P. Bourdieu: a Special Brand of Cultural Sociology 1.Introduction 2.Bourdieu”s intellectual...

P. Bourdieu: a Special Brand of Cultural Sociology

1. Introduction

2. Bourdieu”s intellectual traditions

3. Bourdieu’s meta-theory of social life

4. The key concepts: habitus, position, field, capital, class

5. The contributions to sociology of education

6. The contributions to class studies

7. The insights on the role of culture in social life

8. Summary and conclusion

Outline


1. Introduction

• Bourdieu’s life and times (1930-2001): individuals, generations, students’ movements, development of sociology, emergence of cultural sociology, etc.

• B the academic and B the polemicist

• From ground-breaking works to teaching Sociology

• Reading B from different fields of enquiry to reading B the Bourdieu way (thinking with B against B) or ‘Reading B, Using B’

• The layout of our discussion


2. B’s intellectual traditions

a. Structuralism and Existentialism (philosophy, epistemology)

• objectivism (universal patterns or structures) vs. subjectivism (unconditional and unconditioned freedom of the subject; binary oppositions in the intellectual field in French society in B’s formative years

b. Ethnology and ethnography: B’s fieldwork experience

• B as attempting to transcend that opposition; his exercise is like incorporating the traditions into his sociological habitus, and impose a conscious and critical reworking on these internalized and institutionalized dispositions (Brubaker); in other words, like any social practice, the practice of sociology also has its inherent dispositions


• ethnology is more about the Culture of a People, whereas ethnography is more about the study of patterns of behaviour and attitudes of a population; 民族學 vs. 民族誌 ; one is more anthropology, the other more sociology; one is more a discipline, the other more a methodology

• B’s study of the Algerians in the late 1950s: more an ethnology than an ethnography; but instead of a unified Culture characterizing the Algerians, he found diverse cultures, as distinct groups in the society think of themselves in relation to other groups; a plurality of culture, of culture-staking groups


• B’s interest then is more about the displacement of the traditional cultures of the Algerian tribes in the face of the onslaught of modern culture; he made references, in a Durkheimian fashion, to collective and communal sentiments characteristic of a traditional society, and he is interested in the consequences of the uprooting of that ‘harmonious’ and ‘taken-for-granted’ culture (which, unlike Durkheim’s collective conscience, is embodied in the individuals)

• While his ethnology brought him close to the tradition of structuralist anthropology, he was not willing to see the individuals as governed then by one set of values/culture, and now, by another; for him, there are traditional values embedded in new behavioiur; already, B emphasized the contingent, open-ended but still overall-structured side of social actions (habitus as inherited dispositions; as the past in the present)


• Also, unlike the anthropological approach, B is against the use of ‘role’ as a set of cultural representations; it is too static

• B agrees that culture is a map where we find (locate and chart) the routes of behaviour; but he also emphasizes the importance of practical knowledge: it is only through practical knowledge – like actual driving --- that we know the routes, as if the map has now become part of our body (the place/road as in front of us, left, right, behind us, etc.) (Outline)

c. B as responding to the classical masters: B as marrying Marx and Durkheim? B as indebted to Weber for the substance of his theory? (B’s as inhabiting in the practices of the masters?)

• B’s question and approach is this: how do we or how should we learn from the masters? Do we learn from them a body of concepts, ideas and arguments? Or do we learn from them a certain intellectual disposition? In other words, we could see the past masters as craftsmen, who made something new out of the materials (philosophy, economics, etc.) available to them; we learn from them by watching them in action/practice, and what we learn is more in terms of intellectual orientations or dispositions: visions of the social world are framed (what questions to ask? What aspects to attend to? What are the basic units for meaningful analysis? Etc.)

