Bourdieu: Cultural Capital, the Love of Art & Hip Hop

The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu was interested in how the organisation of culture and the social world around us could affect our individual view of the world. How we didn’t just pick the culture we liked, but in some ways culture picked us – made us more or less likely to act in certain ways.

I look at Bourdieu’s ideas about cultural capital, social capital, and institutional capital, primarily through his book, the Love of Art.

For Bourdieu, facts about the world could be measured, collected, and recorded; but they were also instinctively absorbed by us from a young age – they became subjectified into our own behaviour. He was interested in how these cultural and social phenomena tcouldhat connect us to the wider world. Our tastes, accents, styles of speaking, mannerisms, and values can be the product of our social environment and our own minds. He sought ‘the subjective dispositions within which these structures are actualized.’

Our preferences in art, literature, or music are, in large part at least, determined by our social positions, our family’s exposure to specific cultural artefacts, our economic possibilities, or the interests of the faculty of the school we attend. In the most obvious sense, an American girl attending high school today is unlikely to enjoy 16th century Mongolian folk songs. But why is this? Why are our tastes often so uniform?

Bourdieu’s answer is cultural capital.

He saw that If we are bought up in an aristocratic family who’s friends and teachers all read the Homeric epics then we too are more likely to attach a value to that cultural artefact. If everyone tells us these stories are good as a child we are of course, more likely to value them because praise for reading them is a reward as powerful as any financial reward. Economic capital, like money, can be exchanged for other goods. And so too can cultural capital.

Finally, I look at what this means for culture today, taking a Bourdieuan look at hip-hop and grime .

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Credits:

Stock footage provided by Videvo, downloaded from

Stormzy Glastonbury Photo

Henry W. Laurisch [CC BY-SA 4.0]

Sources:

Bourdieu, The Love of Art

Bourdieu, Forms of Capital

Bourdieu, Theory of Practice

De Paor-Evans, A. The Intertextuality and Translations of Fine Art and Class in Hip-Hop Culture. Arts 2018, 7, 80.