Cultural Capital

Conceptual Overview

Bourdieu's use of the term cultural capital evolved over the course of his career. The concept initially emerged in research on the French educational system with Jean-Claude Passeron in 1964. Based on surveys and ethnographic materials, Bourdieu and Passeron showed that students from upper-class families did better in school at least in part because they brought a well-refined cultural sensitivity into educational settings. Their possession of linguistic capital meant that the children of elites had a stronger vocabulary and a more intuitive sense for the complex stylistic conventions of proper French (both written and spoken). They also possessed other forms of cultural capital including knowledge of relevant cultural content (especially familiarity with genres of high art such as classical painting, literature, and music) and greater skills for aesthetic appreciation and judgment. These forms of cultural capital resonated strongly with the stylized pedagogical emphasis of the French public education system. Bourdieu and Passeron interpret these findings as support for the contention that in France, elite social classes reproduce themselves by passing along various types of capital to their children—economic capital that brings a variety of life opportunities, but also cultural capital that provides other kinds of resources for success.

Bourdieu moved on to investigate a variety of cultural and social fields (including, for example, the fields of literature, painting, photography, science, academia, and law). He incorporated the concept of cultural capital into a broader theory of capital formations. In addition to economic and cultural forms, Bourdieu distinguished social capital (resources that accrue to one through his or her social networks) and symbolic capital (resources associated with the production of legitimate authority and competence). He also distinguished between three forms of cultural capital: an embodied state (dispositions of mind and body), an objectified state (cultural objects such as artworks, books, tools), and an institutionalized state (such as educational credentials).

Throughout this period, Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital continued to reflect certain basic theoretical assumptions: (1) Culture is seen as arbitrary, the result of particular class or group enculturation projects; (2) agents are presumed to act according to perceived interests and in accordance with tactical gamesmanship; (3) choices are not rational in the calculative sense of rational choice theory, but rather are embedded within a complex theory of culture that links Bourdieu's concept of habitus (emphasizing taken-forgranted assumptions about how the world works, both practically and cosmologically) and a theory of practice that emphasizes the embodiment of lived experience; (4) every field is defined by the type of capital that is dominant in it, and every type of capital is defined by the field within which it dominates; and (5) every field is organized around a distributional logic according to which those groups or class fractions that possess the dominant forms of capital also receive the primary benefits from and maintain hegemony over activities within the field.

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