Purposeful and unintentional: Chinese adolescent golfers in the intergenerational transmission and feedback of cultural capital

Abstract

By highlighting the motivation behind the intergenerational transmission of cultural capital (ITCC), this article extends the notion of the transmission of cultural capital. Utilising Bourdieusian theoretical resources, this article produces an analytical framework for the ITCC. Through empirical materials that were gathered based on semi-structured interviews conducted in China with adolescent golfers as well as separately with their mothers, this article reveals the multiple objectives of purposeful ITCC, and the reverse transmission/cultural feedback to mothers is also identified. The findings show that there are three objectives from social and biological sense:1) increasing the possibility of enrolling in a prestigious university; 2) promoting sportsmanship awareness and positioning social hierarchy; and 3) maintaining fitness and correcting vision. Unintentional cultural feedback/reverse transmission emerges as a result of increasingly frequent intergenerational communication between mother and child. Mothers start acquiring and deepening their habitus in golf-related fields with dominant or recessive guidance from youngsters. This article demonstrates the analytical capacity of Bourdieusian theoretical resources for intergenerational transmission analyses in the Chinese context.