Introduction

The central objective of this article is to analyse a number of Pierre Bourdieu’s works, focusing specifically on his contribution to the development of a research agenda surrounding the notion of the ‘migrant-body,’^[1] through which I seek to centre on the bodily dimension, or embodiment, of the question of migration.

Adopting this approach, I reflect on the interconnected concepts of habitus, hexis, strategy, field and capital, as well as on the body as a theme intrinsic to Bourdieu’s thought and research. In this way, I aim to create an analytic and conceptual base that allows us to expand the field of migration studies by providing more analytic consistency to the embodied dimension of the migratory phenomenon.

This recourse to Bourdieu to think about the ‘migrant-body’ is explained firstly by the fact that the article joins a series of studies on the theme that will certainly not be exhausted by the present contribution, nor does it imply that subsequent publications cannot subject the topic to a more systematic critique. At the same time, although Bourdieu does not have all the answers, I argue that, epistemologically, his theory provides the foundations for comprehending the production of a migrant-body. It allows us to consider both the action of ‘disciplinary’ powers (to use a term foreign to him), the market and the state, and the practices through which the immigrants themselves embody stigmas, resist them or even transgress them. In this way, for example, the concept of habitus allows me to consider both structural and subjective elements.

Before immersing ourselves in the central problematic of this article, it is worth explaining that I arrived at the debate on the body through a post doctoral project on immigration and bodily modifications.^[2] My intention then was to understand the intention and/or practice of modifying physical traits socially and culturally associated with ethnic and/or national belonging among immigrants in Lisbon and Madrid, in a context taken to be intercultural (2018a, 2018b, 2018c, 2017, 2016b, 2014b). Generally speaking, the study’s findings allowed me to conclude that the desire to realize or practice bodily changes among immigrants involves a tension between factors linked to national ethnic belonging and to the forms of subordination, discrimination and social transgression experienced in the place of destination, but also to other factors associated with the consumer society that pervades migration as an issue.

This article was elaborated through my (re)readings of Bourdieu’s work, focusing specifically on the ideas of embodiment and the body underlying his theoretical system, and through a survey of the literature, based especially on the CAPES periodicals website, using a combination of ‘immigrants/immigration’ and ‘body’ as search terms. Additionally, I consulted several articles that have already explored the dialogue between Bourdieu’s concepts and the migration issue. In both cases, however, although mentioned, the body and its social construction is not problematized.

As the principal finding of the investigation developed in this article, I argue that Bourdieu’s conceptual system represents a consistent theoretical base for exploring what I propose to call the ‘migrant-body.’ Even though some grounds exist to criticize Bourdieu and these concepts (merely cited here rather than developed due to space limitations), he offers us sufficient elements to affirm that the body is a fundamental dimension of the phenomenon of migration. First, because it is fundamental to society as a whole and, second, because it allows us to apprehend and comprehend how the processes of embodiment before, during and after the migratory trajectory explain the dynamics of insertion, positioning and repositioning of immigrants in specific fields in which they express relations of force and power objectified through the ‘migrant-body.’

To meet its central objective, the article is divided into five parts. In the first, I present the problematization grounding the proposed idea of the ‘migrant-body.’ In the second, I turn to various authors who have studied the body from diverse theoretical perspectives. In the third, I engage in an analytic exercise through which I explore the concepts of Bourdieu that dialogue most directly with the ‘migrant-body.’ In the fourth, I examine more closely Bourdieu’s concepts of the body and embodiment. Fifth and last, I dialogue with the articles that present research findings in the field of immigration in which the body appears, but is not theoretically problematized.

1. Problematization

This reflection on the ‘migrant-body’ is situated within a broader issue concerning the sense of strangeness and cultural diversity produced by the immigrant and its repercussions for the issues of difference and inequality in migratory contexts. The idea of the body mobilized here, for its part, is epistemologically and theoretically based on the contributions of Pierre Bourdieu, more specifically on the dynamics of embodiment^[3] inherent to the notions of habitus and hexis, categories conceived in conjunction with those of strategy, capital and field.

From the outset, I propose that the ‘migrant-body’ is the objectification of relations of force and power in the form of physical traits, forms of body care, body techniques and so on. In other words, the migrant-body results from the interplay between social pressures and the diverse forms of framing, resistance and/or transgression mobilized by migrants throughout their trajectory. I also refer to the fact inherent to migratory processes that mobility results in a body in motion. In this sense, the ‘migrant-body’ generates estrangement, sets off the alarms of otherness, raises physical and symbolic barriers. The ‘migrant-body’ is an irremediable condition, since nobody can migrate without their body, which, at the same time, is imbued with the migrant’s history.

In the power game in which social hierarchies and stigmas are produced, appearance (physical traits, clothing, gestures and so on) connect the agent to the set of social, economic, political and cultural relations as a whole. “Stereotypes are fixed preferentially on physical appearances and transform naturally into stigmas, fatal marks of moral imperfection or racial belonging” (LE BRETON, 2009, p. 78).

Comprehension of the ‘migrant-body’ depends on Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and hexis, both of which will be situated later in this text. The habitus is the form through which history is embodied in the human biological body.

It is because the body is (to unequal degrees) exposed and endangered in the world, faced with the risk of emotion, lesion, suffering, sometimes death, and therefore obliged to take the world seriously (and nothing is more serious than emotion, which touches the depths of our organic being) that it is able to acquire dispositions that are themselves an openness to the world, that is, to the very structures of the social world of which they are the incorporated form. (BOURDIEU, 2000, p. 140-141)^[4]

According to Bourdieu, this tradition extends back to Antiquity:

Twenty centuries of diffuse Platonism and of Christianized readings of the Phaedo incline us to see the body not as an instrument of knowledge but as a hindrance to knowledge, and to ignore the specificity of practical knowledge, which is treated either as a simple obstacle to knowledge or as incipient science. (BOURDIEU, 2000, p, 137)^[5]

Bourdieu emphasizes that when considered from viewpoints like the scholastic tradition, for example, the body is always apprehended through the visual sense, which reduces it to its appearance and to its physical traits, almost always naturalized. By contrast, Bourdieu’s notion of embodiment goes beyond this ‘visible’ aspect of the body (though without discarding it) by considering other sensory dimensions such as smell, touch and taste. The concept of habitus allows us to grasp how socialized bodies maintain, as Bourdieu would say, a ‘visceral’ relation with the social world of which they are the product but also the producer.