• B’s sociology is thus best presented not in terms of (a system of) concrete concepts, propositions, etc., but as a distinctive posture, ‘a theoretical stance’ (Brubaker), as nurturing a certain way of looking at the world



3. B’s meta-theory of social life (or how do we conceptualize social action: B as inheriting Weber and reworking on the materials?)

a. The idea of social life as game: game implies practice, mutual orientation, strategy and tactics, and, of course, rules (rules of the game, and what is at stake, e.g., is it about losing/gaining money, status, face, honour? what are the rules involved?)

from this initial conception of social action/practice and social life, we could see B’s endeavours as – in one respect -- about game, exchange and cultural meanings (symbolic games) in an unequal world (Examples: Chinese old saying and proverbs on reciprocity)

from these exchanges, one could derive the logic of practices (in this case, the logic of reciprocity/gift exchange), but what drives this logic is not rules, and not culture as such


if the exchange game is about honour, then B is arguing that what is involved here is neither simple communicative action (tit for tat, taking up invitation, returning favours, etc.) nor ritual (where the rule of reciprocity or equal honour dominates and infuses social actions)

it is not rules that is the driving force of these exchanges; it is a sense of honour, which is a cultivated disposition, ingrained from early childhood, and inscribed in our thought schemas and bodily postures

in actualizing this sense of honour, one does not act automatically, ritualistically or unthinkingly; instead, there are strategies and tactics (e.g., if one wants to terminate the exchange, one immediately returns the gift in the same amount; or if one wants to shame the other party, one gives out a gift so great that the other party could not possibly reciprocate); one often plays with time; there is thus relative uncertainty and unpredictability ----- this leads to B’s emphasis on practical knowledge (social agents as virtuoso) and sense of the game


For B, rules (and norms) are like musical notes on a score sheet; it is the dispositions that the player bring to them that determines how – and how well -- he plays it.

• The above is to look at B’s construction from the viewpoint of the player/actor/agent; in his construction, B is also characterizing his own position in understanding/knowledge, in relation to two other modes of understanding

the ethnomethodological mode, which focuses on subjectivity, on lived experience; but it could not discover the conditions that make the lived experience possible

the objectivist knowledge mode: points to objective conditions, but misses the temporal character of human behaviour (witness gift/exchange example); it ignores ‘misfiring’, ‘non-replies’ (could be intended), mistaken intentions, etc.; neglects that social practices are always tentative, open-ended and strategic


B’s own theory of practice: from the sin of omission in the objectivist mode, B derived the idea that social actions/practices are like symbolic gymnastics (it takes training, it takes observance of the rules of the game, but it also takes something more); there is also an ineffable character of social practices (like listening to music, there are bodily movements and corporeal effects)

all this is outside the purview of rules, roles and objective conditions (all the stock-in-trade of sociology)

Implications I: in methodology (broad sense), one has to execute a double break: break from native experience and native explanations (we cannot take the objects’ accounts on their face value); break from our own presuppositions and categories

the break from objective/objectivist mode is important, for the latter sees or constitutes practices as an object, as an accomplished result; it does not see the generative grammar of the practices; objective knowledge does not examine its own conditions of understanding


That’s why B wanted to provide a theory of theory, a theory of (theoretical) practice; by this, one could be more aware of the principles we build into our relation with the object

the example of gift exchange: it shows the generative scheme in social practices; it shows how rules become part of the body of dispositions; it shows what observer and agent have in common, viz. the unknowing, ‘misfiring’, nature of interactions

Implications II: in terms of substance, B constructed quite a unique language for studying social life; images and analogies we could associate with social practices, such as style, art of living, manners, strategic, playful, tempo and time, virtuoso, performance


b. From game to structure

• A schematics of B’s construction of a (meta) theory of social life

Socialization

Group

Role

Individual

Reproduction

Fields/Capital

Doxa

Game

System

Stratification

Institutions

Others

INDIVIDUAL --------------------------------------- SOCIETY


Games (from gift exchange to relations at work to impersonal relations in the city) are the living tissues; further up, we find the organs (structure and functions)

At the basic level, we saw how B conceptualized social life and social practices; the idea of dispositions (as thought schema, as set of mental habits and bodily feelings) is already there

Doxa is, from the individual side, the taken-for-granted, preconscious understanding of the world and our place in it; it is the way things are, though it is a socially produced understanding, and it varies from culture to culture, from field to field (Calhoun); it is a pre-conscious understanding of role; from the society side, doxa is encapsulated in institutions, which define roles; but instead of separating individual from society, role from institutions, B used doxa to refer to the meeting of the two


