[BRIEF NOTE] Cultural Capital

[rfmcdonald]

Pierre Bourdieu's concept of "cultural capital" has always interested me.

The term cultural capital represents the collection of non-economic forces such as family background, social class, varying investments in and commitments to education, different resources, etc. which influence academic success. Bourdieu distinguishes three forms of cultural capital. The embodied state is directly linked to and incorporated within the individual and represents what they know and can do. Embodied capital can be increased by investing time into self improvement in the form of learning. As embodied capital becomes integrated into the individual, it becomes a type of habitus and therefore cannot be transmitted instantaneously. The objectified state of cultural capital is represented by cultural goods, material objects such as books, paintings, instruments, or machines. They can be appropriated both materially with economic capital and symbolically via embodied capital. Finally, cultural capital in its institutionalized state provides academic credentials and qualifications which create a "certificate of cultural competence which confers on its holder a conventional, constant, legally guaranteed value with respect to power." (248) These academic qualifications can then be used as a rate of conversion between cultural and economic capital.

The questions of how the acquisition of cultural capital can be routinized, what approaches work best, or whether the acquisition of cultural capital can be routinized at all are all interesting and relevant in numerous contexts. Unfortunately, I don't have the theory to begin to respond to Bourdieu.