The habit is appearance? Are these synonyms or not?

To meet on clothes is a characteristic feature of a person. Appearance can reveal much to others about a person, it is often called a habitus. How universal is this concept, does it affect only the external aspects? Let's try to sort out one by one.

Habitus in the "human" sense

In the conceptual apparatus of psychology and sociology, the mental habit designates a set of stereotypes of perception and principles of practical activity formed during the activity. The concept was introduced by Elias and Bourdieu.

The deep idea of the surrounding world, which has passed from experience to a way of life and thinking, which has become a person's "nature", is the habitus. Bourdieu defined it as "a system of stable, transferable dispositions that, integrating past experience, functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, understandings And actions And makes it possible to achieve infinitely diverse goals. "

Anthropology also successfully operates with this concept. In physical terms, here the habitus is a set of parameters of a person's appearance, including physique, clothing, skin and hair color, facial expression, gestures and similar visible signs.

Applied aspect of habitual characteristics

The estimation of the habit allows the specialist to penetrate into the essence of a person's psychosomatics, when one can say a lot about the state of health and way of life on posture and gait. Physicians often determine the possible conditions and problems of the patient by their physique and appearance.

For example, the asthenic habit is a combination of lean physique, high growth, muscular atrophy, pale skin coloration. It is characterized by a predisposition to neuropsychiatric disorders and various infectious diseases.

Red-nosed, red-nosed fatties with a picnic constitution represent an apoplectic habit. It, in turn, gives a greater probability of disrupting the blood supply to the brain (stroke) and the work of the cardiovascular system as a whole.

The notion of habit is applicable not only to man, it is also found in the application to plants and animals.

Plant's habitus

Botany usually refers to the habitus of tree plants as a characteristic life form (biomorph). The formation of the appearance of a tree or shrub is influenced by a number of factors:

• Lifestyle and habitat (climate, relief, soil);
• Shape and thickness of the trunk;
• Direction of growth of large branches (vertically, at an angle, horizontally);
• Type of branching of shoots;
• Size and shape of the crown, its thickness.

Depending on the conditions of plant life, habitual characteristics may vary. For example, trees on swampy marshy soils grow with a curved, thin stalk, and in conditions of depleted soil they rarely reach the maximum size.

In landscape design, the habitus is a kind of pattern that is used by a specialist to design a landscape background and compose woody groupings. This is convenient, since the seedlings do not give a complete picture of the final result of the artistic design, differing from the adult plants.

Habitus in veterinary medicine

Veterinarians and zoologists, while determining the habitus of an animal, rely on several characteristics:

1. The constitution is determined by the state of the skeleton, muscles, skin, the development of subcutaneous tissue, as well as the proportionality of the proportion of parts of the body of the individual.
2. Fatness can be estimated on a kind (round or angular contours of a body) and at a palpation (volume of a fatty клетчатки and musculature). Gradation of this parameter: good, average and unsatisfactory fatness. The extreme degree of the latter means the exhaustion of the animal.
3. Assessment of body position (normal, involuntary, abnormal) can help in the diagnosis of injuries and diseases. Abnormal positions of parts of the body are often characteristic symptoms, and the forced position of the limbs diagnoses the nature of the injury.
4. Temperament is determined by observing the behavior of the animal. Flaccid and apathetic individuals are characterized by a phlegmatic temperament, nervous and violently reacting - excitable. Animals with good health are characterized by a calm or lively temperament.

These signs give a three-dimensional picture of the animal's condition, help assess its danger and choose a certain style of behavior when interacting with it.

As you can see, the habitus is not just a set of external parameters, but also a set of mental settings, habits and behavioral patterns. For those organisms, of course, who are able to act actively.