Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist who wrote extensively on power and social relationships. Bourdieu studied under Marxist philosophers, and he believed that ownership of economic capital was the root of power.
However, he theorized that there were three types of capital— economic, cultural, and social. He considered social and cultural capital to be “disguised forms of economic capital.”
These disguised forms of capital appear as benefits and resources that are generated from access to economic capital but are made out to be disconnected from wealth.
For example, having a refined taste in art as a result of attending a prestigious university has cultural advantages that appear to be unrelated to the economic capital required to pay the tuition fees. This means that social and cultural capital conceals how powerful economic capital is.
This article focuses on Bourdieu’s conception of cultural capital: the types of cultural capital that exist, how individuals gain cultural capital, and what its effects are.
What Are The 3 Types Of Cultural Capital?
Bourdieu thought that there were three forms of cultural capital that an individual could possess. Let’s explore this more in depth:
1. Cultural Capital in an Embodied State
This form of cultural capital is the knowledge, skills, and even tastes that you acquire as a result of your social standing. In particular, it is the knowledge that allows people to maintain their social standing by conforming to cultural expectations.
For example, knowing the proper way to hold a wine glass while at a networking event may signal a kind of refinement that might impress a potential employer at a prestigious firm.
Bourdieu theorized that this form of cultural capital was picked up almost unconsciously by individuals as they absorb the behaviors of their friends and families, to the point that social advantages like having good taste and good manners become engrained into your personality, into who you are.
Cultural capital in an embodied state is closely related to the idea of a habitus—a concept coined by Bourdieu that was very important to his philosophy.
Bourdieu described the habitus as an unconscious “feel for the game;” a sense of what you should or should not do in social situations, a sense of where you fit into the social “game,” and a sense of how to win at that game.
This unconscious and largely invisible nature of embodied cultural capital would make it appear far removed from economic capital.
However, embodied cultural capital is acquired by being raised around these kinds of behaviors—and the kinds of behaviors you are exposed to are directly correlated to the economic silo you exist in.
Further, this “sense of the game” can be essential in moving up the social ladder and gaining access to wealth.
2. Cultural Capital in an Objectified State
This form of capital is physical objects that can be owned, such as books, pieces of art, or historical artifacts. These objects have cultural or symbolic significance and communicate something about the owner’s social standing.
For example, a wealthy man with an extensive collection of rare books is able to project a sense of intellectuality and competence about himself by owning these objects.
Cultural capital in an objectified state also requires some level of cultural understanding in order to be interpreted or understood.
In theory, the cultural artifacts in museums are available to everyone, but it requires a certain level of educational context in order for someone to truly understand the piece of art that they are looking at and get the most out of it.
In fact, Bourdieu found empirically that the amount of time that people spent in a museum of art correlated directly to how much education they had attained. Those who had had more schooling spent more time in the museum.
Bourdieu also discussed machines as objectified cultural capital. One must have a certain level of knowledge—embodied cultural capital—in order to operate the machine and therefore gain the economic capital that one is rewarded within their ability to operate the machine.
Objects like these that require embodied cultural capital in order for them to be useful or meaningful to the person interacting with it were considered by Bourdieu to be cultural capital in an objectified state.
3. Cultural Capital in an Institutionalized State
Institutionalized cultural capital is a formal recognition from an institution that a person has some asset. This is usually in the form of a degree or certification credential.
This form of social capital allows the person who has it to directly transfer their cultural capital into actual economic assets.
It allows the individual with the degree to access higher-paying jobs and more elite professional and social circles than they would have had access to otherwise.
How Cultural Capital is Acquired
1. Family background and social class
Bourdieu thought that people gained embodied cultural capital by passively observing the behaviors that they see around them.
The way that your family behaves, their worldview, and the knowledge they have get passed down to you as you listen to your family’s stories, watch them interact with others, and read the books they had on their shelves.
Our sense of the world and how you should act in it is greatly influenced by the kinds of families we grew up in. Bourdieu referred to the influence that our families have on us as “imperceptible apprenticeships.”
He thought that cultural capital was passed down intergenerationally, as grandparents teach parents a way of living, those parents will go on to teach that same way of living (perhaps even unconsciously or accidentally) to their children, and so on.