Doxa is something more: first, by capturing the society-in-individual, B highlights the symbolic control of society over the individual; in any field, doxa requires the individual to adhere to its way of working (effective social being requires this much) (e.g. HK Dream in the field of social mobility is about the belief that one could leave behind one’s humble background by one’s efforts; this could be a partial, distorted understanding, but as doxa, it nevertheless helps one to go on his everyday business with motivation and certain effectiveness; doxa is thus different from ideology)

Second, when one adheres to the way of working of a field, things are not equal; some benefit more from this than others; thus middle class children imbued with the HK Dream doxa could actually do better than normal, while working class children may only get disillusioned eventually


At the level of group and group formation, B constructed alternative units/concepts to class, stratum, etc.: field and capital

Fields (to be tackled more systematically later) are distinct domains with its own logic (doxa), types of resources (capital), standards of evaluation, and practices in them are coordinated; individuals and groups enter, inhabit and participate in these fields by position-taking; their positions are related to one another often in a hierarchy

Artistic production, scientific activities, corporations are possible fields; a field is not self-evident, pre-existing; it is constructed (just as ‘ideal type’ is a construction in Weber) by our conceptual interest

Fields are thus more abstract and amorphous than class, strata, etc.; but they are also more dynamic in that fields are related to one another (through conversion of capital), and individuals/groups’ position-taking in the field (space) becomes an important issue (‘class’ often forgets the individual)


At the level of integration (system), and reproduction (socialization), B made two important observations:

First, society is regulated of course by rules, but not by express regulation; there is no (and no need for) constant institutionalized call to order: habitus and doxa have done most of the work already; individuals’ habitus as inherited dispositions (socialization) set to work in new, changing circumstances

Second, more specifically, the system is integrated and reproduced through the political function of domination in and through performances of the communicative actions (Outline, p.14)


Example: the Chinese Confucian gentlemen vs. the small people ( 君子不與小人爭 ; 君子動口小人動手 )

The classifying practices are attached with cultural meanings; they point to or invoke differences which lead to a series of interconnected characteristics: behavioural, dispositional, and sense of worthiness; in other words, judgmental

For B, this is domination in and through such classifying practices; culture is such a game of making distinctions/differences, and culture is also the resources used in this game; this game is not neutral, harmless, or equal to all


c. The role of self-conscious agents in this construction: from the side of the individual, B sees the individual as experiencing social structure in action/practice; in these experiences, the individual develops his ‘tool-kit’, which contains the previous encounters/experiences; ‘tool-kit’ as both structure and experience combined; in using/selecting from the tool-kit, one is also adapting, adjusting, transforming

d. The role of structure: from the side of structure, the influence or effects of structure are only activated/translated by the individuals

e. This is how B approaches the binary opposition between individual – society, between structure – agent, between free agent – mechanical structure


4. Key Concepts (bearing the earlier point about ‘Reading B, Using B’)

a. Habitus

• Dispositions (habitus 1), and dispositions to regulate products of dispositions (habitus 2)

• Dispositions vs. rules, interests and pure subjectivity: unlike the others, habitus is about continuous, piecemeal, adaptive manouverings in social actions (new issues, new environment…)

• Dispositions which are subconscious, which could not bear conscious and systematic articulation (no, and no need for, ‘What do you mean?’)

• Dispositions which are internalized and institutionalized, that make possible regulated improvisations (functions as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations and actions)

• Habitus is thus practical mastery of the schemes of perception and thought, it ‘in no way implies symbolic mastery’

• Habitus is thus durable and transposable dispositions; as cognitive and motivating structures


Habitus, cont’d

• In the world of habitus, it is practice and the immediacy and intelligibility of practices that concern B

• habitus is shaped by the structure, and regulates the practice; it is thus both objective and subjective at once

• Habitus as dispositions has its formative period (e.g., family and childhood as the most dominant part of the past which survives in the present); habitus as yesterday-in-today

• Thus, to say class (as structure) determines behaviour is only a short-hand explanation; what is required is to see how the structure is translated and mediated through individual’s actual dispositions and practices (example: propensity for children of lower-class background to abandon studies increases as opportunity for higher education decreases: their habitus is such that ‘those things are just not for us working class kids’, or ‘they speak a different language, and why should we bother’

• The self-imposed (and not always consciously) brake on ambition thus helps to reproduce inequality in the society


Example: Structure – Habitus – Practice

B’s study of the Kabylia tribes in Algeria:

Structure: house (physical); M-F (sexual difference: social)------all these have structures, i.e., certain distinctions (and differences invoked), e.g., left – right, external – internal, ability to impregnate – ability to be impregnated, etc.

