Mothers, Wives and Changing Lives by Sally Baker Brian Brown

Author:Sally Baker, Brian Brown [Sally Baker, Brian Brown]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783164431
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Published: 2011-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

The influence of religious Nonconformity

The cultural and educational role of chapel communities in Welsh life and in the generation and sustenance of cultural capital can usefully be illuminated by means of Bourdieu’s extensions (1986b) of the notion of capital to explain cultural and symbolic affairs. Cultural capital is concerned with knowledge, skill, education and related advantages that can lead to higher status in society, closely approximating the accretions of knowledge, aspirations and spirituality which have been claimed to be central to Wales’s identity (Philips and Harper-Jones, 2002). The influence of the chapel was mentioned by nearly all participants. Participants recollected the ‘educational’ and ‘self-improvement’ ethos of the chapel providing an encouraging culture:

(Eryl) the chapel was a major influence on my life and on certain members of the [school] class. The chapel encouraged reading, literary culture … it especially helped me when I had to perform and go in front of an audience, so that was part of the Welsh culture … before you got to college you had done it before and chapel was really important in that.

Other participants revealed a very direct assistance from the chapel in their memories of receiving a formal education in Sunday school. Another participant felt less directly affected, but certainly sensed its presence in society:

(Arwel) a great deal has been made and probably rightly, of the influence of Nonconformity and RE and Sunday schools … in creating a literate, disputatious culture in Wales which lent itself in a sense to university education … I did go through some of that … felt that education was a good thing … it wasn’t a crucial influence … but one was certainly aware that Wales did have a lot of teachers and preachers who had had an education whereas the other people in my community had not …

The early religious experiences of the participants played an important part in acquiring a love of learning and an intention to go to university; a ‘cognitive habitus’ in Nash’s sense (2005) of the term. The chapel exposed them to people in roles for which an education was needed, such as ministers and teachers, who played a significant role in these communities. Such experiences are implicated in the kind of habitus the participants describe themselves acquiring as children.

A number of interviewees attributed their aspirations to attend university to a lack of other opportunities, as a result of local socio-economic problems:

(Eryl) it was automatically assumed that I was going to university because … in B—— [a village mainly dependent on a dying slate industry], at that time, what else do you do?

(Geraint) there was that feeling that you should get an education to avoid the pit, avoid the quarry.

(Arwel) I knew … plenty of slate quarry workers … I didn’t want to do physical labour … I knew what it was … I’d seen people physically digging ditches, I’d seen people coming home from work covered in slate dust and … I very consciously didn’t want to do that … as a

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