Accounting for Culture by Caroline Andrew & Monica Gattinger & M. Sharon Jeannotte & Will Straw

Author:Caroline Andrew & Monica Gattinger & M. Sharon Jeannotte & Will Straw [Andrew, Caroline]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: POL028000
Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
Published: 2005-03-29T16:00:00+00:00

10.

The Elusiveness of Full Citizenship:

Accounting for Cultural Capital, Cultural Competencies, and Cultural Pluralism

KARIM H. KARIM

Most discussions about cultural capital seem to revolve around the consumption or use of cultural goods and services. This chapter attempts to address some aspects of a more fundamental role that cultural capital plays in society. Adopting an anthropological perspective on culture as a way of life, it seeks to widen Pierre Bourdieu’s discussion of the social exclusion that results from a person’s lack of certain aesthetic dispositions to one that accounts for broader aspects of life. Cultural capital in the present discussion refers not only to the acquisition of taste and distinction, but to an individual’s possession of a more extensive set of cultural competencies. They include the forms of knowledge and practices that all human beings need in order to interact with each other in society.

Sharon Jeannotte1 succinctly summarizes Bourdieu’s conceptualization of cultural capital as consisting of three elements:

...1) embodied capital (or habitus), the system of lasting dispositions that form an individuals character and guide his or her actions and tastes; 2) objectified capital, the means of cultural expression, such as painting, writing, and dance, that are symbolically transmissible to others; and 3) institutionalized capital, the academic qualifications that establish the value of the holder of a given qualification.1

The present chapter’s inquiry is primarily concerned with the competencies that individuals hold in themselves rather than the objectified and institutionalized forms of cultural capital. Bourdieu presents “habitus” as the sociological factors (parentage, class, education) that lead to the production of a person’s capacities for taste. Whereas I find his overly-structural analytical framework and its implications for the relative immutability of individual taste to be problematic, this study does draw from his idea of the embodied nature of cultural capital.

Bourdieu’s well-known inquiry into this matter, published in English as Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste,2 was motivated by the effort to identify the aspects of bourgeois culture that become symbolic of social status. The book presented his analysis of a survey that he conducted in the 1960s in France.

The survey sought to determine how the cultivated disposition and cultural competence that are revealed in the nature of the cultural goods consumed, and in the way they are consumed, vary according to the category of agents and the area to which they applied, from the most legitimate areas such as painting or music to the most “personal” ones such as clothing, furniture or cookery, and within the legitimate domains, according to the markets—“academic” and “non-academic”—in which they may be placed.3

The present discussion’s anthropological approach to culture does not subscribe to notions of the legitimacy or illegitimacy of cultural practices. On the contrary, it involves in its ambit of inquiry broader cultural expressions such as language, humour, and communal memory. It also seeks to address the pluralism of Western societies that goes beyond the traditional idea of a culturally homogenous nation-state.

The key question for this discussion is: how does a liberal democracy strive to broaden

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