By observing how children roam around the house, relate to mother and father, etc., B found these activities as ‘structural exercises’ (some kind of apprenticeship but not limited to copying of practices), by which habitus as durable dispositions is created, that orients the children in particular ways, e.g., men talk and walk in certain ways, men are responsible for certain affairs, women do such things differently, etc.

The practices that result in these settings thus partake of the symbolic meanings; the latter are thus objectified


Through habitus, the structure acts as structuring structures; the structure finds a corresponding structure in the mind (moral, cultural, ethical, etc.); in turn, habitus becomes a structured structure

Habitus as different from rule, and different from values (collective conscience in the latter assures conformity and order, but for B, these things need to be renewed, and also, values speak only to the mind, but habitus also has a corporeal side (e.g., behaviour, deportment, like dancing)

By seeing habitus as that sphere/structure which lies behind rule and norm, B could then see these dispositions as enabling us to judge, to conceive, to classify, to relate or distance ourselves; it is the sphere which guides our cultural choice; it has elective affinity with certain cultural practices and performances; but this relation does not suggest mechanistic or finalized determination;


b. Field

• a domain, containing some invariable characteristics, thus like system, in a way;

• these invariable characteristics determine the logic of the practices in that field;

• each field is relatively autonomous from other fields; a field is not one with fixed and easily-drawn boundaries; instead of being a physical or geographical phenomenon, a field is more like a field of forces

• within each field, there are its distinct resources and valued capital;

• capital and resources could be converted from one field to another, but there is no fixed rate to the conversion;

• within each field, people could or would actively engage in position-taking games, and doing so, generate situations;

• habitus and capital define the trump cards that the individual could deploy in the field;

• the field is thus like a game, a site with struggle and strategy;


• in each field, there are dominant types of capital, and there are things that are at stake

• in each field, there are perceptions/conceptions of the social world (representations) as a hierarchy; there are also representations of the hierarchical relations of this field with other fields

• from the viewpoint of the individual, one could in one’s life-span go through various fields; from the viewpoint of the group, each field contains interactions of groups which are empowered/constrained by their possession of the capitals distinctive to that field

• finally, a field could be seen as consisting of both positions and situations; situations are more about the given characteristics (e.g., a peasant as having his material life closely connected to the soil, and with that bondage to the soil, he may develop certain religious orientations); positions are more about the relations that connect one individual/group to another (thus, peasant as different from/in relation to city dweller)


Field, cont’d

• field is thus a unit of analysis, not taken superficially or conventionally from existing approaches, e.g., society, economy, or group, class, etc.

• it is a unit of analysis bound together by a logic (or some general determining mechanism), and for B, this logic is the logic of capital

• people in any field compete, struggle and strategize for capital (and they would use their capital for this purpose too); and for that particular field, there are distinctive capitals at stake; there are, in other words, distinctive interests, power and conflicts involved

• individuals in any field have intrinsic properties (e.g., belonging to a certain class, or having certain occupations), but they also occupy positions in that field, and these positions also have properties (how these positions relate to other positions, how these positions relate to the actual distribution of positions in that field, etc.)


Field, concluded

• thus, for B, field is like a social microcosm, within which we find practices heavily bound up with habitus and capital

• artistic production is a field, so is scientific activities; high fashion is a field, so is the making of popular movies (with the production of art movies as a related field)

• if habitus helps us to see the agent not so much in terms of a ‘finished’/’accomplished’ state of affairs (with rules/norms/culture/class, etc., as the determinants), as in terms of an active, generative, adaptive orientation and posture to the social world, then field helps us to characterize and structure that larger social space


c. Capital and Class

Class first:

• for B, class is something that is internalized (in the form of dispositions for a particular class) and something that could be objectified/objectivated (class as structure is only activated through actors’ actions)

• class is related to objective and real differences in material conditions, market position and position in the relations of production, but it is something not exhausted by these conditions

• class is not something that has a single and distinct mode of determination, i.e. no one single, however important, factor could determine the nature of class

• class is best understood as a space of objective positions superimposed by the space of symbolic goods (cultural capital) and the space of habitus


