Translating Bourdieu: cultural capital and the English middle class in historical perspective

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which Pierre Bourdieu's work on culture and cultural capital can be applied to the study of the English middle class in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing on a wide historical literature, the article argues for the significance of culture as a constitutive element of middle-class identities in England since 1800. It goes on to examine Bourdieu's ideas of 'objectivated', 'instutionalized' and 'incorporated' cultural capital, in the context of family, inheritance, education and the body. The article identifies changes in the historical forms which cultural capital has taken and emphasizes the importance of analysing family processes of intergenerational transmission.

Does Teacher Encouragement Influence Students’ Educational Progress? A Propensity-Score Matching Analysis

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‘It Is Not a Matter of Taste … ’

“…Children, therefore, are repeatedly mentioned, and not only as a possible threat to the aesthetic harmony of the home, but also as inheritors of the social markers or cultural distinctions in their socialisation, which fits well together with Simon Gunn's argument that the influence of the mother has not been given enough importance in the discussion on cultural capital and that in fact women have been an essential source of transmission of cultural values and norms (Gunn 2005 Talking about the inheritance of 'social signals' or 'codes' Á/ that is distinctions Á/ implies that the interviewees accept and, to some extent, subscribe to them: Elisabeth spoke rather proudly of her teenage daughters who are able to distinguish different ways of being a Swedish-speaking, upper class high school student. It also reveals another interesting feature: when Lilli referred to the interviewer as someone who 'knows about' social codes, she actually admitted that one's outward appearance, or habitus, is something that you build yourself (even accentuating it, like Beatrix suggests in her comment), and that the outer 4.…”

The PTA: Promoting Swiss tours, 1888–1939

“…If this marks a continuity inasmuch as travel was still seen as adding to one's cultural capital, it also reveals a shift in how this was seen to further one's development: from the acquisition of those manners and values necessary to form one's national citizenry and imperial identity, to the certification of one's social status via the acquisition of a signifier of class. That is to say, travelling was now seen to strengthen one's social prospects, at this time defined more by one's income or profession that cultural capital per se (Gunn, 2005), by contributing to the affirmation of one's social class. Accordingly, and following a trend that generally defined the industry at this time, the PTA embraced leisure as an espoused motive for travelling, and began promoting its tours as constituting individual, and not collective, experience.…”