Pierre Bourdieu

reading 204 "cultural capitalism and symbolic violence"

by Randall Collins

“All pedagogic action is, objectively, symbolic violence insofar as it is the imposition of a cultural arbitrary by an arbitrary power.”

Bourdieu unique sees culture as an arena of stratification and conflict. Culture is itself an economy, and is related to the material economy of goods and services. Stratification in the cultural economy and in the material economy is reciprocally related, both as cause and effect. Culture is a realm of power struggle, related to realms of politics.

This threefold theme shows that Bourdieu’s intellectual roots are in Max Weber.

The central concept “symbolic violence” defined as “ power which manages to impose meanings and to impose them as legitimate by concealing the power relations which are the basis of its force” Such power is very widespread, which makes up the content of formal schooling, childrearing, of public status display, or religion, and the communication media. Their legitimacy as cultural meanings by which people define the world and each other’s place in it, is based upon force. Often this force is hidden and necessarily so.

Bourdieu also assumes Durkheim’s analysis of education as civil religion, in which moral and intellectual categories are imposed as ever-present representatives of the force society. He claims that the society is based upon misrecognition. Durkheim had argued that society is held together by ritually created beliefs in its gods. In Bourdieu’s sense, this involves a fundamental misrecognition, since society creates the gods, but must hide this fact from itself because only by believing in the gods as objective can the belief be effective.

Levi-Strauss took Marcel Mauss’ proposition of exchange of gifts as the basis of the primitive economy in his Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949/1969) examines the various structures of tribal society from the political and economic alliances produced by gift exchanges of women. Bourdieu disagreed with him and argued that matrimonial exchange rules are officialising strategies imposed by ruling groups in practice to manoeuvring among families struggling for advantageous alliance. He thinks that the exchange culture in this misrecognized form is the basis of the reproduction of the entire society.

In modern society, schooling reproduces the distribution of cultural capital among social classes. The content of the dominant schooling is the culture that corresponds to the interests of the dominant classes. This constitutes cultural capital, the chief instruments of transforming power relations into legitimate authority, with double reproduction, both structural relations among the classes and particular families that constitute social classes pass along their advantages from generation to generation.

That is Habitus, the internalization of an arbitrary cultural standard, at first in the family, later in school. Once finishing schooling, individuals carry a fund of culture which gives them entrée to particular occupations and social circles. This movement of individuals through a system of cultural inculcation thus reconstitutes the structure of society. Culture reproduces the entire structure of society, including its material economy.

Bourdieu believes that symbolic capital is always credits, wealth, he ultimate basis of power can exert power, and exert it durably, only in the form of symbolic capital. Differed from Marx on capital accumulation, he thinks the accumulation of cultural capital is the key leads to class diversion. Education system unifies all cultural capital into a single market, and guarantee convertibility of cultural capital into money at a determinate and objectively fixed rate.