The Mediodoxy: A Bourdieusian Third Logic of Practice between Orthodoxy and Heresy in the Lived Experience of Anti-Muslim Racism and Antisemitism

Bourdieu’s triad of doxa, orthodoxy, and heresy explains consensus and contestation yet leaves undertheorized the middle ground where practice unfolds. I theorize mediodoxy as a third logic of practice and knowledge that neither ratifies doxa nor negates it. Drawing on 23 interviews with Jews and Muslims, I reconstruct sequences in which actors invoke racialized tropes (“Timbuktu,” “pure-blooded”), normalize discriminatory jokes, or acquiesce in exclusion. These cases show symbolic violence operates not only by external imposition but also through the practical compromises of those navigating stigma. Extending Bourdieu’s claim that domination works with the complicity of the dominated, I specify mechanisms of complicity and argue that mediodoxy can crystallize as a mediodoxic habitus—durable, patterned, and formed through recurrent experience of antisemitism and anti-Muslim racism. Mediodoxy refines field theory and advances the sociology of racism and antisemitism by showing inequality is stabilized, legitimated, and rendered ordinary between orthodoxy and heresy.