Cultural Capital

The late Pierre Bourdieu, one of the leading French social thinkers of the twentieth century, developed the concept of “cultural capital” to explain the ability of elite managers and professionals to transmit their privileged status to their children, a process he referred to as “social and cultural reproduction.” By “social and cultural reproduction,” Bourdieu referred not only to the intergenerational reproduction of family status but also to the reproduction, first, of larger systems of social inequality and, second, of systems of cultural hierarchy (for example, the prestige of high-culture genres such as ballet and classical music compared with chorus lines and hip-hop).

Bourdieu was an abstract thinker with a gift for concrete social analysis. Like his other concepts, cultural capital has both a general definition and specific referents. Most abstractly, cultural capital comprises familiarity with and easy use of cultural forms institutionalized at the apex of a society's cultural hierarchy (for example, orthodox religious doctrines in a theocracy). In his work on contemporary France, Bourdieu used “cultural capital” to refer to familiarity with prestigious aesthetic culture, such as the high arts, literary culture, and linguistic ability. Such “high culture” is often produced by artists who eschew commercial values and claim to pursue art for art's sake. In many countries, it is distributed by nonprofit or public institutions. And its status is ensured by substantial public and private investment in school and university curricula that celebrate it, as well as high-culture programming in libraries and broadcast media and, in many countries, direct government support for high-culture artists and cultural institutions. Consequently, compared with other forms of prestigious knowledge, familiarity with the arts (or an understanding that such familiarity is a sign of distinction) tends to be nearly universal, cross-cutting boundaries of region, gender, or profession. The precise content of cultural capital, however, differs from society to society (e.g., in Japan, cultural capital includes knowledge of Noh Theatre and tea ceremonies).

Bourdieu asked how high-status people with relatively little personal wealth, for example, managers of publicly held corporations or professionals such as lawyers, doctors, and university professors, are able to pass down their privileged positions to their children. Before the rise of the manager-control firm, transmission of privilege was easy: The owner of a business simply bequeathed it to his (very rarely her) children. Once businesses passed into the hands of shareholders, direct transmission was no longer practical. Instead, Bourdieu argued, families transform their economic capital into “cultural capital” by exposing children to prestigious culture from early childhood on, through household conversations, lessons, and visits to museums and performing-arts events. Thus trained, children possess what Bourdieu called “embodied cultural capital”: cultural capital built into their ways of seeing and their schemes of evaluation, which they carry with them wherever they go. (Bourdieu also wrote of “linguistic capital,” the ability to speak with confidence, correctness, and grace, which may be regarded as a form of cultural capital.)

When children from privileged backgrounds go to school, their teachers mistake this embodied cultural capital for intelligence or giftedness. Thus, they convert their cultural capital into good grades, encouragement, and admission into competitive academic programs. Success in school facilitates success in later life, especially with completion of university training, at which point embodied capital is supplemented by the credentialed cultural capital of degrees and diplomas. (Bourdieu also wrote of “objectified cultural capital,” or books, paintings, musical scores, and other physical objects that one needs embodied cultural capital to appreciate, but this plays a less important role in his theory.) After completing schooling, children from high-status families “reconvert” their cultural capital back into economic privilege, completing the circuit of reproduction. Cultural capital remains useful after school, however, enabling its possessors to establish comfortable relations with potential patrons, employers, or marital partners.

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