2. The body in sociological approaches

The development of the sociology of the body can be described as a work in progress still, despite various endeavours in this direction such as those of David Le Breton (2009), Boltanski, (1971, 1979) and Bryan Turner (2014). What exists, including in response to the theoretical and epistemological limitations already identified in this article, are authors within the human sciences who began to attribute more importance to the body, beginning with Marcel Mauss (2003) and including Merleau-Ponty (1971), Erving Goffman (2008, 2011), Michael Foucault(1998, 2000), Jean Baudrillard (n/d), feminist theorists like Judit Butler (2000, 2002) and Joan Scott(1995), until we reach authors who I consider to have given the most emphasis on the body as a core element of social analysis (and not just as an object of control), like Norbert Elias (1994, 2000) and the author of central interest for the purposes of this article, Pierre Bourdieu (1977, 1986, 1989, 1990, 1992a, 1992b, 1996, 2007, 2009, 2014).

Another source for the growing importance of the theme of the body in the social sciences is the research on identities. To some extent it is these studies that have guided my work over recent years. What matters in these studies of identities is less a listing of the characteristics and markers and more an understanding of how these are produced. In the case of this article, this problematic leads to the construction of the object through the intersection of other problematics such as those related to the phenomenon of migration and the social production of the body.

The human body is a central element of the social order (whether as a product or a producer). In this latter sense, which we cannot explore in detail in this article, it is worth remembering the important work of Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone, in which he analyses how the various forms and conceptions of the body have influenced architecture and urban planning projects over the course of history (SENNETT, 1996[2008]).

Sennett’s work is recalled here to demonstrate the inseparability between body and society, an inseparability that I shall examine from an opposite direction to Sennett’s own investigation: in other words, my reflection on the ‘migrant-body’ investigates how the social, economic, political and cultural dimensions of the migratory phenomenon are objectified in the body of the migrant.

But before entering into more specific questions on the importance of Bourdieu’s theoretical system for the notion of the ‘migrant-body,’ we should examine how the theme has been treated by some authors in the field of social sciences, within an approach committed to the systemization of a ‘sociology of the body.’ In this analytic field, Bryan Turner (1984 [2014]) suggests that sociology needs to centre more on the body to comprehend what he calls the dimension of the “corporality of human life.” Drawing from Foucault, the author points out that the origin of sociology resides in modern medicine, not in the authors who are frequently evoked as the discipline’s forefathers, such as Comte, and its concern to classify, order and discipline bodies. Turner critiques constructivist approaches to the body, even though in the foreword to the third edition of his book Body and Society(1984[2014]), he argues that Bourdieu advanced the sociological analysis of the body through the concepts of habitus and practice, since these help comprehend the body both as an inscription of the social and, therefore, of forms of control and domination, and as a medium for experiencing the world. His main thesis on the body, however, concerns the category of vulnerability as a foundation for “human experiences and interests,” a category rooted in the problematics of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of being and time.

For Le Breton (2009), the object of the sociology of the body is the process through which the body is socially produced. This sociology of the body depends on the analysis of the relations with the other, placing him among those authors who thinks of the body in terms of relations of cultural belonging and otherness. In this interplay, the body reveals its symbolic dimension. It is ‘adaptable’ and can respond to the needs of integration. In sum, according to Le Breton (2009), the sociology of the body studies the “physical rooting of the actor” in society.

In the line of studies of the body produced in the context of the debate on identities, Cunha (2014), in her analysis of the “the body image,” centres her analysis on the process of embodiment. Subjacent to this idea is the critique of the Cartesian paradigm in its various expressions that separates the body from the mind. The author turns to the work of Marcel Mauss and Merleau-Ponty to ground this perspective and presents other contributions ranging from the symbolic interactionists to (relational) sociologists like Elias, Bourdieu and Giddens, and postmodern and poststructuralist authors influenced by psychoanalytic and feminist studies. Consumer society appears as the new environment in which the social actor is embodied, above all through the logic of consumption in its diverse economic and symbolic dimensions.

Consequently, in diverse theoretical, methodological and even epistemological perspectives, the body is recognized as a form of being in the world, profoundly related to the economic, political and cultural characteristics of which it forms part. The body has been one of the most evident points of reference^[6] in the classification and hierarchization of individuals and social groups. On one hand, the body possesses an inexorable dimension. It exists. But on the other, its existence is the outcome of its lived experience in the world. It is through the body that the individual becomes social, establishing and developing connections with other individuals. This problematic brings me to the debate on the relationship between body and identity with its various connective meanings.

The colour of the skin or hair; the shape of the eyes, nose or mouth, the presence of a vagina or a penis, the size of the hands, the roundness of the hips and breasts are always culturally significant and in this way become (or do not) marks of race, gender, ethnicity and even class and nationality. (LOURO, 2004, p. 75)

The above quotation can be used as a starting point for the theoretical debate that I am looking to develop based on Bourdieu’s conceptual system.

Study of these relations has gained in strength over recent decades with the revelation of forms of control and domination manifested not only in economic relations but also through the actions of the State, the market and technologies that heteronomously act on social individuals by standardizing and controlling their bodies. These actions may include educational disciplines, aesthetic patterns, or models of experiencing affects and desires, almost always involving the naturalization of the cultural and social expressions of life. Along these lines, there have been many studies of gender, sexuality and bio power, among other themes, that have mobilized new theories and approaches such as those of Foucault (1998, 2000), Scott (1995), and Butler (2000, 2002), among other theorists.

Within the broad field of studies of the body, I have set out to dialogue with authors situated within an analytic area called relational sociology (EMIRBAYER, 1997).This has enabled me to think about the body through the debate on identities that maintain alterity as a counterpoint, generating the possibility of considering the immigrant as a producer of diversity and cultural otherness. This path will lead to the notion of embodiment and Bourdieu’s theoretical system explored later in this article.

