Word.ws English Dictionary

cleft habitus

cleft habitus noun: a sense of dislocation experienced when one's life conditions change drastically, for example through social mobility.

Noun

cleft habitus

  1. A sense of dislocation experienced when one's life conditions change drastically, for example through social mobility.
    • Bourdieu's idea of “cleft habitus”—a split between the world you come from and the one you enter—helps explain the resentment we see in Vance, who has written about feeling anxious over not knowing which fork to use at Yale […], and about being silently judged by people who seem to belong in a...2025 May 24, Nancy Kolff-Rodriguez, “The irony is it takes two Frenchmen to explain Maga”, in FT Weekend (Letters section), London: The Financial Times Ltd., →ISSN, →OCLC, page 8

Origin of cleft habitus

Calque of French habitus clivé, coined by French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher Pierre Bourdieu.

Questions about cleft habitus

What does cleft habitus mean?
Cleft habitus means a sense of dislocation experienced when one's life conditions change drastically, for example through social mobility.
What part of speech is cleft habitus?
Cleft habitus is a noun.

Words near cleft habitus in the dictionary

  1. clefs
  2. cleft
  3. cleft chin
  4. cleft chins
  5. cleft grafting
  6. cleft habitus
  7. cleft lip
  8. cleft lips
  9. cleft of Venus
  10. cleft palate
  11. cleft palates

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cleft habitus (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “cleft habitus.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cleft_habitus. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.