Political and somatic alignment
habitus, ideology and social practice
pp. 167-198
in: Gilbert Weiss, Ruth Wodak (eds), Critical discourse analysis, Berlin, Springer, 2003Abstract
Milosz, writing in Poland after World War II, characterizes human comportment and speech in what he calls the "people's democracies' as acting that takes place wherever one finds oneself, even in the privacy of one's own quarters. Though a degree of acting is part of human relationships everywhere, that in Eastern Europe was "a conscious mass play rather than automatic imitation" (1955 [1981], p. 55). Conscious acting develops the habitus until "Proper reflexes at the proper moment become truly automatic." The game of concealing one's thoughts and feelings in order to protect oneself, one's reputation, and one's relatives was not invented in postwar Poland or Czechoslovakia but was cultivated and termed ketman in the Islamic world, where the man of faith protected his faith from exposure to infidels. Though Milosz imagined that in the West the constant conscious cultivation of what he so aptly terms "reflexes' was not necessary, it is only by comparison that a person from what he calls the Imperium finds people completely relaxed, saying whatever comes to mind, laughing out loud.