sort of elegance that hebrought about with that.

So, although it is true that Ashton did not teach daily class, students at theRoyal Ballet School inevitably dance a great deal of Ashton as Ashton remainsthe mainstay of the Royal Ballet repertory (Jordan and Grau, 1996; Kavanagh,1996; Vaughan, 1977). This view, and the implication that dancers trained inballet schools where Ashton is not part of the everyday curriculum find itmore difficult to dance Ashton, is supported by our interview data. Forexample:

Interviewer: Do you think that with the people coming from the Royal BalletSchool, the Ashton is more instilled?

Casper: Yes, yes… Again it depends on the individual, whether theyassimilate it quickly or whether they don’t. You find the onesthat do make quicker progress through the company. Very oftenyou get a dancer who comes in from outside that you see imme-diately has the potential to be able to integrate into the companyvery quickly because their style of dancing is such that they fit interribly quickly. Others don’t, and it’s a matter of time until youfind out whether they can or they can’t.

So, it also seems that the choreographic habitus is itself transformed via theinstitutional habitus of ballet companies with significantly different dancestyles.

It can be seen that the relations between individual habitus, institutionalhabitus and choreographic habitus are complex, and in our discussion weelaborate on some of the ways in which they are interrelated.


Discussion and conclusionThe relationship between individual, institutional and choreographic habitusbecomes especially clear when there is either concordance or discordancebetween these three elements. So, for example, when the choreographerWilliam Forsythe’s productions are:

Danced by companies other than his own [Frankfurt Ballet], they tend to do it withgreat success, but not always as articulately as his own dancers. Forsythe’s owndancers have…been practising his steps and concepts for years, some for morethan a decade, whereas other dancers usually only have about a month to learnthem. And this shows in their respective performances. (Wulff, 1998: 42)

Here, individual habitus is insufficiently shaped via a lack of the appropriatebackground schooling, the embodied discipline, of a particular choreographicand institutional habitus. The dance quotations gleaned both from our inter-views with Royal Ballet dancers and from the memoirs of dancers provide auseful insight into the bodily habitus of classical ballet dancers. Moreover, theybegin to illuminate the relationships between the body, self, society and culturewithin the field of dance. To oversimplify, we saw earlier how the so-called ‘lyri-cal style’ of the Royal Ballet is less suited to the ‘attacking athletic allegro style’required for the ballets that Balanchine produced for his New York City Ballet(Clarke and Crisp, 1981). Some ballet memoirs reveal the synthesis of individ-ual, institutional and choreographic habitus that occurs in one dancer – forexample, in the contrasting styles (balletic habitus) of, say, Allegra Kent withthe NYCB (Kent, 1997) and Antoinette Sibley with the Royal Ballet (Newman,1986). Furthermore, dancers who move between companies, and particularlythose who endeavour to move between classical ballet and modern dance,such as Nureyev (Solway, 1998), provide useful insights into these differinghabituses. As they struggle with fresh ways of dancing, they are, in effect, try-ing to obtain enough physical capital and cultural capital to assume a newdance habitus. The ex-Kirov dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, therefore, spent twoyears with NYCB in order to attain his ‘Balanchine’ habitus (Ramsey, 1998).

We hope our article has shown that the cultural world of ballet is repletewith embodied practices. For instance, the mental and physical demands of acareer in ballet become embodied in a craving for perfection. This daily questfor the unattainable is one of the features of class, rehearsal and performance.The ballet coach literally inscribes the steps onto and into the bodies of thenext generation of dancers. Ballet is based on the production and reproductionof this generational artistic embodiment. More generally, the balletic habitus isconstantly created and replicated by the reciprocal connections betweenagency and structure. We tried to capture this process in our tripartite distinc-tion of individual habitus, institutional habitus and choreographic habitus.Individual habitus is extremely diverse as individuals vary both in terms oftheir capital (some are great turners, others great jumpers; some are polished


