Origins
The term cultural capital is typically credited to the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu was interested in understanding why children with similar cognitive abilities (e.g. IQ) but different social classes ended up having vastly different life outcomes. In particular, how was it that the wealthy were able to 'socially reproduce' and pass on various advantages to their children. According to Boudieu, this was because the wealthy were able to endow their children with cultural capital. To Bourdieu, children from wealthy families entered school already prepared to succeed in it - they shared a common mode of speech, style of interaction and have prior awareness of both the ways of teaching and content of the syllabus. The idea therefore is that these children come with something - a form of capital.
Now, my interest is primarily in discussing cultural capital in a more general sense - not focussed on educational attainment but as a form of capital that individuals can accumulate, spend and convert. I see his analysis as descriptive - it provides a way to see the world. I won't comment here on to what degree it is metaphysically substantive.
Bordieu's three kinds of cultural capital
Bordieu distinguishes between three kinds of cultural capital, which I will denote as follows:
<1>: The embodied state
<2>: The objectified state
<3>: The institutionalised state
Let's discuss these in order.
First with the embodied state (<1>) - this refers to capital that is linked to the body and is internal. It refers to our knowledge, our skills, our experiences. One important aspect of <1> is the difficulty in cultivating it. I cannot simply pass my knowledge to you - you have to somehow cultivate it over time. The somehow of this is extremely important and I'll discuss it in more detail later in this post. The development of <1> is what I describe as cultural enrichment.
The objectified state (<2>) refers to cultural artefacts - for example books, paintings, sculpurse. Rather facetiously - if it's British Museum, it's probably this second kind of cultural capital. What's interesting is the transmission of <2> objectified cultural capital. I can of course sell you a collection of paintings, but what is transferred is only the legal ownership of the artefact - not the means of 'consuming' the painting. This point about consumption is vitally important - imagine I sold you first edition copy of Descartes meditations in the original French. While the artefact has value in itself, if you're unable to read French then you cannot really consume it. To consume the book you will need to be able to understand French (and philosophy) to a sufficient level - part of your embodied (<1>) capital.
The third state (<3>) refers to recognition received by an institution, for example a qualification. The problem with (<1>) embodied capital is that it is a part of you - there's value but someone might not believe it (in comparison e.g. to (<2>) objectified capital). By having recognition from an institution, you can validate your capital. Qualifications are a form of a signal that tells onlookers certain things - here being my level of (<1>) embodied capital. It is important of course to distinguish the qualification from the skill - qualifications are external while skill is internal. You need to show someone your qualification for it to be of value (and in theory you can fake it), while your skill requires no witness.
Consumption of cultural content
Now
that I've discussed the three kinds of cultural capital, I want to
focus on what I describe as cultural content. Rather abstractly, I'm referring to the 'meaning' or 'value' behind cultural artefacts (<2>) or qualifications (<3>) that is amassed in the embodied state (<1>).
Let's return to my example of French.
The embodied state (<1>) refers to my actual ability in French. For example how I am able to speak the language, how I am able to read French books, how I am able to understand native speakers and so on.
The objectified state (<2>) might refer to all the French books or films I have. It could also refer to various French museums or artefacts. Note that such cultural artefact or films have some kind of content that I cannot fully access unless I'm able to actually French.
Finally, the institutionised state (<3>) might refer to my French qualifications - a DELF exam or an A-level.
The key here is this idea of content - the more cultural capital we have in the embodied state, the more we can content we can consume. It's worth highlighting here that there more forms of consumption than simply cultural artefacts - we can for example consume an interaction (e.g. a conversation with a French person) or an experience (e.g. a French film).Indeed, we can think of our ability to consume capital in the embodied state (<1>) as the way we can spend our cultural capital. We use to gain access to content that we would otherwise be restricted from.
A natural conclusion is therefore to think about how we can increase our cultural capital in the embodied state (<1>). Well quite obviously to anyone who has tried learning a language, I need to consume more content. I.e. I need to speak more French, I need to read more French and so on. Note that there's clearly some kind of loop involved - develop <1> by consuming <2> and vice versa. Of course the more we develop <1> the more we are able to consume <2> and only with a sufficient amount of <1> are we able to legitimately develop <3>.
Now, the development loop for language learning is relatively, but other kinds of cultural capital are more complex to develop. For example, what does it mean to develop greater knowledge of a certain culture - what might it mean to learn how to be 'truly French'?
Is it it about reading up on the country? Or does it involve living in the country and experiencing an specific lifestyle? What if I go to the country but never talk to anyone? Is that better than sitting in my UK home and watching videos about France?
Without knowledge of how to properly consume content, we might struggle to develop wide cultural capital. I could visit the van Gough gallery every single day, but if I'm rushing through the paintings each time, am I really developing my cultural capital or understanding of impressionism? Is it wasted on me? They say practice makes perfect, but I think it is targetted or active practice that does so.
I went to visit the Angkor Wat recently spending a day looking at various temples. I spent around $40 on a day pass and $20 on a Tuk Tuk driver to take me around for the day. Why did I do this? Well aside from the fact that I thought it would be interesting (and a great photo opportunity!), I also believed that it would culturally enrich me on some level - but how? What is the difference between e.g. just looking at photos of Angkor Wat in comparison to seeing it in person?
Another way of framing this question – how do I consume the Angkor Wat?
On some level, this question seems bizarre – we do not consume a temple. The point however is that we can get more or less out of the experience of visiting Angkor Wat. It can add to my cultural capital to a large degree, or it can barely affect me. Think about the guy who visits each place and only takes a photo from the outside and then moves onto the next. What does he gain from the visit, except a bunch of photos (that are probably worse than the stock photos used for advertising the site)? It feels like this guy is missing out on something.
Reading online, I saw a bunch of suggestions on what to do when visiting Angkor Wat. They suggested sitting for a bit in each temple, looking around and feeling the atmosphere. They suggested hiring a guide to talk about the differences between each temple, and the history involved. They suggested looking out for specific inscriptures on the walls of the temple. These all seem like suggestions on how to more effectively consume the experience of viewing Angkor Wat.
I saw this interesting post the other day on viewing art that discusses various techniques one can use to view art - for example by looking the art medium and looking up the context of the art. I think that these are ways to improve our ability to consume art and hopefully get something more out of the experience.
I'll leave this post here with the key message that to properly develop cultural capital we need to invest in properly consuming content. In the next post I want to go into some more detail about the difficulty in determining the value of cultural capital and the resultant risk we incur when we invest in cultural capital.