• occupation is the closest indicator of class in terms of objective conditions, but other networks of differences created by age, gender, ethnicity, place of origin, etc. are also class-constitutive, for they bring with them different (spaces of) symbolic goods (and the valuations of them) and dispositions (habitus)

• there are thus internal differences in occupations-constituted-class; no matter how refined we make these categories, they remain statistical aggregates, and thus only ‘theoretical’ classes; ‘real’ classes exist in the superimposed spaces of objective conditions, symbolic goods and habitus

• B’s approach is thus not ‘multi-dimensional’ (in the sense that he brings in other dimensions to cross-cut with the economic dimension); to him, class exists in a spatial matrix constituted by objective conditions, cultural capital (which has its own economy) and habitus


Capital

• Like Marx, B argued that the ultimate factor of power is capital; however, unlike most Marxist accounts, B’s economic power is not exhausted by the material/economic indicators (land, capital, occupation, etc.); economic power (e.g., that of the landed aristocracy) brings with it a whole array of (peasants’) debts of honour, tradition of alliances, rights and obligations

• Economic power could be powerless (especially in pre-market societies, where reciprocity/exchange is perceived and conducted as purely social/political activity); more often, economic power must be converted into symbolic power (thus legitimate, as the order of things) before it becomes really powerful

• Economic capital and cultural capital are different but they inter-penetrate; there could be conversion between them, but the conversion is not automatic and there is no fixed rate of conversion


• B agreed that given a similar aptitude (ability), more years of schooling as a resource/capital could bring more profits (economic earnings); but he added that ability itself is also a product of investment; this investment is non-economic in nature, though it could bring about economic benefits

• Cultural capital (as a result and as a further means) is thus about such investments

• Cultural capital takes several forms: (a) incorporated into one’s habitus (e.g., one has the natural disposition to discover and appreciate art); (b) as objectified resources (books, pianos, works of art, reference books, cultural goods); (c) scholastic/cultural credentials (e.g., ivy league as guarantee of quality)

• Culture is not just an integral and integrating characteristic of an individual/group, but is also a currency (like economic capital), which could be used and invested for reproducing or changing positions; it is a resource used in practices

Cultural capital


Cultural capital, cont’d

• what is distinctive about cultural or symbolic goods is that, unlike material goods, one does not simply consume them; one can only consume them by apprehending their meaning; with cultural capital, one could then consume and appropriate these goods

• cultural capital thus ‘denotes the ensemble of cultivated dispositions that constitute such schemes of appreciation and understanding’ (Brubaker)

• when the school curriculum is biased towards a middle class culture/ethos, middle class children being cultivated with the ‘right’ schemes of appreciation and understanding could perform better (in language, in literary texts, in being the ‘smart kid’)

• But for B, the transmission of cultural capital is not automatic; there could be middle class homes (with all the books, dictionaries, etc.) that do not activate and work on the capital; like any social practice, it requires agency to activate the potential


Capital, concluded

• B suggested a two way matrix of capital: volume/amount of (all forms of) capital, and types of capital (economic and cultural); the intersection produces a space on which classes could be plotted


5. Bourdieu’s contributions to class studies

a. The arguments of ‘Distinctions’

• There are classes, of course, and in the first instance, classes could be plotted on a social space of objective positions (with indicators/criteria like occupation, educational qualifications, etc.)

• But classes not only have objective positions (intrinsic properties of class membership); there are also relational properties to them (classes, and groups within them, as related to other classes on the social space), and these relational properties may vary across different fields

• But there are some general relational properties: there is hierarchical distance and difference among the classes; these differences are also about the representations held by each class (that these people are my equals, we are on the same wavelength; or they are social aliens; I feel uneasy talking to them…)


• these representations (social/class imageries) are driven and shaped by habitus (the natural and durable dispositions which one ‘inherits’ by way of socialization), and are objectified in attitudes and actions

• the imageries and the actions thus combine to construct some class-specific and coherent life-style; ‘we do things this way; they do things differently’; from eating habits to consumption, from manners to educational aspirations; from leisure activities to political views

• On the space of objective positions, B thus superimposed the space of life style (with habitus being the driving force, so to speak); both spaces of course are governed by the matrix of economic and cultural capital

