While I found Bourdieu's theory addressing very subtle and even psychological aspects of the social world, I still thought there was a privileging of structure ["In reality, the dispositions durably inculcated by the possibilities and impossibilities, freedoms and necessities, opportunities and prohibitions inscribed in the objective conditions (which science apprehends through statistical regularities such as the probabilities objectively attached to a group or class) generate dispositions objectively compatible with these conditions and in a sense pre-adapted to their demands. The most improbable practices are therefore excluded, as unthinkable, by a kind of immediate submission to order that inclines agents to make a virtue of necessity, that is, to refuse what is anyway denied and to will the inevitable" (p.54)] though I can see how he tries to break away from a strict structuralist approach of the Levi-Straussian kind; [LiPuma I think on the other hand is critiquing him for the reverse? - "The theoretical outcome is such a strong claim for the indivisibility of knowledge and human interest, stronger even than that articulated by Habermas (1973), that it leads to a positional epistemology. What we can know of ourselves or our society depends entirely on our "orbit" within a field of forces." (p.23)]

But my main question / concern is whether Bourdieu's theory does not remove/reduce action from being  intentionally / consciously political  by explaining action as a result of the interactions between a habitus and field which limit the range of possibilities, and by arguing that one is not often aware of the game he is born into? ["The habitus - embodied history, internalised as second nature and so forgotten as history - is the active presence of the whole past of which it is the product. As such, it is what gives practices their relative autonomy with respect to external determinations of the immediate present." (p. 56) - this sounds like a justification of present action to be reproducing the past and therefore maintaining the hierarchy / domination] LiPuma also states that the notion of the ‘habitus' enables Bourdieu to analyze the behavior of agents as objectively coordinated and regular without being the product of rules, on the one hand, or conscious rationality (conscious rationality to me being the operative term that makes me wonder if he deliberately wants to view practice as not intentionally political?) And this to me would be the break from Foucault  - whereas there is a strong idea of embodiment in his argument by which bodies occupy certain social positions because of differential distribution of embodied capital, embodied knowledge, embodied beliefs etc, I think Foucault's argument is about how knowledge or other forms of 'capital' are used to shape bodies in a deliberate manner.

One could I guess argue that his idea of reflexivity is trying to do just that - that is make actors conscious of their social positions - but that doesn't seem to address my concern; which is that while I can become conscious of my act, I need not be guilty of it if its something that is embodied in me because of my habitus which I cant escape (even if there are other choices that i could have made within my habitus) - so for example one does not typically hold people accountable when they raise their arm as a reflex (defensive) action, and even if they were to be conscious of it, they could still justifiably raise their hand the next time around since it is a bodily mechanism of defense.