Within these limits and to begin to present a set of authors who dialogue more directly with the relation between body and identity, I turn to the work of Le Breton for whom “[…] the body is the actor’s most visible feature” (2009, p. 10), but at the same time it is “false evidence” (2009, p. 26). This is because, beyond its physical materiality, its flesh, bones and muscles, the body only has social meaning when contextualized in its time and its actual or virtual spaces. According to Le Breton: “[…] man is not the product of the body, he himself produces the body’s qualities in his interaction with others and in his immersion in the symbolic field. Corporality is socially constructed” (2009, pp. 18-19). Among all the different parts of the body, it is the face (LE BRETON, 2019) that most clearly evinces the marks of identity and alterity. It is the most exposed part and where the feelings are concentrated, the expressions of social actors in the constant interplay of convergences and divergences with other actors.

The importance of the body and the face in identificatory processes (Ennes & Marcon, 2014) is ‘optimized’ in the immigrant’s condition. In many cases, it is the more visible marks of the body and face that give away the person’s belonging to a determined group or the condition of ‘foreigner.’ Similarly to Scott (1995) cited earlier, Le Breton helps explain how the colour of skin, eyes and hair, along with the shape of the nose, eyes and jaw, are signs that identify the condition of foreigner and from which it is difficult for the immigrant, should they wish, to detach themselves. According to Le Breton, in circumstances like migration, “…the body needs to be erased, diluted in the familiarity of functional signs” (2009, p. 50). The immigrant’s body and face, however much he or she may feel otherwise, are seen and identified with an outsider, someone who does not belong to the dominant group […] The stranger’s body becomes a strange body. The other’s presence is limited to the presence of their body: they are their body” (LE BRETON, p. 72).

The body’s visibility is one of the bases to produce stigma. Its classification thus produces social difference and inequality. Diverse examples and studies exist of stigma in Western societies in which the relationship between stigma and body emerges as a recurrent theme. One of the most important of these studies is by Goffman (2008), which has close parallels with my research topic and problematic since, for the author, stigma needs to be considered not only as an attribute but also as a set relations. This approach interests me firstly because of its relational rather than essentialist character, and secondly because, as proposed at the beginning of this article, the migrant-body is a body produced and materialized in the diverse relations in which migrants live their trajectory.

Also discussing the relationship between stigma and body, Elias (2000) emphasized the importance of physical traits and the production of stigma for the social and cultural demarcation between the established and outsiders (2000, p. 32). Stigma^[7]indicates that difference has been converted into inequality and the stigmatized person placed in a relation of inferiority and subordination vis-à-vis the stigmatizer. Even in the contemporary context in which difference has been claimed as a right, ridding oneself of stigma is still a necessity for social inclusion and integration. Along these lines, Gilman (2005) adds that: “The stigma they evoke is the repugnance at a clear sign of difference, a difference attributable not only to the body but also to the character” (2005, p.114).

In his book The Civilizing Process (1994), Norbert Elias, for his part, contributes substantially to our comprehension of the social in the biological body. An example is when he associates the development of civilization with a set of changes that are not only behavioural but also associated with new criteria around which revulsion, tenderness and physical attraction are produced.

In the postmodern world, one of whose constitutive elements are migratory flows, the relationship between the individual and their body involves, Le Breton (2014) once again argues, a process of decoupling. The individual acquires autonomy over their body. The body becomes a field of action, a territory exploited by the individual in their disputes with themselves and others. The body is now ‘modulable’ by the individual (2014, p. 21) “[it] favours multiple identities, the fragmentation of the subject engaged in a series of encounters” (2014, p.24).

In this ephemeral, individualized and individualizing world (BAUMAN, 2005; CANCLINI, 2007; CASTELLS, 2000; FEATHERSTONE, 1997; HALL, 2002), the body is a means of self-presentation. Also according to Le Breton (2014),it could be said that the affirmation of the self through the body in contemporary society maintains a proportionally inverse relation to the weakening of collective references to a life in common.

This set of questions on the social production of the body, its relation to the question of identity, and its centrality in the contemporary world, especially with respect to old and new forms of domination, resistance and social transgression, can be better comprehended through the Embodiment Paradigm (CSORDAS, 1990) in which the body is dislocated from the condition of an object to be studied to the subject of culture – that is, the body is not conceived as an appendage of the individual but as an existential terrain (ibid, p. 5). Although not excluding other ideas described above, this conception better synthesizes the notion of the migrant-body explored in the present article. In this sense, the body results from acquired dispositions that simultaneously express the ways of life and power relations in a society, as well as being a means of intervention of the individual in this social world (Bourdieu, 2007, p. 171).

3. Thinking the ‘migrant-body’ through Bourdieu

Having arrived at the embodiment perspective, we can turn to the contributions of Bourdieu’s theoretical system, especially the concepts of habitus, hexis, strategy, capital and field (BOURDIEU, 1977, 1986, 1989, 1990,1992a, 1992b,1996,2007, 2009, 2014) to think about the ‘migrant-body.’ In “The logic of fields,” (1992a), Bourdieu emphasizes that these concepts form a theoretical system and should not be conceived separately: “Such notions as habitus, field, and capital can be defined, but only within the theoretical system they constitute, not in isolation” (BOURDIEU, 1992, p. 96).^[8]

Here I examine each of these concepts in turn to show the connections between them. Next, I emphasize how they dialogue with the theme of the body and, consequently, how they help us elaborate the idea of the ‘migrant-body.’

The concept of habitus occupies a central place in Bourdieu’s theoretical system. This centrality is explained, at least in part, by his project of theoretically and epistemologically moving beyond the dichotomies between objectivity and subjectivity, commonplace in the theoretical debate in the field of the Social Sciences over the twentieth century.

