From: Cameron Mann <csmann-AT-telstra.com>
Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 15:57:15 +1000
Subject: [BOU:] Economic, cultural and symbolic capital


Michael Franklin wrote: 

[-[ You can't accumulate cultural capital unless you can distance 
yourself from necessity, and you certainly can't accumulate more 
cultural capital than others unless you have the time.  ]-]

I disagree. Counter-example(?) A hunter-gatherer bunch of people is 
going to value the abilities to successfully hunt and gather food 
precisely because of their proximity to necessity. Thus the best 
hunters & the best gatherers will accumulate hunting-gathering cultural 
capital, and those freaks who are both excellent hunters & gatherers 
will earn heaps of cultural capital, but still /need/ to hunt. 

I think the suggestion that there could ever be a condition in which an 
agent could not accumulate cultural capital is quite contradictory to 
Bourdieu's framework. An agent has cultural capital... 

(ie  "the talents one has. to be able to dance in socially sanctioned 
ways, or to kick a ball into a net, or to lift a box onto a shelf, or 
to speak in one or more languages", "knowledge of opera, art, 
literature", "which spoon to use, what to wear and how to wear it, when 
to smile & how to eat.")

...as a consequence of being in a culture. Most of us have got the 
message from Herder et al and moved beyond the idea that any human has 
NO culture.  The issue about cultural capital thus becomes what type 
(which types) and how much (how little) does an agent have. 

The distance from necessity is necessary (!!) to acquire/exhibit/employ 
that KIND of cultural capital which kind of rubs its domination in the 
face of the dominated. This kind of cultural capital is totally 
devalued if that distance from necessity is absent.... so in a muddy 
field pulling turnips, or playing 'Survivor',  all of your high-culture 
cultural capital is quite UNhelpful. Equally, Tarzan's prodigious 
aptitudes do nothing for him in "society."

In Australia there's a particular hunter-gatherer known as Rex Hunt. 
He's an Australian Football commentator who has a TV Show about 
fishing, and he never keeps the fish he catches - he kisses the catch 
and then throws it back into the water. Here's a guy who's into 
the 'art of fishing' - fishing for the sake of fishing, rather than for 
food - and one needs a distance from necessity to practice his art - 
but the context and the capital and the practice are all different. For 
all its artistry, throwing fish back in the water earns you the kind of 
cultural capital NO ONE in a hunter-gatherer culture would understand.

This is why care must be taken when thinking about capital or fields or 
habitus in isolation (generally, don't). Any idea that you need 
distance from necessity to accumulate cultural capital is talking about 
a DEFIANTLY USELESS capital (typically from the left (autonomous) side 
of fields of cultural production (arts & sciences). This USELESS 
capital, dervied from valuing something for its own sake, is put to 
good use in regulating distinctions by certain people in certain 
contexts.  

Of course, literature & history is full of examples of what happpens 
when an agent's cultural capital is unrecognised/unrecognisable 
('Stranger in a Strange Land' and 'Encino Man' spring to mind) ... 
the 'fish out of water syndrome' ... 

Bourdieu developed a explaination that could transcend an Orientalist 
point-of-view (where one can point at the funny foreigners who do 
things that make no sense) by employing a complex (field-habitus-
capital) that insists the we acknowledge that ways of doing (after the 
strategies of the habitus), and valuing (capital) can not be divorced 
from their contexts (their fields). 

* * * *

Michael also wrote: 

[-[ The symbolic effect of cultural capital coordinates social space 
and doesn't *just* result in symbolic profits, but tangible economic 
profits.  And it seems that in many examples the greater the symbolic 
effect, the greater the economic payoff. ]-]

I know Bourdieu often seems a little, well, tentative with the idea of 
the over-arching all-encompassing field_of_all_fields "Field of Power" 
at times... But I wonder when translating symbolic capital directly to 
economic profits is perhaps a little "spurious" for a correlation.... 
and whether it would be better to say that the AMOUNT of capital you 
have ( regardless of type, ie the vertical axis of a field) translates 
to a relative amount of power, which can then be translated into 
economic capital....

Of course, as already mentioned (by Magnis I think), the "exchange 
rates" between different kinds of capital are a focus of struggle in 
themselves. So trying to convert your specific cultural capital through 
symbollic capital to economic capital may be a fruitless exercise, and 
terribly satisfying depending on which field and what capital you start 
with. 

Interestingly, the reverse  - taking your economic capital and trying 
to translate & exchange your way into a field is much  more likely to 
meet with unmitigated success


Cheers,

Cameron

--------------------
csmann-AT-bigpond.com

"you will never understand how it feels to live your life with no 
meaning or control" - Common People, PULP
 

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