Social class is an important part of this as well. The way that families and parents tend to behave, the tastes they have, and their knowledge about the world tend to be a function of their socioeconomic background.
The kinds of behaviors that families adopt to survive in their particular social worlds differ across income levels. For example, if you were to grow up in a wealthy family, you might learn some things about investing, networking, and elitist etiquette just from hearing your parents talking about it or seeing them employ these skills.
You wouldn’t necessarily need those skills in a low-income environment, and you would likely learn more useful information from your family about how to behave in the social spaces that are familiar to you. In this way, social class is an important part of cultural capital.
2. Educational background and achievement
Bourdieu saw educational systems as essential to distributing cultural capital to people in society. He saw what children learn from their teachers as working in harmony with the influence of the family to transmit cultural heritage from one generation to another.
Children learn about art, discipline, social sciences, and politics, from school. This provides a fair amount of access to cultural capital, even for low-income, public school children.
However, Bourdieu thought that the cultural knowledge children received within their families helped them get more out of the educational system.
For example, the SAT test included an analogy question requiring the test taker to know what an “oarsman” and a “regatta” were.
These are both boating terms—which wealthy students were much more likely to have come across and understand. For these students, their cultural knowledge as a result of their wealth gave them an advantage on an exam.
In this way, Bourdieu believed that cultural capital was generated by education but that those who already held cultural capital from their families and communities would stand to gain more from their school.
3. Geographic location
Just as culture varies across regions, so does cultural capital. Income level, religion, and dominant cultural ideas vary massively across regions, even within the same country.
For example, someone growing up in Morocco would have a very different social sphere from someone growing up in the Philippines.
They would speak different languages, go to different schools that teach different curriculums and have different family rituals and local customs. Each of these people would likely also have different levels of educational attainment.
All of this amounts to vastly different bubbles of knowledge, tastes in food and music, and social behaviors between these two people. Therefore, their levels of cultural capital would be different.
In this way, geographic location is closely tied to the acquisition of cultural capital.
The Effects of Cultural Capital
1. Economic advantages
Cultural capital can, and often does, lead directly to economic capital. Take, for example, the case of Anna Sorokin, who through her acquisition of cultural capital such as knowledge about art, was able to infiltrate the upper echelons of the New York elite art world and scam many people out of their money.
Her ability to communicate that she was part of their world through embodied cultural capital meant that many people were willing to hand over massive amounts of money to her.
However, cultural capital usually works in ways that are very above ground. This example simply illustrates the economic power of signaling to others that you belong in their world through subtle social cues. Having the right cultural capital leads to jobs, favors, investment opportunities and other benefits that create economic capital.
2. Social advantages
Cultural capital is essentially knowledge that helps you operate in the world. Social capital was understood by Bourdieu to be simply relationships among people and membership in social groups.
Many benefits can come from having advantageous relationships, most certainly to wealthy or powerful people. For example, investing advice or recommendations for a desirable job from a powerful friend.
Social capital also includes being a member of a formal groups. This includes things like alumni networks and social groups that may have any number of social and cultural perks, including “symbolic profits” like prestige.
3. Reproduction of social inequality
Bourdieu wrote that cultural capital—specifically habitus—imbued social actors with predispositions that made them capable of behaving in a way that adapted to the social structure around them. Bourdieu thought that this led to a reproduction of the social structures.
If we become the kind of people that behave in ways that conform to the social structures we are in, this upholds the social structures.
For example, someone raised in a low-income community would learn to behave in a specific way that may be unfamiliar or even unwelcome in high-income communities. Not knowing how to behave in a high-income community would make it difficult for them to move up the social ladder. This perpetuates inequality.
Critical Evaluation
1. Lack of empirical evidence
While Bourdieu’s work has been massively influential in the world of sociological thought, critics still raise concerns about his ideas.
One of the most common critiques is that Bourdieu did not give an empirical grounding for much of his theoretical structure. Indeed, the concern has even been raised that Bourdieu’s theories are by nature inconsistent with empirical evidence.
How could one possibly prove or disprove the existence of embodied cultural capital? And how could that be empirically linked to inequality? This is something to consider when thinking about Bourdieu’s work.
2. Oversimplification of social reality
In reading his work, it seems that Bourdieu sees the social landscape as a game in which everyone competes for resources.
However, in each of our daily lives, we could see ways in which social life is much more complex than competing for a piece of the economic pie.
