Pierre Bourdieu

attempted to synthesize structuralism and existentialism with a mode of knowledge that treats actors as ensconced within structures - semiotic and material - that are internalized and taken for granted, and yet able to navigate these structures strategically.

Pierre Bourdieu’s attempt to synthesize structuralism and existentialism. Bourdieu’s theoretic approach—what he called “practice theory”—stressed that, through habituation, agents may internalize the structures that surround them. They may internalize the binary distinctions that Lévi-Strauss identified and that then may become part of their habitus—part of their way of understanding the world and acting within it.

's main thrust was to emphasize how Sartre, but also Lévi-Strauss, circumvented the problem of how practice relates to the explanatory structures that we are able to discern in our scientific inquiry.

For Bourdieu, the tension between structuralism and existentialism crystallized the central problem in contemporary thought—namely, the lack of a theory of human agency. The thrust of Bourdieu’s intervention was to emphasize how Sartre, but also Lévi-Strauss, circumvented this main problem - of how practice relates to the explanatory structures that we are able to discern in our scientific inquiry.

Pierre Bourdieu, n.All

Pierre Bourdieu