• (Refer to distributed figure)


what people consumed (cultural products) and what they practiced (decorating homes, choosing friends, etc.) happen in this very French environment (i.e. intellectual, civilized, refined, etc. tradition)

the figure(s) should be approached loosely (figuratively) rather than concretely (as if they suggest precise connections); what is interesting lies in the ways the different spaces superimposed on one another, and how items of cultural consumption from different domains tend to ‘group’ together

the first (vertical) axis suggests greater or lesser volume or amount of overall capital; the more upward you are, the more capital (regardless of composition), the more well-off (materially and spiritually) you are

the second (horizontal) axis points to the composition of capital; those lying on the right are those with more economic capital than cultural capital, and vice versa for those lying on the left

• Observations


B drew a complicated picture: it is not music or art as such that separates the classes; it is down to the type (legitimate vs. middle-brow vs. philistine), the extent (number of works); down to material (buying art object) and symbolic consumption (going to museums), and fashioning of one’s life style (from home décor to friends) (also, example of rice or other cultural goods)

Inter-class and intra-class differences (in their position-taking) are equally important for B

Both objective class positions and social origins (father’s background and mobility) are important

Education is important (conferring educational capital so as to appreciate culture), but it is not all

Other factors like age, income also enter into the picture


Observations, cont’d

the great contrast is of course between those at the top and those at the bottom; here, it is between those who have few and simple taste ordinary table wine, soccer…) and those who have jet-set holidays, golf, music, etc.

But even among those at the top, there is a great distinction between those whose structure of capital is different: those with more cultural capital are oriented towards more intellectual taste and practice (chess, piano), and those with more economic capital towards horse-riding, champagne, riding, etc.

the professions lie somewhere in between the two

Similarly there is a contrast at lower range between the primary teachers and the small shopkeepers/businessmen: here the orientation is even more distinctly political, with the former more inclined to vote for the left, the latter more for the right


Snapshots of class and lifestyle I

The upper class (‘pleasant things are non-necessary things’; works of art are ‘dreamt of for a long time, and are always looked at with pleasure; ‘loving something means having it with you’, hobbies (painting described as ‘ I like twirling a brush) and artistic pursuits are considered ‘of no interest’ and ‘prefer not to talk about them’; could not live without the hifi system, which is a combination of different brands, after some research; everyone, even someone who earns nothing, needs music; the hifi system is as necessary as my cooking stove; external appearance and attire are of no concern: ‘people want to see me not for my socks I am wearing or my tie… they invite me as I am’; never read the critics and their reviews: ‘if there’s something on that’s important, you’ll always know’; ‘some people like wearing uniforms, belonging to this team or club.. I am my own man; an individualist at all costs’…….


the qualities of disinterestedness, the ability to distance ‘being’ from ‘having’, and do not bother to show it; man of leisure, but something not achieved; just born with it; all that is liked and practiced presupposes a culture, which could not be bought overnight or conferred simply by education

the appeal to upper class taste: ‘the ostentatious, gratuitous expense implied in the purchase of a ‘priceless’ object is the most indisputable way of showing the price one is prepared to set on things that have no price, absolute testimony of the irreducibility of love to money which only money can buy.’ (p.280) ‘What is true luxury? Refinement; a necessity for those who can afford it, and a key for those who, when they see it, train their eye, their taste, and can find it in the simplest objects, a scarf, a skirt… ‘ (artistic director of Christian Dior)

lawyer, and son of lawyer; wife, daughter of an engineer; inherited or born with a culture, which has ancient roots

Observations


Snapshots of class and lifestyle II

The executive class (relatively young, but ‘sourced’ from grand bourgeoisie; both with good education, and both working; like things ‘snug and cosy’; have little interest in home-improvement, as taste diverts them to other things; discriminating in furniture purchase (‘seen a lot of mediocre stuff, and decided that we didn’t like it’), with furniture shipped from London; discriminating look extends to work (‘in my business (advertising), we are constantly classifying people, there are social classes, castes, and it’s a matter of fitting a product to the right caste’); ‘being too fashionable is not much better’; dressed children in classic style, a simple pretty smocked dress, with English overalls; distaste for the petite bourgeoisie, who ‘filled their gardens with gnomes, windmills, and similar rubbish’); ‘the petite bourgeoisie have no taste, it’s a phrase we often use, though we are well aware that it’s racist’; parents would be more authoritarian when it comes to judgment of pb’s taste, or lack of taste, but ‘we spoke up for everyone’s right to have their own taste’; without being a wine buff who can tell one year from another, ‘I’m the one who chooses the wine’, when with colleagues; ‘hardly anyone knows how to choose wine, so as soon as you know a little bit about it, you look like someone who knows how to live’,