This is precisely the function of the notion of habitus, which restores to the agent a generating, unifying, constructing, classifying power, while recalling that this capacity to construct social reality, itself socially constructed, is not that of a transcendental subject but of a socialized body, investing in its practice socially constructed organizing principles that are acquired in the course of a situated and dated social experience. (BOURDIEU, 2000, pp. 136-137^[9]

In his endeavour to open a space between objectivists and subjectivists via the concept of habitus, Bourdieu promotes a dialectic between the two extremes. To summarize his argument, the agent’s power to act in accordance with social impositions or to transgress them are both socially constructed. Consequently, agent and structure, subjectivity and objectivity are not exclusive but rather produced continually. The above citation also presents the relationship between habitus and body. As Bourdieu explains with greater clarity in the following citation:

The habitus, as society written into the body, into the biological individual, enables the infinite number of acts of the game – written into the game as possibilities and objective demands – to be produced; the constraints and demands of the game, although they are not restricted to a code of rules, impose themselves on those people – and those people alone – who, because they have a feel for the game, a feel, that is, for the immanent necessity of the game, are prepared to perceive them and carry them out. (BOURDIEU, 1990, p. 63)^[10]

The citation can be used as a link to the concepts of field and strategy. The field is actually a heuristic category through which Bourdieu reinforces, so to speak, his attempt to evade both those approaches, whether those analyses centred on the agent’s rationality and its prevalence overde terminant social factors, or their opposite, deductive analyses that dispense with empirical investigation and the practical dimension of social life. In his words:

It is in the relationship between habitus and the field, between the feel for the game and the game itself, that the stakes of the game are generated and ends are constituted which are not posited as such, objective potentialities which, although they do not exist outside that relationship, impose themselves, within it, with absolute necessity and self-evidence. (BOURDIEU, 2000, p. 151)^[11]

It is important to stress that the field is an analytic category, not an empirical fact. It too can be conceived as a methodological resource that serves to guide and direct the research.

Thus the notion of field functions as a conceptual shorthand of a mode of construction of the object that will command, or orient, all the practical choices of research. It functions as a pense-bete, a memory-jogger: it tells me that I must, at every stage, make sure that the object I have given myself is not enmeshed in a network of relations that assign its most distinctive properties. (BOURDIEU,1992, p. 228)^[12]

As well as being closely related to habitus, the concept of field is, by definition, inseparable from that of capital, since the field is understood as a field of forces and disputes determined not just by agent’s way of acting but also the power she or he possess in the form of economic, social and/or symbolic capital.

Capital, which, in its objectified or embodied forms, takes time to accumulate and which, as a potential capacity to produce profits and to reproduce itself in identical or expanded form, contains a tendency to persist in its being, is a force inscribed in the objectivity of things so that everything is not equally possible or impossible. (BOURDIEU, 1986, p. 15)

Capital is an expression of economic, social or cultural power that positions agents within the social relations of force that constitute a field. From the above citation we can also highlight the fact that, in defining capital, Bourdieu makes explicit its embodied dimension. This offers some clues to the idea of the ‘migrant-body.’

Habitus and capital thus possess a bodily dimension. In other words, the body is a means of expression of the habitus and can also act significantly in a specific field like capital, as already mentioned in the section of this article with reference to problematization. The body is a decisive element in the relations of force between agents, therefore, and, although not mentioned explicitly by Bourdieu, within his analytic model.

Hexis, in turn, I understand to be a specific kind of habitus. While not every habitus is expressed as hexis, every hexis is an outcome of a habitus: in other words, it is habitus transformed into hexis (Bourdieu, 1972)and thus results from a process of incorporation of the social into the biological body.

Body hexis speaks directly to the motor function, in the form of a pattern of postures that is both individual and systematic, because linked to a whole system of techniques involving the body and tools, and charged with a host of social meanings and values. […] But the fact that schemes are able to pass from practice to practice without going through discourse or consciousness does not mean that acquisition of the habitus comes down to a question of mechanical learning by trial and error. (BOURDIEU, 1977, p. 87-88)^[13]

As expressed, it may be that Bourdieu’s attempt at synthesis makes hexis a twin concept to the ‘bodily techniques’ of Marcel Mauss. A small digression can be made here on the importance of Mauss to Bourdieu’s work, in particular on the place of the social in the body. In his celebrated text “Techniques of the body” (2003), we can encounter not only references but explanations of the concepts of habitus and hexis:

Hence I have had this notion of the social nature of the ‘habitus’ for many years. Please note that I use the Latin word-it should be understood in France-habitus. The word translates infinitely better than ‘habitude’ (habit or custom), the ‘exis’ [hexis], the ‘acquired ability’ and ‘faculty’ of Aristotle (who was a psychologist). […] In them we should see the techniques and work of collective and individual practical reason rather than, in the ordinary way, merely the soul and its repetitive faculties. (MAUSS, 1973, p. 73)^[14]

We cannot avoid recognizing the strong presence of Mauss, whose notion of body derives from that of the person in Bourdieu’s conceptual system, including on the dynamic between inheritance and acquisition of habitus. Referring to ways of walking – a theme that Bourdieu would later address in a number of his own works, such as Pascalian Meditations (2007), The Logic of Practice (2009), Distinction (2008), and Outline of a Theory of Practice (197.) – Mauss, discussing how Maori women walk, suggests that everything in adult life results from learning, even the person’s way of walking. “This was an acquired, not a natural way of walking. To sum up, there is perhaps no ‘natural way’ for the adult” (1973, p. 74).^[15]

These considerations a propos Marcel Mauss’s contributions to our understanding of the relationship between society and biological body are important not only for a better understanding of how and from what sources Bourdieu constructed his conceptual system, but also for the reflection on how the migrant-body is produced in the dialectic between inherited and acquired traits over the migrant’s lifetime, including, obviously, his or her migratory trajectory.

Finally, in discussing the Bourdieusian concepts most directly relevant to the objectives of this article, there remains the concept of strategy. For Bourdieu:

It is the product of the practical sense as the feel for the game, for a particular, historically determined game – a feel which is acquired in childhood, by taking part in social activities […] The good player, who is so to speak the game incarnate, does at every moment what the game requires. That presupposes a permanent capacity for invention, indispensable if one is to be able to adapt to indefinitely varied and never completely identical situations […].One’s feel for the game is not infallible; it is shared out unequally between players, in a society as in a team. (BOURDIEU, 1990, p. 62-63)^[16]

For me, the concept of strategy, once again as a consequence of the concept of habitus, can be understood and deployed in studies on the ‘migrant-body’ as an expression of the agent’s learning in the migratory context and the actualization of the habitus (BOURDIEU, 1990, p. 196).

