Date: Wed, 25 Feb 1998 13:05:10 -0800
From: mitchell wilson <lobster-AT-mail.utexas.edu>
Subject: Re: Request: Is there ethnic/racial capital?


Hello, Anja.  You wanted to know if your message made sense.  Most of it
did.  And I enjoyed reading it.

But this was ambiguous: 

"Talking in terms of empirical methods I would think that - were my
> hypothesis correct - there should be a cluster of people that is
> distinguished as a class by ethnic/racial markers (in combination with
> other forms of capital), i.e. which is empirically distinct from others
> who share the same forms of capital, but not the ethnic/racial markers."

I mean, look at your qoute here, as I've cut out the middle-part.  The
middle part was an interjection that confused the issue.  You appear to
say "there should be a cluster of people that is distinguished as a
class by ethnic/racial markers . . . who share the same forms of
capital, but not the ethnic/racial markers."  

How can a group distinguished by the same ethnic markers not share those
ethnic markers?

Does that make sense to you?  Am I reading this wrong, or are you saying
that a group who EVEN THOUGH fails to share the same ethnic markers,
nevertheless is distinguished by ostensibly shared ethnic markers?  This
would be analogous to ethnic stereotypes, would it not?

Anja Weiß wrote:
> 
> Dear colleagues,
> thank you very much for your comments. I would like to respond to some
> of them:
> Frans Schryer wrote:
> >
> > The way I read Bourdieu (also following Brubaker), ethnicity would be
> > seen as another form of making distinctions, or another `class'
> > dimension (as in class-ification) along with gender and economic
> > class (and occupation) and even region. Bourdieu only makes a few
> > short references to that effect (I don't recall the exact source
> > offhand), and it is true that he had written very little on
> > ethnicity. However, Bourdieu does refer to regionalism (the example
> > is Occitanie in southern France) as an example of how new
> > distinctions can come into being (as part of a process similar to
> > ethnogenesis) -- somewhere in his "Language and Symbolic Power".
> 
> One problem for me is, how to treat ethnicity: as a form of capital or
> as a marker of distinction. To clarify this: It is easy to argue that
> ethnicity or "race" is just one more ascriptive criteria with which the
> capital that people own is recognized. However I would like to argue
> that ethnicity/race is something like symbolic capital. It can
> delegitimize economic, cultural and social capital in specific fields.
> 
> Talking in terms of empirical methods I would think that - were my
> hypothesis correct - there should be a cluster of people that is
> distinguished as a class by ethnic/racial markers (in combination with
> other forms of capital), i.e. which is empirically distinct from others
> who share the same forms of capital, but not the ethnic/racial markers.
> 
> Maybe this is not the case macrosocially. I am working on group
> interactions and there race/ethnicity clearly plays an important role
> beyond other forms of capital even among anti-racists.
> 
> Kent Lofgren wrote:
> How will you use "das habitus"? As you know, Bourdieu talks about
> "group-habitus", and that individuals in the same group have similar
> habitus. This can be used to construct gender-habitus, I argue, and
> ethnic-group-habitus.
> 
> Refering to my above argument, Habitus could explain why interactive
> groups are ethnically homogenous, because sharing similar experiences is
> one important reason for group cohesion. Nevertheless ethnic relations
> at least in Germany are changing so much and quickly, that it is
> difficult to determine what is "the same group". Thus we cannot argue
> with "Habitus" alone. We will have to take into account, that struggles
> about value hierarchies and distinguishing markers are ongoing and still
> changing quickly and that these struggles determine who will be
> considered a class in the future and who will develop a common habitus
> in the future. In short: I think that Habitus plays an important role,
> but that the concept of classes consisting of clusters of people with a
> similar distribution of capital may be as important.
> 
> Please let me know whether the above clarifications make sense.
> 
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-- 
Mitch Wilson
http://ccwf.cc.utexas.edu/~ifmq322/index.htm
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