Cultural Reproduction

Cultural reproduction is a concept developed primarily by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to describe the method by which dominant classes within an unequal society replicate and legitimate aspects of their culture. Pierre Bourdieu and other theorists argue that cultural reproduction ensures that the various forms of language, dress, art, and learning of the dominant class appear as normative to the society at large. As such, cultural reproduction is theorized to be one of the major tools by which the dominant class retains power. Cultural reproduction differs from the somewhat related cultural production in that cultural production deals with the development of cultural objects, whereas cultural reproduction is focused on how existing cultural forms of the dominant class become prevalent over alternate cultural forms.