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Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Capital
Meet Pierre.
Here he is, looking thoughtful.
Born in 1930 to working class parents, Bourdieu went on to become an influential sociologist in and outside of France. He’s best known for his theory of habitus and cultural capital, and it’s this theory we use at E Corp. You’ll see us apply it in lots of areas because we find the theory a helpful tool - for both explaining and understanding the lived experience of working class adlanders.
To understand how a working class person might interact with the advertising and media industry, we can split Bourdieu’s theory into three components:
Habitus
Bodily hexis
Cultural capital
Habitus
How we view and understand the world embodies habitus and affects our behaviour, and how we react to the world too. Bourdieu describes it as “systems of dispositions” (Bourdieu, 2010, xxix). We build these views and behaviours through the culture in which we live.
What’s interesting about habitus is how we gain and develop it. Although some of it is learned, we gain a lot of it through experience - how we interact with other people in our lives, as well as through interactions with our circumstances and surroundings. The result of these interactions shape our habitus, which in turn, shapes how we interact and view the world. As a result, Bourdieu believes our habitus is inescapably linked to our social class.
Bodily hexis
Our habitus is embodied in our bodily hexis. The way we present ourselves from our accent to our posture is our body expressing our habitus. Here it is on a picture drawn by one of our participants during a workshop
Cultural Capital
Bourdieu defines cultural capital as a collection of ‘tastes’ we learn from others.
From a young age, our community, family, peers and institutions (such as schools) shape our tastes. Tastes may present as music, literature, art, how we dress and knowledge. But it’s not just about which tastes we’ve gained. How we decode knowledge also forms cultural capital, and it acts as a signifiers, allowing others to put us in a category (or class) and vice versa.
Here's a picture drawn in one of our workshops. We've annotated it with the cultural capital our participants thought a senior advertiser might have.