Cultural Capital

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Pierre Bourdieu first utilized the term cultural capital in his 1973 work, Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction. Cultural capital concerns forms of cultural knowledge, competences, or dispositions acquired by the privileged classes. It is a "form of knowledge, an internalized code or cognitive acquisition which equips the social agent with empathy towards, appreciation for or competence in deciphering cultural relations and cultural artifacts". The concept is defined as high status cultural signals used in cultural and social selection. For example, parents who belong to these classes are able to equip their children with the cultural capital (networks) necessary to successfully navigate through society, particularly within the educational system.

One of the critiques with Bourdieu's application is that it participates in the process of domination by legitimizing particular practices as naturally superior to others and by making these practices seem superior by those excluded. Bourdieu's work shows that schooling serves to reinforce the demarcated social differences already exposed in society. The culture schooling transmits is largely that of the dominant culture, and often classifies as natural talent that which is embraced by the elite, thus failing to acknowledge the diversity and knowledge brought by underrepresented populations, including the poor. Much of the informal learning, which takes place in the household, is what is transmitted in the classroom, thus students who don't come from privileged backgrounds are relegated and labeled as inferior, unless they assimilate substantially, and even then... they suffer from exclusion.

Scholars within the field of education have extended Bourdieu's term to include the marginalized. The term has been utilized to account for the inequities amongst class and race issues in the classroom. I use it in my own work to help differentiate between the inequalities that exist within the lower-class sectors and the dominant class, particularly in relation to the attainment of higher education.

References:

Bourdieu, P. (1993). The field of cultural production. New York: Columbia University Press.

Tierney, W.G. and Hagedorn, L.S. (Eds., 2002). Increasing access to college:Extending possibilities for all students. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Contributed by Rufina Cortez