23 Bangladesh e-Journal of Sociology. Volume 17, Number 2. July 2020. Aristotelian Habitus and the Power of the Embodied Self: Reflections on the Insights Gained from the Fakirs in Bangladesh Mohammad Golam Nabi Mozumder 1 , Abstract: This article traces back classical Greek and Medieval meanings of habitus to show that Bourdieu’s redefinition of habitus discarded a seminal feature of Aristotelian habitus—the power of radically transforming the self at will. I elaborate how the practices of purposefully training the embodied self remains marginalized in Pierre Bourdieu’s re-conceptualization of habitus. Examining Aristotle’s habitus, this paper brings back the focus on the long-neglected insight of the power of deliberately (re)training the self in constructing a heterodox but ethical way of being and socializing. As an example, I refer to the Fakirs in current Bangladesh, who cultivate antinomian life-practices. The main argument of the paper is that habitus in Bourdieu’s formulations is less suitable than Aristotle’s in analysing the praxis of the Fakirs. I suggest that instead of sticking to a universal conceptualization of habitus, sociologists should consider with equal importance both models of habitus articulated by Aristotle and Bourdieu. Doing that could benefit contemporary sociology in two ways: First, Aristotle’s conceptualization of habitus is an important tool in identifying the sociological importance of the praxis of marginalized groups, e.g., Fakirs in Bangladesh; and second, extending the focus of a key sociological concept, i.e., habitus, addresses the apparent disconnect between the wisdom of heterodox practitioners in the Global South and dominant social theories built upon the analyses of European and American social traditions. Keywords: Body, Subjectivity, Fakir Lalon/Lalan, Habitus, Power, Self Introduction There has been a disjuncture between Aristotle’s model of training the self and later developments in social theories of the body, such as embodiment and biopolitics. The disjuncture surfaces in Bourdieu’s redefinition of the term ‘habitus.’ Bourdieu purged the term ‘habitus’ of its classical meaning of ‘virtuous dispositions,’ which was characteristic of Aristotle’s model of training the self. Aristotelian understanding of habitus remained dominant in the writings of Roman and Medieval thinkers (Nederman 1989; Sparrow and Hutchinson 2013), including Islamic philosophers (Mahmood 2005: 137). Bourdieusian habitus discards the essentially ethical nature of training the embodied self, originally laid out in the Greek conceptualization of habitus. The ripple effect of the disjuncture, orchestrated by Bourdieu, concerns the role of the embodied self. In the Aristotelian model, the self holds the power to train it to embody virtuous dispositions, in other words, to cultivate an ethical subjectivity. But later literature on embodiment by Marcel Mauss (1973), Mary Douglas (1984, 1996) and Pierre Bourdieu (1990, 1977, 1985); and biopolitics by Michel Foucault (1995, 2008) put the body under the strategic command of power through society, culture and the state. Aristotle’s paradigm of training the self has been missing in social theorizations of the body, except in Foucault’s later works, especially on Pagan technologies of the self (1988, 1990a, b, 2012). 1 Researcher, Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies. Email: mozumderbd81@gmail.com