equipped with both economic and cultural capital; but in this case, there is no appropriation of works of art (as pure distinction); cultural capital instils a discriminating and demanding taste, with money to boot (mahogany furniture flown from London; ‘we only pay the VAT’)

a cultural democratic outlook (‘we spoke up for everyone’s right to have their own taste’) but to them, the petite bourgeoisie have no taste;

a cultural carnivore who knows the ‘classics’ (thus prefer landscapes to still-lifes, impressionists to moderns); less culturally arrogant (?) than their predecessors

like their predecessors, ostentatiousness is the biggest sin; prefers understatement, as there is no need to make an impression

Observations


Snapshots of Class and Lifestyle III

The petite bourgeois (keywords of lifestyle are ‘sobriety’ and ‘propriety’; proper in grammar in language (‘I’d be really ashamed if I made mistakes as obvious as that’), proper in dress (cannot see herself strolling in jeans); ‘I like things to be tidy’; ‘I hate pretentious people; ‘I can’t stand people who don’t know how to behave…I don’t like being trodden on by superiors… (also detests) people who are dirty’; (but) respects people who are below her; ‘what I like in songs is words that mean something..’

this ‘very modest’ nurse captures some of the essence of the class and lifestyle of the petite bourgeois: a respect for order and for culture; concern for propriety (from language to choice of friends)

with the younger and wealthier members of the pb, their cultural taste is a mixture, a dilution of ‘high culture’ (or what B called ‘legitimate culture, concretized in museums and art collections)


Observations, cont’d

for the pb, legitimate culture is not made for him and so he is not made for it; the pb acknowledges culture, but does not know much about it; thus popular arrangements of classic works, film adaptation of classic drama or literature, popularization as science, light opera as music, etc.; the characteristic of all these is immediate accessibility and the outward sign of cultural legitimacy

the pb wants the home to be tidy, and he is engaged in a lot of ingenuous (with some help from IKEA?) home-improving; e.g., putting up mirror walls in the living room to make his home look bigger than it is; it is often about ‘look’, and he would go for ‘seconds’, ‘rejects’ (often ‘discriminately’ chosen), etc., and convinces himself that they are cheaper and create the same effect; it is often about ‘effects’

the pb is torn between taste he is inclined to, and taste he aspires to; the former is determined by the size of his wallet, the latter by the mediated, popularized and diluted cultural capital (which demands immediate accessibility and which has the ‘effect’) he acquires


7. B’s insights, summarized

a. Social positions (class) – habitus – position-taking: what is involved is choices that range from goods to practices; position-taking is about these choices and their consumption; dispositions mediate between the positions and the choices; habitus thus makes sure that there is a corresponding structure of habitus for every structure of differentiation (deviations); ‘to each class of positions, there corresponds a class of habitus (or tastes)’;

b. It is not just about what are being consumed and practiced, but also how; this leads to style and distinction; distinction is not an innate character or property; it is a manner, a bearing, a way of showing oneself to the world; distinction is always a relational thing; here habitus provides a unity of style; there is the same ‘signature’ to every thing (from music appreciation to children’s education to views on entertainment) consumed or practiced by a class; even if two classes consume the same goods, their style (and their ‘signature’ views) will differ (piano lesson as exposing children to finer things in life or piano lesson as one more extra-curricular activity helping child to enter elite-schools


Insights summarized, cont’d

c. Habitus thus both ‘determines’ or predisposes a class to certain goods, practices and people, and provides a unity of style to these activities and opinions (there are fine things in life that are worth cultivating and pursuing --- and spending time on them; piano lesson for my children is to expose them to these things; I also have intelligent and witty people around me, and together we have the most civilized and cultured gatherings…..)

