Subject: Re: Bourdieu and class in the US framework
Date: Tue, 28 Nov 95 10:28:20 MST
From: "Alan Smart" <asmart-AT-acs.ucalgary.ca>


  The general point made below is valid, but it seems that it
applies primarily to certain types of cultural capital, those
asssociated with 'high culture'.  Other forms of cultural
capital, such as engineering degrees, familiarity with computer
software, knowing how to sell to the 'American public' certainly
continue to hold considerable advantages for conversion into
economic and symbolic capital.
> 
> Although I can't claim to be all that familiar with Bourdieu's work apart 
> from sections of *Distinction,* I'm interested in the questions raised 
> thus far about the presumed "universality" of class wrt cultural capital.
> 
> I'd argue that the understanding of "class" as it appears in *Distinction*
> is deeply and locally French, and that Bourdieu has to be modified with
> caution to fit the US framework.  For one thing, in the largely
> anti-intellectual US it is by no means clear that the acquisition of
> cultural capital (a form of wealth I take to be secondary, even
> compensatory, to the extent that it is mimetic of monetary capital) has
> the same capacity to elevate social status as it might elsewhere.  Surely
> it still might in certain (metropolitan? European-identified?) locations
> in the US, and surely it at least used to within academia.  But on the
> latter point, recent efforts to assimilate university structures and
> operations to the corporate model (elimination of tenure, downsizing,
> increased "productivity" [= processing more students cheaply] etc.)
> suggest a whole lot of things--among them, I'd say, the effective
> de-privileging of pockets of "cultural capital" as described by 
> Bourdieu.  This may also be a function of the historical (as well as 
> geographical) distance separating us from Bourdieu: new forms of cultural 
> capital are on the ascendant.
> 
> 
> Denise Albanese
> English Department
> George Mason University
> Fairfax, VA
>