Having presented the concepts of Bourdieu that seem to me central to thinking the ‘migrant-body,’ I shall turn now to focus on some of the author’s works that refer more directly to the themes of embodiment and the body.

4. Body and embodiment in Bourdieu

Over the course of their life, immigrants experience various expressions of physical and symbolic violence, but at the same time can learn to reposition themselves within the fields in which they act. Weakness and suffering (BOURDIEU, 2007) can lie at the origin of the learning and actualization of the immigrant’s habitus. It is at the level of practice, then, the practice of the body, practice as embodiment, that we must understand the ‘migrant-body.’ From this we can infer that the centrality of the body in Bourdieusian theory derives from the centrality of the practical (bodily) dimension of social life.

Bourdieu’s theoretical system enables me to propose that in the case of the ‘migrant-body,’ as with the human body in other contexts, the moral dimension overlaps the physical. In other words, posture, bodily techniques, aesthetic standards and self-care are associated with the social group and with the migrant’s position within the field in which she or he acts, rather than being inherent to the body’s physiology or nature. We are dealing with systems of social classification that, far from possessing a univocal meaning, can be materialized on the basis of habitus and hexis, as well as in the forms capitals producing social hierarchies or transgressions.

In Outline of theory and practice (1977), Bourdieu proposes that the body mediates between physical and social space.^[17]In other words, he sets out from the premise that society should be understood as an interconnected double space, physical and social, and that the agent (and her/his body) is located within it as a result ofher/his habitus and forms of capital. In this early work, based on the reality of the Cabila in Algeria, Bourdieu explains the role of rites in the embodiment of agents through movements and postures expressed through them, explaining the relations between public life and private life that are objectified in double form as body and as public and domestic space, albeit not in automatic fashion.

Having established that the internal space of the Kabyle house receives a symmetrically opposite signification when replaced in the total space outside, we are justified in saying, as we did earlier, that each of these two spaces, inside and outside, can be derived from the other by means of a semi-rotation, only on condition that the mathematical language expressing such operations is reunited with its basis in practice, so that terms like displacement and rotation are given their practical senses as movements of the body, such as going forwards or backwards, or turning round. (BOURDIEU, 1977, p. 117)

In this sense, the rites establish a connection between public and private as an expression of the incorporation of social elements – that is, through the body not reason (BOURDIEU, 1977), hence his inclusion in the embodiment paradigm (CSORDAS, 1990).

The concept of hexis also appears in other works by Bourdieu. In “Remarques provisoires sur la perception sociale du corps” (1977), hexis appears as an expression of embodied social dispositions – that is, dispositions that become substantialized through either form or technique. Beyond this dimension, I would also argue the need to consider more conscious expressions of the relation like body care (a topic to which I return later) that are also explained by the dispositions acquired as an expression of strategies or (bodily) capital.

In another work, Bourdieu (2009) recalls that practical reason is inscribed in the body and informs the agent’s choices. This inscription results from belonging to a field and is determined the agent’s belief in it. Being practical, this belief is not a “state of mind” but a “state of the body” (BOURDIEU, 1990, p. 70).^[18] Thus the relationship between practical reason, belief and body involves a bodily hexis that is a “durable way of standing, speaking, walking, and thereby of feeling and thinking” (BOURDIEU, 1990, p. 70)^[19]produced in the body’s relations to time and space.

The centrality of the body in Bourdieu’s sociological analysis is also present in Pascalian Meditations (2007). Habitus and hexis represent the process of embodying society. He returns to the idea already explored in The Logic of Practice that society makes itself present in the social agent through the body and not through consciousness or reason.

Setting out from Bourdieu’s contributions, I would like to propose two possibilities for thinking about the body, specifically the ‘migrant-body,’ I suggest that the relationship between agents and their migratory trajectory is produced in two ways: ‘inherited’ and ‘strategic,’ both of which function as an expression of the “state of the body” rather than the ‘soul,’ as explained above. From this viewpoint, the ‘inherited’ body is objectified through the embodiment of values and power relations originating from the migrant’s situations of class, gender, race and so on in the fields in which she or he acts in the country of origin. This modality is an expression of what is unconscious in both habitus and hexis.

The second possibility, the ‘strategic body,’ is better comprehended through the concepts of habitus and strategy. This possibility refers to the agent’s process of learning, in this case in the migratory context and in the many fields (economic, artistic, political and so on) in which this can occur.^[20] I refer to this process through the expression “conversion of stigma into emblem” adapted from the chapter “Identity and representation: elements for a critical reflection on the idea of region” (BOURDIEU, 1989), materialized in the form of ‘body capital.’

In terms of the ‘inherited’ dimension of the ‘migrant-body,’ we can identify a proportionally inverse relationship between estrangement and the period spent living in the place of destination. In other words, the body is stranger the less time that it has been in the receiving society. This relationship is no different to the ‘strategic’ dimension of the body, since time is essential for the acquisition and/or actualization of the habitus and the capitals specific to the fields in which the migrant acted, acts and will act on her or his trajectory.

5. The body in migratory studies and possible dialogues with Bourdieu

The bibliographic survey encountered two groups of articles. One group containing attempts to propose and systematize the idea of an ‘immigrant habitus’ and a ‘mobility capital,’ but making no direct reference to the theme of the body in the migratory context; and another group in which the body appears, albeit not centrally, but makes no reference to Bourdieu’s work. In this case, I turned to the latter articles as an initial source on the kinds of realities experienced by immigrants that are related in some form to the body.

In terms of the first group of articles, Brito (2010) argues that spatial mobility is associated with the acquisition of a ‘migrant habitus.’ This habitus is obtained through one’s own experiences and those of concrete or imagined close people who have experienced mobility previously. According to the author, the ‘migrant habitus’ explains why some people decide to migrate and not others. This habitus, however, does not appear as a condition for the success of the migratory project (success in the sense of achieving its objectives) but is connected to the motives for migrating. The migrant habitus comprises three elements: (a) familiarity as processes, (b) with experience and(c) a trajectory of study abroad.

