PIERRE BOURDIEUCULTURAL AND SYMBOLIC

CAPITAL

EDUC 800- Ways of KnowingElizabeth Hanna

Kathy NuttHye-Young Shin

An Introduction to Pierre Bourdieu

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flz6shD3g2s

Pierre Bourdieu1930-2002Biography

Born August 1, 1930 in Denguin, Pyrenees-Atlantiques, France in a modest rural family.

Educated at the Lycee in Pau, Lycee Louis-le-Grand.

Studied philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure.

Worked as a lycee teacher at Moulins from 1955-1958.

Undertook ethnographic research among the peasants of Kabylia in 1958 -1962 after completing his military service in the Algerian War.

Switched to the study of sociology which allowed him to combine both theory and practice.

Married Marie Claire Brizard in 1962. They had three sons.

Returned to the University of Paris in 1960.

Pierre Bourdieubiography, cont.

Pierre Bourdieu Biography, cont..

Gained a teaching position at the University of Lille where he remained until 1964

Director of Studies at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes from 1961.

Chair of Sociology at the College de France, in the VIe section in 1981.

In 1968, took over the Centre de Sociologie Europeenne until his death in 2002.

Died January 23, 2002 in Paris, France (age 71)

Selection ofBourdieu’s Major Works

Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste (1984)

In other words: Essays towards a reflexive sociology (1990)

Language and symbolic power (1991) The rules of art: Genesis and structure of

the literary field (1996) Masculine domination (2001)

Bourdieu’s Influences

Max Weber (1864–1920)

German political economist & sociologist

He is typically cited, with Émile Durkheim and Karl Marx, as one of the three principal architects of modern social science.

Bourdieu’s Influences, cont.

Karl Marx (1818-1883)

• A German philosopher, political economist and revolutionary whose ideas are credited as the foundation of modern communism.

• He summarized his approach in the first line of chapter one of The Communist Manifesto: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

Bourdieu’s Influences, cont.

Émile Durkheim (1858-1917)

A French positivist sociologist

Influential in both sociology and anthropology, Durkheim published groundbreaking sociological studies on law, education, crime, religion, suicide, and many other aspects of society.

Bourdieu’s Influences, cont.

Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-2009)

• French anthropologist and ethnologist, and has been called the "father of modern anthropology”

• He was one of the central figures in the structuralist school of thought, where his Ideas reached into fields including the humanities and philosophy.

Bourdieu’s Influences, cont.

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) Influenced Bourdieu’s focus on the body, action, and practical dispositions, which

found their way into his theory of habitus.

Edmund HusserlMaurice Merleau-Ponty

Bourdieu’s Influences, cont.

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

A French mathematician, physicist, and Catholic philosopher

He corresponded with Pierre de Fermat on probability theory, strongly influencing the development of modern economics and social science.

Bourdieu titled his Pascalian Meditations after Blaise Pascal.

People influenced by Bourdieu

Michel de Certeau

Loïc WacquantFrance Winddance Twine

Howard Winant

Bourdieu Concepts

Fields

a setting in which agents and their social positions are located

a structured social space with its own rules, schemes of domination, legitimate opinions and so on.

relatively autonomous from the wider social structure, in which people relate and struggle through a complex of connected social relations.

Main Fields

Habitus

a structure of the mind characterized by a set of acquired schemata, sensibilities, dispositions and taste.

a system of durable & transposable "dispositions”

the individual agent develops these dispositions in response to the determining structures (such as class, family, and education) and external conditions (fields) they encounter.

Habitus

1. important factor contributing to social reproduction.

2. provides the practical skills and dispositions necessary to navigate within different fields

3. constantly remade by these navigations and choices

4. mediates between “objective” structures of social relations and the individual “subjective” behavior of actors

Capital

Social Capital

"the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition."

The Forms of Capital (1986)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ND7UgjXHenY

Cultural Capital

non-financial assets that involve educational, social, and intellectual knowledge.

provided to children who grow up in non-wealthy but highly-educated and intellectually-sophisticated families.

Cultural Capital

forms of knowledge, skills, education, and advantages that a person has, which give them a higher status in society.

parents provide their children with cultural capital by transmitting the attitudes and knowledge needed to succeed in the current educational system.

Three Variants of Cultural Capital

in the embodied state incorporated in mind and body

in the institutionalized state, such as educational qualifications

in the objectified state, simply existing as cultural goods such as books, artifacts, dictionaries, and paintings

Cultural Capital

•YouTube - Pierre Bourdieu - Different Tastes

Symbolic Capital

the resources available to an individual on the basis of honor, prestige or recognition.

functions as an authoritative embodiment of cultural value.

a crucial source of power.

Symbolic Capital

Symbolic Capital cannot be converted to other forms of capital (economic, cultural, social). However, these latter three can have also symbolic value.

Example 1

economic + symbolic value

Examples 2

buying a work of original art

economic capital + the cultural capital to appreciate it

Symbolic Violence

first introduced by Pierre Bourdieu a holder of symbolic capital uses the

power this confers against an agent who holds less, and seeks thereby to alter their actions.

incorporation of unconscious structures that tend to perpetuate the structures of action of the dominant

Symbolic Violence

more powerful than physical violence in that it is embedded in the very modes of action and structures of cognition of individuals, and imposes the specter of legitimacy of the social order.

Symbolic Violence Cultural Capital (e.g.,

competencies, skills, qualifications) can be a source of misrecognition and symbolic violence.

working class students vs. middle class students

transformation of people's symbolic or economic inheritance (e.g., accent or property) into cultural capital (e.g., university qualifications)

YouTube - Sociology is a Martial Art (2/

Back to Bourdieu

Bourdieu and Literacy Education

“In broad terms, literacy is the ability to make and communicate meaning from and by the use of a variety of socially contextual symbols. A literate person can mediate their world by deliberately and flexibly orchestrating meaning from one linguistic knowledge base and apply or connect it to another knowledge base. The definition of literacy is dynamic, evolving, and reflects the continual changes in our society.” http://www.bridgew.edu

Bourdieu and Literacy Education, cont.

“Language forms a kind of wealth…”

According to Kramsch in Pierre Bourdieu and Literacy Education,“Bourdieu’s main contribution to education is a deep appreciation of the fundamental paradox of literacy as being both liberatory and conservative, an instrument of both social change and social reproduction.”

Bourdieu and Literacy Education, cont.

“a Bourdieusian stance enables educators to better understand their own and their students’successes and failures, and thus turns the paradox into a creative experience.”

Consistent with Bourdieu’s social practice, he recommended that teachers “combine the awareness of the theory and the empathy of the practice.”

How do Pierre Bourdieu’s theories connect to other Ways of Knowing?

An invitation for discussion…