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technicians, others are wonderful actors and so on) and in their embodied his-tories. Some dancers prefer modern dance to classical ballet, while others pre-fer the classroom to the stage – and vice versa. At the individual level,distinctions in physical capital can literally ‘seal your fate’. For instance, theraw material that forms your ‘body type’ can determine whether your careertrajectory as a male dancer follows that of a danseur noble or of a demi-caractèredancer. The individual agent is processed by the institutional structure, andthis reflexive relationship produces and reproduces the habitus of the balleticbody. Casting for existing and for new ballets adds a further choreographicdimension to this association, and so the dancer’s habitus is a function of theinterrelationships between individual, institution and choreography.

Shevtsova (2002: 58) states that ‘habitus is a socialised subjectivity’ and sothere is both an individual and a ‘group habitus’. In a similar vein, several authorshave discussed the idea of ‘institutional habitus’ (Reay, 1998; Reay et al., 2001;Thomas, 2002), and especially the ways in which this can, for example, mouldstudents’ choice of university in the UK as the school ‘launders cultural advan-tages’ (Crossley, 2003: 43). Institutional habitus is ‘the impact of a cultural groupor social class as it is mediated through an organisation’ (Reay et al., 2001).Within the field of dance, schools will have differing institutional habituses, andour interviews revealed how many dancers saw their move from the Royal BalletSchool to the Royal Ballet Company as inevitable and natural. To adopt a phraseof Bourdieu’s (2000: 143): ‘they feel at home in the world because the world isalso in them, in the form of habitus, a virtue made of necessity’.

For Bourdieu, and for many other social researchers influenced by hisapproach such as Reay et al. (2001), habitus is a key to understanding socialclass and the reproduction of hierarchies of distinction (Bourdieu, 1984).Habitus is, essentially, an appropriated set of generative dispositions. Some ofthese dispositions are bodily ones. Hence:

The apparently most insignificant techniques of the body – ways of walking orblowing one’s nose, ways of eating or talking…[reveals] the most fundamentalprinciples of construction and evaluation of the social world. (Bourdieu, 1984: 466)

The lifestyles of the different social classes become inscribed on and in theirbodies. Furthermore, physical capital – via body shape, gait, posture, speechand so on – contributes to the reproduction of social inequalities. In otherwords, the body is a bearer of value in society (Shilling, 1993).

One way of extending our research would be to investigate the field of clas-sical ballet in order to trace the social trajectories of aspiring ballet dancerswho, for example, enter the Royal Ballet School and the subsequent dancingcareers of graduates of this school. We have some interesting data on thefamily milieux of those who become professional dancers, and this too couldform the basis for a Bourdieusian discussion on social hierarchy and issues ofpower which are central to Bourdieu’s notion of habitus (Hillier and Rooksby,2002; Wainwright and Turner, 2003a).


We recognize that the institutional structure of ballet, like any field, deter-mines a range of social positions in terms of their prestige and authority. Inother words, the structure of the field shapes the careers of ballet dancers.Although all dancers have physical limitations, what counts as ‘physical capi-tal’, as we outlined earlier, and how this is viewed, changes both historicallyand geographically. The power to determine ‘what counts’ exemplifies thepower struggles within a field. The careers of ballet dancers, like other ‘sportsstars, artistes’ (and even academics), depend on the views and actions of thosewith the power to determine what counts as capital within a particular field.Even world famous ballerinas like Gelsey Kirkland and Lynn Seymour were lit-erally driven out of ballet companies through disputes with powerful balletcompany directors (Kirkland, 1988; Seymour, 1984). The different forms ofinstitutional habitus could also be considered as different forms of capital, withcurrency in some fields (say, the Royal Ballet) but not in others (for example,the Kirov). Various company styles are forms of capital within these ‘fieldswithin fields’. In this article, we highlighted the difference between the inter-nalization of a company style (a product of the institutional habitus andchoreographic habitus of, say, the Royal Ballet) by members of the corps de bal-let and the way various ‘star dancers’ can adopt (given time) or ignore a par-ticular company style as they dance around the world.

