Pierre Bourdieu: The concept of Cultural Capital

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• Pierre Bourdieu The concept of Cultural Capital
• Four Types of Capital
• Cultural Capital and Social Reproduction the
  case of elite boarding schools

The Taft School
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Eliott Weninger and Annette Laureau Cultural
Capital The French sociologist Pierre
Bouredieu, working with various colleagues,
developed the concept of cultural capital in the
early 1960s to help address a particular
empirical problem.
Pierre Bourdieu
What was it?
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Bourdieu maintained that culture shares many of
the properties that are characteristic of
economic capital What did he mean by that?
Pierre Bourdieu
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• Bourdieu further argued that cultural capital
  exists in three distinct forms.
• Competence
• Objects
• Institutionalized forms

Pierre Bourdieu
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• Pierre Bourdieu Cultural Capital and Social
  Reproduction
• the importance of culture in the social
  reproduction of class and class structure
• How does this work?
• textual analysis, p. 2

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Cultural Capital is...

• tastes (music, art, food, dress, etc.)
• manners
• linguistic and interpersonal skills
• attitudes and dispositions
• cultural knowledge
• arbitrary
• difficult to acquire later in life

Paul Fussell
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The point of my work is to show that culture and
education arent simply hobbies or minor
influences. They are hugely important in the
affirmation of differences between groups and
social classes and in the reproduction of those
differences.
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Weninger and Lareau cite more recent research
about how cultural capital works among U.S.
elites. What is the argument about cultural
omnivores rather than snobs?
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• Cultural Capital in Context
• Economic capital
• Human capital
• Social Capital
• Cultural Capital

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(No Transcript)
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Groton
Elite Boarding Schools
Philips Exeter Films
The Taft School
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Elite Boarding Schools Discussion How is the
experience in the film and the experience
described in the Cookson and Persell article
different from your own? How does this
matter? What do they mean by curricula as
cultural capital? How are such students
advantaged?
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Cultural Capital in Action?