History is physical, haptic, and practical. 

It is physical because the past never happened on paper. It happened in bodies: in hands that shaped clay, in shoulders that carried grain, in feet that wore hollows into stone steps. Every document we read was once an object someone held.

It is haptic because understanding often begins at the fingertips. The weight of an axe, the grain of a plank, the stubbornness of a fibre that will not twist the way you expect — these things tell us what no description can. To touch a material is to meet the limits its makers worked against. 

It is practical because knowledge lives in doing. A technique survives only as long as someone still performs it; the moment the last pair of hands stops, the knowledge becomes a guess. Repeating the gesture is a way of asking a question the sources cannot answer.

The past is shaped by economic capital, cultural capital, social capital, and symbolic capital.

Material resources: money, property, land, means of production. It is directly convertible into money and is institutionally guaranteed in the form of property rights. Bourdieu treats it as the root form, since the other kinds can in the last instance be traced back to it, though never transparently and never without cost.

Cultural capital is knowledge, competence, and cultivation. It exists in three states. In its embodied form it consists of internalised dispositions, taste, manners, and command of language; acquired slowly through socialisation, it is bound to the person and cannot simply be handed over. In its objectified form it takes the shape of cultural goods such as books, paintings, and instruments, which can be bought, though using them requires the embodied form. In its institutionalised form it appears as credentials and academic titles, which certify competence and give it official, durable recognition.

The resources that come with belonging to a lasting network of relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition. Its volume depends both on how far the network extends and on the capital held by the people in it. It is not given once but has to be maintained through continuous investment in relationships.

Not a separate substance but a state of the others. Any form of capital becomes symbolic when it is perceived and acknowledged as legitimate, appearing as prestige, honour, authority, or reputation. Its effectiveness rests on misrecognition, meaning that it works only as long as it is not seen as capital but as a natural attribute of the person.