Within a ballet company, the corps de ballet is the institutional habitus mademanifest. Here, dancers of different schooling and styles become one entity; or,to put it more accurately, their individual bodies are transfigured to dance asone body. Even with the homogenizing pressures of globalization, the corps of,say, the Kirov Ballet, New York City Ballet, and the Royal Ballet would formthree noticeably different bodies. However, staying in the corps for years maywear away and eventually ablate your individual dance habitus. The work ofbeing, in a sense, ‘a clone in the collective’ renders some dancers incapable ofbecoming principal dancers. In contrast, some future principal dancers – forinstance, Lynn Seymour (Seymour, 1984), have such an abundance of indi-vidual habitus that they are quickly promoted out of the corps as their individ-uality overrides the communal similarity of the uniform corps de ballet.

Because it takes years to incorporate the distinct style of a dance companyinto your body, dancers who change companies and thereby move ‘acrossstyles’ are interesting case studies of the interplay between individual, institu-tional and choreographic habitus. Hence, Frederick Ashton, the founder of theEnglish style of ballet, created only one major role for Rudolf Nureyev duringNureyev’s 15 years as a guest artist of the Royal Ballet (in Marguerite andArmand, 1963, a role that accentuated Nureyev’s dramatic Russian style ofdancing [Vaughan, 1977]). Mikhail Baryshnikov was correspondingly disap-pointed by the lack of English style in Rhapsody (1980) – when Ashton createda role for him that was full of Baryshnikov’s bravura ‘trademark tricks’ butdevoid of Ashton’s brand of languid lyricism (Kavanagh, 1996). In both cases,a great choreographer responded to the remarkably individual balletic bodies


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of these ex-Kirov dancers to produce works that are more infused with Russianmelodrama and bravura than with flowing Ashtonian English restraint. It islikely to take a year, and often much longer, for a dancer to acquire a new insti-tutional habitus. Nureyev could have become ‘an English dancer’ but he was veryreluctant to do so because he felt it would diminish the brightness of his talent(Solway, 1998): ‘Endlessly newsworthy... He is adored by a huge audience; he is aforce of nature’ (Brinson and Crisp, 1980: 244). ‘Forces of nature’, like Nureyev,mould institutions in as much their own image as vice versa (Solway, 1998).

In the concluding section of our article, we address some of the criticismsthat have been made of Bourdieu’s work, and especially of the concept of habi-tus (Calhoun et al., 1993; Fowler, 2000; Grenfell and James, 1998; Lane,2000; Robbins, 2000; Shusterman, 1999). Typically, critics of Bourdieu’s worksee it as vague, deterministic and ahistorical. Given the wide range of Bourdieu’swritings, and his growing eminence across a number of academic disciplines,this has inevitably produced a large critical literature. Our aim here is to out-line and evaluate three of the more common criticisms that relate directly toour discussion of habitus in the field of ballet.

First, Bourdieu’s concepts are often criticized for being vague. A typical crit-ical refrain is ‘that in trying to explain everything they explain nothing’.Equally, the cynic might tease the Bourdieusian with the taunt that ‘theywouldn’t know what the habitus is if they tripped over it’. Similarly, the con-cept of field is sometimes conceptualized as a bounded space, or as a field ofstruggles, and/or as a ‘magnetic’ field – where agents align themselves withthe pole that ‘attracts’ their stock of capital:

The concept [of field] has an almost chameleon-like quality in that it can mean allthings to all people: determined and determining, structured and structuring,strong and weak, modern and postmodern, promoting reproduction and change,Marxist and Weberian. (Prior, 2000: 144)

