Cultural Capital

While he didn’t consider himself a Marxist sociologist, the theories of Karl Marx heavily
influenced Bourdieu’s thinking. Marx’s influence is perhaps most evident in Bourdieu’s
theory of cultural capital. Like Marx, Bourdieu argued that capital formed the foundation of
social life and dictated one’s position within the social order. For Bourdieu and Marx both,
the more capital one has, the more powerful a position one occupies in social life. However,
Bourdieu extended Marx’s idea of capital beyond the economic and into the more symbolic
realm of culture.
Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital refers to the collection of symbolic elements such as
skills, tastes, posture, clothing, mannerisms, material belongings, credentials, etc. that one
acquires through being part of a particular social class. Sharing similar forms of cultural
capital with others—the same taste in movies, for example, or a degree from an Ivy League
School—creates a sense of collective identity and group position (“people like us”). But
Bourdieu also points out that cultural capital is a major source of social inequality. Certain
forms of cultural capital are valued over others and can help or hinder one’s social mobility
just as much as income or wealth.
According to Bourdieu, cultural capital comes in three forms—embodied, objectified, and
institutionalized. One’s accent or dialect is an example of embodied cultural capital, while a
luxury car or record collection are examples of cultural capital in its objectified state. In its
institutionalized form, cultural capital refers to credentials and qualifications such as degrees
or titles that symbolize cultural competence and authority.
Habitus
Habitus is one of Bourdieu’s most influential yet ambiguous concepts. It refers to the
physical embodiment of cultural capital, to the deeply ingrained habits, skills, and
dispositions that we possess due to our life experiences. Bourdieu often used sports
metaphors when talking about the habitus, often referring to it as a “feel for the game.” Just
like a skilled baseball player “just knows” when to swing at a 95-miles-per-hour fastball
without consciously thinking about it, each of us has an embodied type of “feel” for the social
situations or “games” we regularly find ourselves in. In the right situations, our habitus
allows us to successfully navigate social environments. For example, if you grew up in a
rough, crime ridden neighbourhood in Baltimore, you would likely have the type of street
smarts needed to successfully survive or steer clear of violent confrontations, “hustle” for
jobs and money in a neighbourhood with extremely low employment and avoid police
surveillance or harassment. However, if you were one of the lucky few in your
neighbourhood to make it to college, you would probably find that this same set of skills and
dispositions was not useful—and maybe even detrimental—to your success in your new
social scenario.
Habitus also extends to our “taste” for cultural objects such as art, food, and clothing. In one
of his major works, Distinction, Bourdieu links French citizens’ tastes in art to their social
class positions, forcefully arguing that aesthetic sensibilities are shaped by the culturally
ingrained habitus. Upper-class individuals, for example, have a taste for fine art because they
have been exposed to and trained to appreciate it since a very early age, while working-class
individuals have generally not had access to “high art” and thus haven’t cultivated the habitus
appropriate to the fine art “game.” The thing about the habitus, Bourdieu often noted, was
that it was so ingrained that people often mistook the feel for the game as natural instead of
culturally developed. This often leads to justifying social inequality, because it is
(mistakenly) believed that some people are naturally disposed to the finer things in life while
others are not.
Field
Along with Bourdieu’s notion of a “feel for the game” came his theory of the game itself.
Bourdieu understood the social world as being divided up into a variety of distinct arenas or
“fields” of practice like art, education, religion, law, etc., each with their own unique set of
rules, knowledges, and forms of capital. While fields can certainly overlap—education and
religion, for example, overlap in many religiously-based colleges and universities in the
United States—Bourdieu sees each field as being relatively autonomous from the others.
Each field has its own set of positions and practices, as well as its struggles for position as
people mobilize their capital to stake claims within a particular social domain. In art, for
example, Bourdieu noticed that each generation of artists sought to overturn the established
positions of those who came before them, only to be critiqued by the next generation of
“avant-garde” artists who sought their own powerful positions within the field. Much like a
baseball or football field, social fields are places where people struggle for position and play
to win.