Bourdieu’s contributions to migration studies reappear in an article by Oliveira and Kulaitis (2017), in which they hypothesize the existence of an ‘immigrant habitus’ and a ‘mobility capital.’ The ‘immigrant habitus’ refers to the set of material and symbolic dispositions that form part of the immigrant’s actions and trajectory. These are the dispositions necessary to participate in a trajectory of mobility. It involves, for example, a desire or project belonging to oneself or one’s community of origin; personal experiences or those of close people; the circulation in networks and communities of immigrants; and the form part of mechanisms of ethnic/national solidarity. ‘Mobility capital,’ in turn, involves the conversion of this habitus into forms of power that contribute to the concretization of the migration project, such as obtaining a passport and visa, or joining networks that help new migrants to find work, and so on.

These authors (BRITO, 2010; OLIVEIRA & KULAITIS, 2017) have explored the idea of a specific immigrant habitus, referring to the dispositions that initially make it possible for someone to acquire the condition of immigrant. This habitus is revealed at all stages of the migratory trajectory – that is, from the moment of deciding to immigrate to the arrival in the receiving society, including the circumstances and conditions of mobility properly speaking, involving crossing borders and passing through customs.

Apropos the articles from the second group, in order to explore the empirical dimension more closely and better systematize the present reflection, I shall discuss these works from the viewpoint of the ideas presented above of the ‘inherited-body’ and the ‘strategic-body.’

Based on my review of the literature, the ‘inherited-body’ can be visualized, for example, among Bolivians in São Paulo. According to Vidal (2012), one of the markers identifying Bolivians in the city’s streets is a more bent over physical posture of these immigrants, associated with their work in sewing workshops^[21] (caused by long working hours).^[22] This marker is stronger than skin colour or hair type due to the considerable diversity found among Brazilians too. In this case, the differentiated body is a ‘migrant-body’ produced in the migratory context. More than differentiated, it is in reality a body that reveals social inequality since other Bolivian immigrants, physicians for example, do not bear this mark. This suggests that this ‘migrant-body’ is also a ‘social class body’ (BOLTANSKI, 2004).

Still on the forms of identifying Bolivians in São Paulo, Alves (2012) gives greater emphasis to the body techniques associated with ways of walking, crouching and gesticulating as identifying elements.

In this way, a small action or a small gesture can translate with claritycertain cultural elements apprehended by the individual within his or her community, or even outside of it, as in the case of Bolivians in São Paulo (ALVES, 2012, p. 232)

The body techniques of Bolivian immigrants, like any other immigrants, express the way in which the person was socialized in the society of origin – or more accurately, the person objectifies the incorporation of values, forms of life and work experienced in both the country of origin and the country of destination as an expression of habitus and hexis.

The ‘inherited body’ reappears in some studies on borders. Along these lines, Rosello and Wolfe (2017) emphasize how aesthetic patterns politically and culturally associated with nationalities and/or races/ethnicities function as markers of difference, and are mobilized in the context of physical and symbolic borders by agents of the state in order to identify immigrants and refugees. Hair styling, the use of makeup and/or tattoos are used as signs to select those who might be checked, or those who are authorized to cross the border and/or remain in the country of destination.

The communication between immigrants and nationals is another dimension of the relations among ‘migrant-bodies’ found in the consulted studies, related to the communication difficulties faced by Brazilians. According to Reis and Ramos (2012), in Portugal the attempt by Brazilian immigrants to obtain citizenship through, for example, access to public health services involves intersubjective and/or bodily aspects.

Portugal and Brazil are both Portuguese-speaking countries, yet there exist different cultural codes, body postures and ways of speaking in their various regions, both within Brazil and between Brazilians and Portuguese, which can be perceived differently and constitute a hindrance and barrier to communication. (RERIS & RAMOS, 2012, p. 108)

As the authors point out, communication also involves the body and its language, and comprises a decisive component, in this case, in terms of diminishing or augmenting the cultural and social distances that prevent Brazilians from accessing health services.

As one of the most visible identity markers, the immigrant’s body is part of an interplay of visibilization and invisibilization. This dynamic results from strategies that sometimes render the body literally invisible, and sometimes display it as a form of affirmation in the form of capital. ‘Visibility’ and ‘invisibility’ are one of the expressions of the ‘inherited body’ and the ‘strategic body,’ which can be understood better through the concepts of habitus and strategy. From the immigrant perspective, it is possible that visibilization and invisibilization reveal a way of better positioning themselves within the specific fields in which they act or within the society of destination as a whole.

We can see how these possibilities appear in the consulted literature. ‘Invisibilization’ is examined by Vacchianno (2015) in a study of Moroccan youths who stowed away in ship holds to reach Italy, experiencing a severe lack of water and food on the journey. Fear and anxiety accompanied their crossing of the Mediterranean.^[23] According to the author, the interplay between the ‘visibility and ‘invisibility’ of the Moroccan body is also observed in the experience of institutionalization of these young people in reception and detention centres, where body postures, gestures, idioms, tone of voice and clothing are related to dynamics of subjectification, revealing the condition of submission and the lack of autonomy of these youths. The ‘visibilization’ or ‘invisibilization’ of the body of these young Moroccans is an outcome, therefore, of the control of the state agents and agencies that seek to prevent their entry into Italy or to resocialize them. However, they can also reveal forms of resistance and transgression in relation to state control.

The reality experienced by Moroccan youths suggests that the ‘migrant-body’ also results from the incorporation of the experience lived over the migratory trajectory – that is, between the place of origin and the destination. According to Bourdieu (2014, p. 248) “…the body designates not only the actual position, but also the trajectory.”

The immigrant’s body as an expression of the incorporation of dispositions inherited from the society of origin can produce innumerable forms of exclusion in the receiving society, depending, once again, on the field in which she or he acts. The physical aspects are clearer and easily mobilized as markers of difference, enabling the security forces – whether on the streets, squares, subway stations and other public places of the large and small cities and towns of the host country – to act to impedeand/or constrain immigrants. There are, however, other aspects of the society of origin embodied in immigrants, such as their way of walking, speaking and gesticulating, which, as Bourdieu suggests, generate obstacles and hinder their dispute for material and symbolic goods. This body is the ‘inheritedbody,’ the body that simply by its presence and by the feeling that it produces of being out of place or being in the wrong place (restaurants, universities, clubs, work places) is capable of producing subordination, when not exclusion.