But this supposed weakness is, we argue, the strength of Bourdieu’s concepts.It is the very vagueness and ambiguity of Bourdieu’s notions that give theman elasticity that allows the concepts of habitus, capital and field to beemployed in a wide range of empirical research projects – as Bourdieu’s exten-sive and very varied research shows. The concept of field, for example, has cap-tured the imagination of researchers trying to unravel some of the complexityof fields as diverse as education (Reay et al., 2001); literature, (Pinto, 1996);social policy (Peillon, 1998); disability (Edwards and Imrie, 2003); radicalsocial movements (Crossley, 2003); journalism (Marliere, 1998); personalfinance (Aldridge, 1998); theatre (Shevtsova, 2002) and the arts (Danto,1999). Moreover, other key concepts in both the humanities and social sci-ences are also vague, but this does not mean that they lack heuristic purchase.So, to give just one example, ‘we should not assume that the word ‘culture’ canact as a magic wand; it is what we do with it that counts’ (Smith, 2000: 133, ouritalics). This, as we shall see shortly, is essentially Bourdieu’s defence against


his critics. In this article, we have tried to show how three varieties of habitusare helpful in understanding the field of classical ballet.

Body techniques, within and beyond ballet, are not naturally acquired; theyare essentially about education (Durkheim and Mauss, 1975[1912]). As aresult of this detailed education of the body into a cluster of techniques,human beings occupy a habitus. Mauss argued that this habitus is the: ‘tech-niques and work of collective and individual reason rather than, in the ordi-nary way, merely the soul and its repetitive faculties’ (Mauss, 1979: 101). Onecan see in this passage the intellectual roots of Pierre Bourdieu’s notions ofhabitus and his logic of embodied practice (see Crossley, 2001).

Ballet is a paradigm case of embodied social practices. We see habitus andembodiment as entwined, as ‘bodies embrace and express the habitus of thefield in which they are located’ (Wainwright and Turner, 2004a: 101). In addi-tion, we view embodiment as overcoming the problematic Cartesian dualismbetween mind and body (see Crossley, 2001). In a similar vein, habitus is alsoa way to overcome the Cartesian mind–body split. For example, Bourdieu(2000: 136) writes: ‘to understand practical understanding, one has to movebeyond the alternatives of thing and consciousness’. Moreover, to use Csordas’(1994) phrase: ‘Embodiment provides the existential ground of culture andself ’. The concept of embodiment derives from Merleau-Ponty’s (1962)Phenomenology of Perception. In essence, Merleau-Ponty rejected themind–body dualism of Descartes by contending that thinking, feeling anddoing are all practical actions that obligate embodiment. For Merleau-Ponty,the body is never isolated because it is always engaged with the world (Weiss,1999). Bourdieu draws upon Merleau-Ponty in the development of the con-cept of habitus (Crossley, 2001). Furthermore:

We can define embodiment as the mode by which human beings practicallyengage with and apprehend the world. In this respect, the concept of embodimentalso has a close affinity with the sociology of Bourdieu, which attempts to over-come dichotomies between action and structure in the notions of practice and‘habitus’. (Abercrombie et al., 2000: 115)

One critical response to our tripartite distinction of the varieties of habitus isto claim that this proliferation of terms reifies ‘the habitus’ into three pseudo-objects which then need to be related in some kind of framework. We empha-size that we see habitus as a useful way of gaining some analytical purchase ona wide-ranging array of social processes that thereby contributes to a richerunderstanding of various types of social fields. We accept that some aspectsare relatively fixed – for instance, that a dancer’s height (especially when rela-tively small or tall) has an important influence on a dancer’s career (as we sawin the case of Wayne Sleep) – while some things are changeable so dancers canlearn to dance in a different way, and an individual habitus can be modifiedthrough new choreographies and new artistic influences shaping an institutionalhabitus. Our article is an attempt to capture the fluid interplay of regimes of


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practice in which person, troupe and choreography are dynamic and respon-sive to constant changes.

