Date: Wed, 14 Jan 1998 17:13:53 -0600
From: Minoru Sawada <msawada-AT-students.wisc.edu>
Subject: Re: a couple of questions


Thanks Carsten,
You raise such a complicated issue as some exchange rate between cultural
and economic capital, and discussed the possibility that symbolic capital
can be regarded as "common currency" between the two. I think these are
very interesting and important, and that your explanation is
thought-provocative. However, I am not able to expand this argument for
now. One thing I would like to refer to here is that Bourdieu mentions
somewhere that the exchange rate itself is something at stake or a focal
point in symbolic struggles, especially in the field of power.

I wondered if the notion of the total volume of capital was not designated
as an hypothetical concept to explain the result of correspondence analysis
of the space of taste in Distinction, partly because the same sort of thing
can be said about the concept of linguistic capital, which can be thought
of as a subtype of cultural capital. The term linguistic capital was
probably used in Reproduction for the first time--though its embryonic form
might be found in his earlier works such as The Inheritors--and there this
concept was hypothetically or constructively designated to explain the
relationship between "degree of selection" and "linguistic competence" as
is seen in the 1st chapter of the part 2 of Reproduction. This was already
pointed out by Miyajima who is the Japanese translator of the book as well
as some of Durkheim's books. I do not mean Bourdieu and Passeron's way
discussion of linguistic capital has any direct relation to the notion of
the total volume of capital, but I just wondered whether it would not be
impossible to culculate it directly. Yet, this does not mean that I have
doubt of the validity or usefulness of the concept; rather I do not have
enough ability to judge it.

I look forward to hearing more from you and others. Thank you again.

With kind regards,
Minoru

Carsten wrote:
>Minoru Sawada wrote:
>
>>(3) Next, please allow me to have a very basic question. It is about
>>Bourdieu's concept of the total volume of capital, as seen in the
>>rectangular charts of social space in his book Distinction. It seems that
>>the issue of different kinds of capital, especially the relationship
>>between cultural capital as dominated in the field of power and economic
>>capital as dominant there has been relatively often discussed, but the
>>notion of the total volume of cultural and economic capital has not. I
>>understand what it means, and what I want to make clear is how the notion
>>was generated and designated. This topic might be for almost everyone too
>>easy to take up, but to someone like me who is not familiar with statistics
>>in general nor correspondence analysis, it does not seem self-evident, at
>>least because it does not appear clear how the total volume of capital can
>>be calculated. Is it nothing that can be directly calculated, but something
>>like hypothetical concept designated to explain the different sets of
>>positions in the chart of social space as a result of correspondence
>>analysis? It seems at least that there is nothing like common unit or
>>criterion to integrate cultural and economic capital quantitatively; it
>>appears very difficult to statistically quantify various indications of
>>cultural capital and impossible to simply add the volumes of two different
>>capitals without any unit common to them. I think I read Distinction all
>>over but I might have missed some explanation of these. I would be grateful
>>if someone of you could resolve this quite naive question or show me what
>>part of what book or article I should look at.
>
>I am not very familiar with statistics, so I don't know what the answers to
>this question would be in a "technical" sense. But it is certainly an
>important and interesting question which also puzzled me when I read
>Distinction. In what sense can one add a master's degree to a fortune of x
>$ and a yearly income of so and so much? What sort of equivalence can exist
>between an aquinatance with 37 leading art museums or the complete works of
>Shakespeare and a certain income, fortune, etc.?
>
>The answer is, I think, that these kinds of equivalence are established in
>social reality all the time, probably via symbolic capital as the "common
>currency" of cultural and economic capital. Think of the famous artist
>being invited (around the turn of the century people like Rilke, Proust, or
>Joyce in literature) or entertained by the economically rich - such things
>are often discussed in the novels and short stories of Henry James. Or
>think of something quite different, namely the strange equivalence between
>material richness and corporeal beauty, the young and beautiful female body
>functioning as a sort of capital permitting entrance to the otherwise
>closed world of the materially rich, and quite literally adding glamour to
>richness. But the exchange rate, being established in and by practice,
>between such different capitals is not something that can be fixed with
>much precision, I suppose.
>
>best wishes
>
>Carsten Sestoft
>Dept. of Comp. Lit.
>University of Copenhagen
>

*************************************************
Minoru Sawada (UW-Madison)
503-I Eagle Heights,
Madison, WI 53705-2033
Phone/Fax: (608)231-1028
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