Cultural Reproduction

Origin and Evolution of the Concept

French sociologist Bourdieu was most influential in coining the term cultural reproduction. The first [Page 534]appearance of the term occurs in Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron's 1970 text La Reproduction: Éléments pour une théorie du système d'enseignement (published in English as Reproduction: In Education, Society, and Culture in 1977). In the section titled “Pedagogic Work,” Bourdieu argues that a group or class in power has an incentive to impose the values and customs most relevant to maintaining their domination of power over other groups. The most effective way of doing this is to construct a durable habitus—the socio-cultural conditions in which the individual or group exists that become second nature and unquestioned over time. Bourdieu identified the institution of education as the primary mode through which a durable habitus is transmitted to the next generation that will inherit the reins of power. The reproduction of culture in the educational system infuses the younger generation of the dominant class with a kind of cultural capital (or cultural resources) that can be used for access to various social, academic, or economic opportunities. This capital can be built up through further education and used to access the means of power through conferral of legitimacy from the generation already in power. The process of cultural reproduction is a form of what Bourdieu referred to as symbolic violence because it forces subordinate groups to acknowledge arbitrary forms of the dominant group as the norm without any reciprocal acknowledgment of their own sociocultural forms.

Bourdieu further elaborates the term cultural reproduction in his 1973 paper titled “Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction.” In this paper, Bourdieu expands on the role of education in cultural reproduction. According to Bourdieu's argument, assessments of competence in the educational system require linguistic and cultural fluency. The language and culture of the dominant class is almost always the medium through which all groups or classes are assessed for competence. Thus, individuals who come from communities from within the dominant culture are primed for success in school through no true effort of their own. Notions of “effort,” “talent,” and “mastery” shield the successful and unsuccessful from the underlying mechanisms that tend to guide their fate. Bourdieu also links the distribution of cultural capital to the distribution of economic capital. This furthers his claim that cultural reproduction is the chief means through which social inequality is replicated in society.

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