Second, Bourdieu’s work is often viewed as being deterministic (Alexander,1995). For example, Jenkins (1992: 97) claims that habitus acts behind thebacks of agents so that in Bourdieu’s schema, ‘behaviour has its causes, butactors are not allowed their reasons’. In our view, however, this overstates thecase. The habitus is not deterministic, but it is determining. This distinctionmeans that the habitus allows some room for manoeuvre, but typically notvery much. Usually the habitus changes slowly though a process of evolution.But revolutions in habitus do occur. Fateful moments, to use Giddens’ (1991)phrase, change the trajectory of our lives and with it the nature of our habi-tus. The habitus can be transformed via what Bourdieu calls the ‘Don Quixoteeffect’ where perceptions and dispositions are ‘ill-adapted because they areattuned to an earlier state of the objective conditions’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 109).This disjunction between habitus and field can lead to ‘a site of explosive forces(resentment) which may await (and even look for) the opportunity to breakout’ (Bourdieu: 1993a: 87). The threat of redundancy or, to use a positiveexample, an important job promotion may both produce a revolution in habi-tus. We saw earlier how dancers like Kirkland, Nureyev and Baryshnikov all‘broke out’ and thereby changed their balletic habitus. These star dancersrefashioned their identity as they had what Sweetman (2003) calls a reflexivehabitus. Crossley’s (2003: 55) point that ‘reflexive schemas of self-inspectionand reflection constitute an integral part of the normal habitus’ is especiallytrue of the balletic habitus.

This alleged determinism leads to a third common criticism of theBourdieusian corpus: that it is ahistorical. We argue that this, once again, iswide of the mark. Bourdieu argues that history and sociology should be flipsides of the same coin; that history should be a historical sociology of the past,while sociology, at its best, is a social history of the present (Bourdieu andWacquant, 1992). Correspondingly, many of Bourdieu’s books are, effectively,social histories of, for example, academia (Bourdieu, 1988, 1997b) and of thecultural field (Bourdieu, 1984, 1993b, 1996, 1997a). We hope, by usingevocative examples from our own research, that we have outlined some of theelements of a ‘social history’ of the Royal Ballet and that our use of a range ofballet memoirs also constitutes the beginnings of an historical sociology ofballet’s recent past (Wainwright et al., in press).

One of the recurring themes in Bourdieu’s writings is his attempt to wakepeople from their ‘doxic slumbers’. This is because ‘a scientific practice thatfails to question itself does not, properly speaking, know what it does’(Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 236). Once again, Bourdieu provides a tellinginsight in his critique of some of his critics:

I blame most of my readers for having considered as theoretical treatises, meantsolely to be read or commented upon, works that, like gymnastics handbooks, were


intended for exercise, or even better, for being put into practice.... In fact, as I havesaid hundreds of times, I have always been immersed in empirical research pro-jects, and the theoretical instruments I was able to produce in the course of theseendeavours were intended not for theoretical commentary and exegesis, but to beput to use in new research, be it mine or that of others. It is this comprehensionthrough use that is most rarely granted me. (Bourdieu, 1993c: 271, original italics)

Bourdieu’s ‘theoretical concepts’ have been empirically forged in a wide rangeof empirical research projects. He offers us a powerful way of thinking about thesocial world. The continuous spiral between theory, practice and theory, com-bined with the open and adaptable nature of his key concepts, means thatBourdieu’s work offers a very fruitful approach to social research on the body.Such a claim is echoed in a range of statements that praise Bourdieu’s achieve-ments. For example, ‘My main claim is that he [Bourdieu] has superseded vari-ous problems that have perennially plagued sociology as a critical social theoryand that, at the present moment, this is the most original and cogent modellingof the social world that we have’ (Fowler, 1997: 13). Bourdieu’s cultural sociol-ogy is: ‘not only the best, but…the only game in town’ (Lash, 1993: 193).Furthermore, ‘the manner in which he [Bourdieu] manages to weave togetherboth empirical data and theoretical insight is a lesson for all of us in the “art” ofdoing sociological research…the intellectual fruits are there for the takers’(Williams, 1995: 581, 601). Even Bourdieu’s critics concede that he is ‘enor-mously good for thinking with’ (Jenkins, 1992: 11). We, like many other socialresearchers, view Bourdieu’s conceptual schema as a set of tools for thinkingwith, and it is inevitable that academics, like Bourdieu himself, use terms likehabitus to mean slightly different things. In this article, we employ physical cap-ital in a somewhat different way from Bourdieu, and our notion of individualhabitus differs from Bourdieu who writes of habitus and social agents.