The body as an object of surveillance and control by the state of the host country reappears in the study by Challinor (2014). The author investigates how relations between the individual biological body and the collective social body are manipulated by the state through the reality experienced by Cape Verdean mothers in Portugal. According to Challinor, the transition from the ‘individual biologized body’ to the ‘collective social body’ of the mother and the Cape Verdean woman leads to the construction of a negative image of the African woman, used to justify political actions and the expression of disciplinary micro powers that discriminate against them.

Along similar lines, Pussetti (2015)^[24] studies what is called ethnopolitics in Portugal – that is, management projects, ideas and policies (such as family planning) used to normatize the conduct and morality of the immigrant’s body in accordance with the understanding of the host country. In this case, the ‘inherited-body’ is, as demonstrated in the study above, manipulated by the State to control and subalternize the ‘migrant-body.’

The association between the ‘individual biologized body’ and the ‘collective social body’ – which I interpret, once again, as an expression of the ‘inherited-body,’ the habitus and hexis inherited from the country of origin –can also be found in the research developed by Sovik (2009) in London. The study is based on a billboard of a Brazilian beer in which a photograph depicts the Brazilian body through the practice of capoeira. Like the two previous texts, albeit from different perspectives, here too there is an association between the body imagined as a nationality and the individualized body that appears in the photo. Practicing capoeira can be understood as the result of the embodiment of a society whose strength, skill and even sensuality is part of its cultural heritage. In other words, based on the information provided by the author, we could say that the reference to Brazil in the billboard derives from the centrality of the body in Brazilian culture, while the English/European population is attributed a cerebral and intellectualized cultural reference.

The overlapping between the collective and individual immigrant and their expression via the ‘inherited-body’ appears from another perspective, this time in the sense of an affirmation of the immigrant. This is the case studied by Herold Jr. (2014), who investigated German physical culture through a study of the reproduction of Turnenor ‘gymnastics,’ a set of body practices developed initially in Germany and taken by German immigrants to the United States. In this case, the ‘migrant-body’ is not individualized but refers instead to a nationality. Unlike the Cape Verdean women, the ‘German’ collective, as the author shows, is mobilized positively to affirm characteristics valorised in the host country.

The counterpart to the dimension of ‘inheritance’ is that of ‘strategy,’ which simultaneously results from and produces the “actualization of the habitus” (Bourdieu, 2007, p. 196) in a new context and/or a new field. It results, therefore, from the embodiment of new practical and symbolic dispositions in the migratory context. This ‘strategic body’ is revealed, for example, in practices of body modifications using surgery (ENNES & RAMOS, 2017, 2018) and/or aesthetic procedures such as hairstyling, beard shaving, makeup or even the use of clothes foreign to the aesthetic patterns of the country and culture of origin.

In turn, the ‘inherited’ and ‘strategic’ dimensions of the body both maintain a proportionally inverse relation between estrangement and the time spent living in the destination country. In other words, the body is stranger the less time that it has been in the latterand, conversely, time is essential for the acquisition of habitus and specific capitals of the fields in which the migrant has acted, acts and will act. It should be recognized, though, that this time may be relative due to other characteristics of the agent like age, sex, gender, schooling, migratory experience and so on (elements that can be converted into capitals), as well as the person’s activities and circulation in different fields in the home and host countries. This dynamic results from the reflective dimension of the habitus according to which “the instruments of construction of the social […] are socially constructed, in other words structured by the world that they structure” (2007, p. 166).

This process results in what Bourdieu (1977), in “Remarques provisoires sur la perception sociale du corps,” calls the reconversion of the ‘alienated body’ into the ‘unencumbered body.’ This interplay between the ‘alienated body’ and the ‘exemplary and unencumbered body’ can be considered a symbolic expression of the production of the ‘migrant-body’ in which the migrant acts on the bases of his or her knowledge of the rules of the game, the ability to play, and the availability of capitals that will place the migrant in a favourable or unfavourable situation, always provisional, within the specific fields in which he or she acts (the fields of fashion, aesthetics, work, academia and so on) and in which the body appears as a kind of capital.^[25]

This is the process of “reconversion of stigma and emblem” already mentioned in the article: the immigrant’s condition can generate capitals, including body capital that economically, socially, politically and symbolically favours those agents living this condition. In other words, the same sensuality and informality attributed to Brazilian and/or Latin American immigrants, which frequently produce stigmas and place them in a subordinate condition, can, when instrumentalized by immigrants themselves, constitute a capital that makes them employable, including in detriment to native workers.

On this point, Ennes and Ramos (2017) present the case of a female Brazilian immigrant hired to work in the beauty products section of a large department store in Lisbon, due to the association between her nationality and her amiability. Similarly, an Ecuadorian man in Madrid attributed his employment in the civil construction industry to his physical qualities. In both cases, the immigrants had been hired in preference to national workers. Although the testimonies of these immigrants need to be mediated and contextualized within a broader universe of information, it is important to stress that the research and interviews were conducted in 2013, a year of economic crisis in the two Iberian countries. Consequently, entering the formal labour market was a major challenge even for Portuguese and Spanish workers.

The dynamic of reconverting ‘stigma’ into ‘emblem,’ the expression of a strategy that I am proposing here as one of the avenues for thinking about the ‘migrant-body,’ can be observed in other situations like the one studied by Pusseti (2016). Although not the approach taken in her study, the article offers the possibility of understanding how immigrants, in this case anthropologists and artists, encounter a space for their self-affirmation in the artistic field, specifically through an exhibition of photographic works depicting the “suffering bodies” of immigrants, which perform the double function of denouncing and making visible forms of violence experienced in the migratory context. In this case, I suggest that the body is reconverted into art and into a means to heal the physical, psychological, emotional and symbolic wounds of the migratory experience.

The ambiguous and contradictory character of the body understood as an expression of habitus and hexis can be more easily seen in context, like the one studied by Togni (2012) showing how Brazilians in the Cacém district of Lisbon present a set of elements that are significant in terms of cultural consumption and mobilized as positive identification markers through hairstyles, tattoos and depilation (TOGNI, 2012, p. 53).

