Habitus in Nigeria

Driving myself to work today, past the typical array of crash scenes (there must be at least ten mild to serious car crashes in Abuja every day which are completely down to driver error), the word habitus came to mind to explain/clarify the problems of Nigeria.

Most analyses of Nigeria's problems reduce the issue to one of poor leadership (for instance, Chinua Achebe's classic text). This is too simple I fear. Even the extended binary idea that good leadership requires good followership is just a little trite. The problem is more intractable and fuzzy/chiaroscuro than these approaches.

As I dodged the crushed glass and swerved past cars doing the wrong speed in the wrong lane and generally doing the wrong thing without any meaningful use of mirrors, the word 'habitus' sprang to mind as a better way in. The concept of habitus was generated by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Its quite a complex suite of concepts in reality, but without reducing it too much, it refers to the habits, expectations, bodily anticipations and perspectival frames of reference of a specific society or culture, accrued and developed across time. It is a society's way of seeing, feeling and understanding, prior to explicitly understood terms of reference. It is the set of informal rules (most often not stated) by which a society organises itself from within. Perhaps most importantly, it is a set of responses that takes decades, if not centuries, to develop and transform.

Although referring to an intangible nexus, habitus, as the pattern-logic of the social body, can be seen at once to have strong empirical explanatory power. How else do we understand the militant relationship to strikes among French workers, if not in terms of a habitus built up across decades and centuries? Or how might we begin to explain a small island's undue influence from the 16th to the 20th century, if not in terms of the intense effects of an alienating Protestant ethic worked out in terms of habitus, in the case of the UK (of course I am thinking of Weber's classic text here).

In the same way, to understand in any depth the layers of social dysfunction in Nigeria, perhaps we need to analyse its own specific forms of habitus. We need to understand the expectations that create the need for the Big Man in any organisation beyond simple ethnography; the historical patterns that have generated an all-encompassing master-slave power relationship, such that any marginal economic advantage generates the production of master and slave identities, and such that paying a house-help 4000 naira per month is deemed perfectly acceptable by many; and to use habitus to shed light on the enduring agrarian episteme that mitigates against driving in a straight line in Abuja, or to understand the social positioning of say the police.

Habitus would also enable us to look more profoundly at the continuing adverse effects of colonialism (the creation of fake tribal rulers/kings, the historical bias towards the North etc) at the level of a collective unconscious that pre-determines different forms of response from different communities, as well as to examine the open wounds of military dictatorship and the civil war from a deep-level phenomenological perspective, rather than from the perspective of explicit texts or statements.

In terms of any form of path to a solution, a study of the Nigerian habitus would enable us to formulate explicit responses to the informal patterns of understanding and ways of being and doing that lead to the incessant reproduction of dysfunctional realities across the country, leading to much more powerful self-correcting/authochthonic measures, one might hope. It would definitely lead us away from the over-simplistic idea that if only we could find decent leaders to put in positions of power, everything would change..