In conclusion, our article is an example of Dyke’s dictum that ‘the best wayto praise and appraise Bourdieu’s work is also the most straightforward: use it’(Dyke, 1999: 192, our italics). Bourdieu’s social theory ‘should be understoodas habitus rather than as a theory of habitus’ (Brubaker, 1993, original italics).We hope our discussion of three varieties of habitus and the embodiment ofballet is an interesting and helpful example of Bourdieu’s (1993c: 271) plea forsocial researchers to aim for ‘comprehension [of habitus] through use’.

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S T E V E N P. WA I N W R I G H T is Senior Lecturer at King’s College London. His researchfocuses on three areas: first, his major current interest is in the connections betweenMedical Sociology and Science & Technology Studies (especially innovative medicaltechnologies). Second, he also works on Medical Humanities (especially narratives ofageing and death in painting, opera and ballet). Third, he has written extensively on theSociology of Body (especially the reciprocal relationships between various combina-tions of the arts, the social sciences, biomedical science and medicine). He is currentlyworking on an ESRC-funded ethnography of stem cell research, and some of this studyforms the basis of his (with Clare Williams) forthcoming research monograph on TheBody, Biomedicine & Society: Reflections on High-Tech Medicine (PalgraveMacmillan).Address: Division of Health & Social Care Research, King’s College London, 57 WaterlooRoad, London SE1 8WA, UK. [email: [email protected]]

C L A R E W I L L I A M S is Reader in the Social Science of Biomedicine at King’s CollegeLondon. Her research focuses on the clinical, ethical and social implications of innova-tive health technologies, particularly from the perspective of health care practitionersand scientists, and on influences of gender on health. She currently holds researchgrants from the Wellcome Trust Biomedical Ethics Programme on ‘Facilitating choice,framing choice: experiences of staff working in pre-implantation genetic diagnosis’,and the ESRC Stem Cell Initiative: ‘Mapping stem cell innovation in action: the interfacebetween the bench and the bedside’. She has recently completed research for theWellcome Trust Biomedical Ethics Programme on the ethical and clinical dilemmas ofthe changing status of the foetus for practitioners and policy makers; for the ESRC/MRCInnovative Health Technologies Programme, exploring the social implications of inno-vative first trimester antenatal screening; and for the Wellcome Trust Biomedical EthicsProgramme on the clinical and ethical dilemmas of genetic and reproductive develop-ments for health practitioners.Address: Division of Health & Social Care Research, King’s College London, 57 WaterlooRoad, London SE1 8WA, UK. [email: [email protected]]


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B RYA N S. T U R N E R is Professor of Sociology at the National University of Singapore. Hisprevious research focused on four areas: Medical Sociology (particularly the body andsociety); Political Sociology (especially citizenship and human rights); the Sociology ofReligion (chiefly Islam); and Social Theory (especially Classical Social Theory). He seesthese four domains as related via the theme of the body and embodiment. Over the nextsix years, he is directing research on globalization and religion concentrating on suchissues as religious conflict and the modern state, religious authority and electronicinformation, human rights and religion, the human body, medical change and reli-gious cosmologies. The general aim is to develop a comprehensive overview of theimpact of globalization on religions, and the consequences of religion on globalprocesses, and this will be published as three books on religion and globalization(Cambridge University Press).Address: Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, Singapore. [email:[email protected]]


Varieties of habitus and the embodiment of ballet

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