Body aesthetics acquires new meanings, or at least imbues new meanings to practices considered superfluous and superficial. Beauty salons become spaces for acting on the body, whether through hair treatments (cuts, straightening, crimping, use of mega-hair), eyebrows, skin clarification and homogenization, and so on. These spaces are identificatory territories materialized through the affirmation of patterns socially constructed as traditional, such as the example provided by Chaves (2012, p. 142) in which “Brazilian women like flat, straightened hair, very flat, while the Portuguese women like taller hair,” but also the hybridization of aesthetic styles and patterns.

As asserted earlier, the dialogue with the two groups of articles presented in this section aims to explore the possibilities for thinking about the ‘migrant-body.’ Brito, as well as Oliveira and Kulaitis, seek to analyse the immigration context through Bourdieu’s concepts. The more direct absence of the theme of the body in the latter’s work does not negate the fact that they have become important references for the study of the ‘migrant-body’ through analytic proposals based on the ideas of the “migrant’s habitus” (Brito, 2010) or the “migrant habitus” and “mobility capital” (OLIVEIRA & KULAITIS, 2017).

For their part, the articles focusing on the theme of the body were useful first to demonstrating the various ways in which the body has been examined in migration studies. The pairs ‘non-inherited body’ and ‘strategic body,’ and ‘visibilized body’ and ‘invisibilized body’ were means to create a dialogue between Bourdieu’s theoretical system and the various analytical approaches and empirical focuses. Ultimately, it shows that the body suffers from social and legal impositions but may also express forms of resistance and transgression.

Through the concept of strategy, Bourdieu emphasizes the practical dimension of social life along with the capacity of agents based on their comprehension of the meaning of the game, to adapt their habitus and increase their capital within the field in which they act. I argue that the concept of strategy allows us to think about changes in both the habitus and body hexis in the context of migration, since it can reveal the process of learning how to convert the alienated body into the unencumbered body. Adapting their way of dressing, speaking and gesticulating may be a precondition, therefore, to obtaining better results in games traditionally controlled by nationals, or, on the contrary, to strengthening particular elements attributed to their body as a form of controlling the game, like masters of capoeira, samba dancers, or even the claim of greater vigour and physical strength for working in the civil construction industry. Here, the concept of strategy has been of great importance to thinking about and comprehending the potential dynamics of converting the inherited body into a strategic body – the result of the actualization of the habitus and acquired capital.

As stated earlier, the exercise undertaken in this section represents an effort to explore empirical expressions of the body in a migratory context, with no intention to criticize or reinterpret the data and information collected by the authors concerned.

Conclusions

This article’s objective has been to seek out theoretical and conceptual support in Bourdieu to develop the idea of the ‘migrant-body’ as part of a study agenda on the importance of the body in migratory contexts. For this purpose, I argue that the concepts of habitus, hexis, strategy, field and capital are extremely useful. Alongside the reflection on these concepts, understood both individually and interconnectedly, I have dialogued with articles on immigration that either use Bourdieu or explore in some way the theme of the body.

What motivated this article was the need to consider the bodily dimension of the immigration phenomenon to deepen the reflection on questions related to cultural diversity and forms of difference and inequality. My proposal is to centre more on the body or the embodied nature of the migratory experience in order to better understand the relations of force and power over the trajectory of immigrants between their country of origin and the country of destination.

The article demonstrates the existence of a broad and varied volume of studies on the body, systematized in the form of the ‘sociology of the body’ or by studies interested in the theme of identities. It is one the basis of this wide field of research that, based on Bourdieu’s theoretical system, I have looked to think about the ‘migrant-body’ as an expression of the process of embodiment. In other words, the ‘migrant-body’ results from the objectification of the immigrant’s trajectory. This process of objectification is better explained by the concepts of habitus and hexis, which translate not only into physical impositions, like those observed on the borders and in the customs halls, but are also expressed by aesthetic procedures(like makeup and body care)and those associated with body techniques, such as ways of walking, gesticulating and so on.

The dialogue with a number of researchers on the topic of migration whose articles include a discussion of the question of the body aimed not only to situate the body in migration studies, but also to systematize their approach through two categories: the inherited-body,’ like the body that objectifies the dispositions inherited from the country and culture of origin, or the migrant’s insertion in the country of destination; and the ‘strategicbody,’ whose objectification involves strategies and the actualization of the habitus that also result from the process of embodying the experience of migration and result in a ‘body capital.’

The categories ‘inherited-body’ and ‘strategic-body,’ for their part, have proven useful in terms of shedding light on processes of “reconverting stigma into emblem.” Examples can be found in the studies cited here, such as the case of immigrants who convert embodied characteristics like sensuality and physical vigour into forms of economic inclusion. This suggests that, though adverse, the immigrant’s condition generates possibilities for resistance to and transgression of the hegemonic forces in society as a whole and in specific fields.

As can be seen, the conversion of the immigrant’s embodied dispositions into capital depends, to some extent at least, on the migration trajectory – that is, on the economic, political and symbolic power relations between the home country and the host country, and the field in which they are inserted and act. This is a process similar to the one studied by Bourdieu on inherited capital and acquired capital, specifically in his analysis of the inherited capital of the family of origin and the capital acquired through school education (2008, p. 76).

The conversion of body dispositions into capital depends, then, on the wider forces in play, unfolding in the symbolic market between the country of destination and the country of origin. Thus, Germans and their body practices are valorised in the United States. but the body of the Cape Verdean woman is stigmatized and controlled in Portugal.

This logic of a more general economic and symbolic market may become contested or transgressed, such that the immigrant’s alienated body can be converted into an unencumbered body in the migratory context. In this case, the embodiment of the culture and social dynamics of the country of origin results in symbolic and economic gains, albeit limited to the fields in which the immigrant acts, such as the artists who by publicizing the suffering body of immigrants produce greater visibility to their condition, creating more possibilities to be seen, heard and considered by the host society. Likewise, the sensualisation of the migrant’s body, like those of Brazilian men and women, can be converted into capital and allow them to become better positioned in a game whose rules are strongly influenced or even dictated by cultural consumption and aestheticization.

But, of course, while Bourdieu’s theoretical system has demonstrated that it is possible to speak and think of a ‘migrant-body,’ and although I have limited myself to just part of it in the article, it would not be appropriate to claim that this system is sufficient.

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