d. Such habitus is a product of (objective) differences (from occupation to income to education, etc.; occupation may be more influential in shaping habitus, but the other factors also cut their lines in the space), but habitus is also differentiating; we are not only driven by our habitus to pursue certain things, to consume certain goods, to choose certain friends; we are also marking ourselves out from other people when we say this is good, refined, respectable or vulgar, insufferable, cheap, etc.; this implies that social life is a game where the players engage in the pursuit of distinction (trying to achieve status, prestige, both material and cultural)


Insights summarized, concluded

e. B is not simply saying that in this game, people are driven by these interests (in Marx, people are driven by material interests, if only despite themselves); the idea of conspicuous consumption already contains this idea, so the thesis is not novel

f. B wants to make a further point: our habitus makes it possible for us to have both vision (we know what we like) and division (we are different because some things or practices are below or above us), but for this vision and division to matter, to be socially pertinent, all players must have some schema for them to tell the differences between a Volvo or a VW, table wine or vintage champagne, Bossini or Bulgari, etc. etc. (often we could not articulate the differences, but we do know they are different, they are distinct, and one is better/superior/more refined/more expensive… than the other


Insights concluded

g. From the above, B derived theoretical classes: objective positions having affinity with certain lifestyle (and certain outlook on life, on other groups and their goods, practices..); these are classes in the stronger sense, because these classes will seldom inter-marry, they would not speak on the same wavelength, they would have different political views, etc.; in other words, these are classes that could be mobilized by political parties in opposition to other classes

h. By seeing (Marx) class (objective, material-based) as (Weber) status groups, B used the spatial maps of positions and position-takings to tackle the issue of class membership, class identification and class interests; for him, class matters because (and only because) lifestyle (and culture) matters, and the latter matters through the symbolic gymnastics and contests that we all engage in and that is mediated by our habitus (also see Chinese entry, distributed)


A rather succinct way of characterizing B’s position in class and cultural studies:

嗜好作為某一社會的行動者所進行的各種評判的總體 , 它是全盤化了的分類體系 , 並且該體系有他自身的一慣性 .

馬克斯講的是生產關係中的人得異化 , 布迪爾講的是個人的利害關係中的文化歸屬 .

嗜好是一種具有個人化傾向的習性 , 人們按照某種區分進行分類的過程 , 將忘記自己所使用的詞彙是某種理論的工具 , 而且和語言關聯的社會環境也被忘記在腦後 , 遂漸地那些話語也融會貫通為自己的嗜好

人與人之間的兢爭與其說是直觀的力量關係 , 母寧說是以習性表現 , 並承受客觀評價的一種圍繞象徵性權力的關係

社會學 / 人類學新辭典 , 第十頁


8. Conclusion (or what kind of cultural sociology B represents?)

The kind of cultural sociology B demonstrates requires us to:

listen carefully to what people say (from home décor to taste in music); what appears to be trivial could contain the key to truth

acknowledge that cultural and symbolic gymnastics (from ‘I respect people who are below me’ to ‘I can’t stand people who are dirty’) is very much part of our social and cultural outlook, and these gymnastics are sourced from some durable dispositions, and which could find their way into the whole array of consumption practices that is the lifestyle

be skeptical about what static indicators could offer; the symbolic and cultural value (thus ‘distinction’, and claim to superiority) of a cultural goods is determined not by its intrinsic properties but by the social use it is put to


Conclusion, cont’d

to note that occupations make a difference; but so do age, education (type and prestige), social trajectory (class origins, and career course); the structure of capital is as important as the volume of capital, and within cultural capital, there is difference between scholastic training and in-bred, ‘ancient roots’ upbringing in cultivating the ability/dispositions to appreciate culture

be reflexive, that one’s study is also an initiation and an exposure of one’s culture/taste/dispositions (is the interviewee putting me on? Is he snubbing me in the most genteel way? Is he trying to please me or impress me by citing all these composers’ works….); there is equally symbolic gymnastics involved here

to remind ourselves that this brand of cultural sociology is more than anything else a suggested style, a posture for one to engage in cultural studies; the contents it uncover are however deeply particular (is the Japanese sake equivalent to chateau red wine? Is the meaning (‘distinction) of golf club membership the same in the USA and in Japan?....)

P. Bourdieu: a Special Brand of Cultural Sociology 1.Introduction 2.Bourdieu”s intellectual...

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