Critics might say that social life is not all about trying to move up in the ranks, but rather that morals, ethics, and human connection are an important part of the dynamic as well.
Many factors that influence social life could be included in this discussion, but Bourdieu focuses primarily on acquisition and maintenance of resources.
3. Neglect of agency and individualism
Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital has a lot of focus on how society influences individual behavior. His theories don’t tend to understate the impact that societal conditioning has on the daily behavior of individuals and the ways that they interact with one another.
He thought that even individual preferences in music, food and art were a product of embodied cultural capital.
Critics may see this as dismissive of how individuals make choices in their daily lives about how to behave and interact. Where in Bourdieu’s theories is there room for personal agency?
Bourdieu was quite concerned with this question. He was very interested in the ways in which individuals exercised their autonomy within the social structures that they operate in.
He thought that even with the restrictions and regularities of social lives, individuals were able to exercise autonomy within that. While autonomy is bound, it still exists in Bourdieu’s conception.
FAQs
What are the 3 types of capital identified by Bourdieu?
Bourdieu theorized that the three types of capital are economic, social, and cultural. Economic capital includes money, property, and other physical possessions. Social capital is relationships that can benefit individuals, especially those that can help someone attain more economic capital. Finally, cultural capital is a familiarity with a society’s “proper,” dominant culture (which also helps individuals gain social and economic capital).
What is the difference between cultural capital and habitus?
Cultural capital is knowledge itself. This includes knowledge about what is culturally acceptable, about cultural artifacts such as classic musical pieces or works of art, and how to do high-skill jobs.
The habitus is Bourdieu’s conception of how all of this information mechanically comes to quietly become a part of our own personalities and shape our tastes. Habitus is how we embody the web of information that allows us to operate in the cultural environment. It is the way that knowledge becomes indistinguishable from ourselves as it is ingrained into our behaviors and opinions.
What is the relationship between social class and cultural capital?
Social class and cultural capital have somewhat of a reciprocal relationship. If you are born into a wealthy social class, you will grow up embodying more cultural capital. Bourdieu understood cultural capital to be one of the ways that the upper classes maintained their power.
As long as cultural capital continues to be quietly and invisibly passed down through families, social class structures will be maintained.
This is because those in lower social classes do not have the opportunity to learn the “rules of the game” in the way that the upper classes do, and therefore have a harder time playing the economic game.
In this way, social class determines your level of cultural capital, while at the same time cultural capital reinforces social class structures.
What does Bourdieu mean by social, cultural, and symbolic capital?
Bourdieu identified three distinct types of capital: economic, social, and cultural. He theorized that social and cultural capital existed to reinforce and legitimize ownership of economic capital, and to obscure the power of economic capital.
But he also explored the concept of symbolic capital. The concept of symbolic capital is not included in his breakdown of the three types because he thought that symbolic capital was essentially indistinguishable from the other forms of capital.
He understood symbolic capital to be resources an individual has access to due to being recognizable or seen as honorable and prestigious.
How does cultural capital affect education?
Having more cultural capital allows for more educational achievement. It also works the other way around; having more education allows you to accrue more cultural capital.
Bourdieu thought that the educational system was one of the most important ways we gained access to cultural capital, next to the family.
Bourdieu also thought that schools taught students in such a way that students with more cultural capital could get more out of lessons, almost as if they knew a secret code.
Getting more out of school (and having more knowledge of the dominant culture in the first place) increases the chances that you will attain even higher educational achievement and credentials, which leads to even more cultural capital attainment. The two concepts are closely linked.
References:
Bourdieu, P. (2018). Cultural reproduction and social reproduction. In Knowledge, education, and cultural change (pp. 71-112). Routledge.
Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1986). The Forms of Capital. In: Richardson, J., Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. pp. 241–58.
Huang, X. (2019). Understanding Bourdieu-cultural capital and habitus. Rev. Eur. Stud., 11, 45.
Lebaron, F. (2014). Symbolic Capital. In: Michalos, A.C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-Being Research. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0753-5_2961
Riley, D. (2017). „Bourdieu‟ s Class Theory‟, Catalyst Journal, 1 (2).
Tittenbrun, Jacek, Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Multiple Capitals: A Critique (January 13, 2018). Available at SSRN:
