Bourdieu's Terms Research Articles

From flesh to food: Exploring consumers’ fluctuations in hysteresis

Bourdieu’s interrelated concepts of habitus and field have been deployed to theorise the unreflexive consumption practices characterising much of consumers’ everyday lives. Less is known, however, about the disruptive experience when habitus and field suddenly misalign – which Bourdieu terms ‘hysteresis’. We address this lacuna by studying smalahove (sheep’s head) consumption involving participant observation at a Norwegian smalahove farm – an unsettling space within the food consumption field that may challenge many consumers’ habitual ways of seeing, smelling, hearing, touching, and tasting meat. Our core contribution lies in introducing a dynamic conceptualisation of hysteresis, demonstrating how it fluctuates in consumption environments; intensifying and diminishing in intensity as the gaps between habitus and field open and close.

Soviet Samizdat: Imagining a New Society by Ann Komaromi (review)

Reviewed by: Soviet Samizdat: Imagining a New Society by Ann Komaromi Irina Shevelenko (bio) Ann Komaromi, Soviet Samizdat: Imagining a New Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022). 297 pp., ill. Appendix. Bibliography. Index. ISBN: 978-1-501-76359-5. Ann Komaromi's long-term research on Soviet samizdat – a practice of uncensored "self-publishing," primarily via the creation and dissemination of typewritten copies – has resulted in several remarkable achievements, including the online platform "Project for the Study of Dissidence and Samizdat" (https://samizdatcollections.library.utoronto.ca/), where one can find a collection of digitized samizdat periodicals and a wealth of bibliographic and contextual information on samizdat. Komaromi's first book, Uncensored: Samizdat Novels and the Quest for Autonomy in Soviet Dissidence (2015), focused primarily on major literary works by Vasily Aksenov, Andrei Bitov, and Venedikt Erofeev that once circulated in samizdat. Its final chapter, "Samizdat and the Extra-Gutenberg Condition," reiterated her perspective on "the samizdat textual object" in Pierre Bourdieu's terms – as the embodiment of a particular type of symbolic capital whose value derived, among other things, from the autonomy that object maintained in relation to official Soviet cultural [End Page 307] institutions and their attendant ideological and aesthetic constraints. In Komaromi's new book, which does not hide its ties with her earlier study, we are presented with a different approach to samizdat. The new perspective is a welcome change for this reader, who feels that over the past several decades, the Bourdieusian analytical apparatus has become a kind of passkey that confers a sameness on all the rooms it opens. In Soviet Samizdat, Komaromi significantly broadens the scope of her material; it no longer comprises just literary samizdat or its singular exemplars but, rather, includes a vast and variegated range of "publications" produced by poets and religious groups, national minorities and feminists, rights activists and Marxist dissenters. The diversity of this material dictates a novel approach proposed by the scholar – to treat samizdat "as an alternative textual culture that facilitated the formation of new public communities in the Soviet Union after Stalin" (P. 3). This reshaping of the subject seamlessly removes the rigid opposition of official and unofficial (samizdat) culture: the actors of samizdat and their readers obviously partook in both. Komaromi's primary research question has to do with the sense of purpose that informed the activities of samizdat communities and how these communities transformed the social fabric of the post-Stalin USSR over a few decades. In each of the four chapters of her study, Komaromi introduces a range of such samizdat communities, pointing out the complexity of the samizdat map, which resists description through a singular narrative. The chronological starting point of the book is Nikita Khrushchev's "Secret Speech," delivered in February 1956 at the closed session of the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR. Komaromi argues that, among other things, this speech opened the possibility to articulate the plurality of historical narratives of the Soviet past. This, in turn, stimulated the formation of new versions of social imaginary in the present, new ways for people to "connect their individual sense of self to their society and to shared norms and values" (P. 21). In chapter 1, "Samizdat and the Historical Subject," Komaromi presents several examples of what this process entailed: from Revol't Pimenov's Information leaflets (1956–1957) to Aleksandr Ginzburg's Syntax almanacs (Sintaksis, 1959–1960) to thematic collections Memory (Pamiat', 1975–1981), to two Crimean Tatar periodicals, Information (1965–1985) and Effort (K″asevet, 1984–1994), to such subcultural venues as the rock-music journal The Ear (Ukho, 1982–1983). This array of examples emphasizes the geographic diversity and the [End Page 308] plurality of communities that found samizdat a necessary instrument, allowing them to create "networks within which people could imagine themselves differently" (P. 47). One of the ways to conceptualize the sense of mission that samizdat authors and readers shared, Komaromi suggests, is through the lens of the "Hegelian historicism" metaphor – as a means to "help their society resume its role in world history": "While literary writers and readers sought to reconnect with world culture, the rights activists connected these efforts with...

Social value of Spanish among transnational Latin American families in Italy

The aim of this paper is to explore the value of Spanish through the study of the ideologies and subjectivities represented in the discursive practices of some transnational Latin American families that underwent processes of diaspora to Italy. In particular, the goal is to focus on their family language policies by exploring the relationship between linguistic uses, identities, and ideologies. In the current context of neoliberalism, many scholars have highlighted how language has become a commodity (Holborow, 2007; Block, Gray, and Holborow, 2012; Heller and Duchêne, 2012) or, in terms of Bourdieu (1991), a symbolic capital, i.e., a system of values that social actors associate with a particular linguistic use in a specific economic and political context, determined by certain power relations. In global contemporary diasporas, in line with the colonial era (Mignolo, 1992; Heller and McElhinny, 2017), the perceptual and evaluation schemes of linguistic practices continue to be strongly determined by the centre-periphery relationship. This same language regime is reflected in the social value of Spanish that emerges in the discursive practices of Hispanic families in Italy. The data, in effect, demonstrate a clear perceptual inequality between the Spanish of the diaspora, marginalised by its condition of minority language and delegitimised for representing a deviation from the monoglossic norm (Silverstein, 1996), and the central languages (‘standard’ varieties of Spanish and Italian), understood as convertible resources in the global linguistic market and more desirable in terms of social mobility.

PESANTREN TANGGUH AS MODERATE ISLAMIC EDUCATION INSTITUTION DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

The Covid-19 pandemic divides the attitudes of pesantren residents into three categories: very strict, very loose and moderate (tawassut). This moderate attitude is found in Pesma Al-Hikam and Pesantren Sabilurrosyad in Malang City. This article uses a qualitative approach, then analyzed from the perspective of Pierre Bourdieu’s capital theory. The purpose is to describe how the attitudes, mindset, and residents’ behavior of Pesantren Tangguh related to symbolic, cultural, social, and economic modalities, to control the pandemic crisis. The findings of this article are Pesma Al-Hikam and Pesantren Sabilurrosyad as Pesantren Tangguh are representations of moderate Islamic educational institutions during the Covid-19 pandemic in terms of Bourdieu’s capital theory. First, the nationalist-religious; adaptive and inclusive; and philosophical-rational character in terms of symbolic capital. Second, the theological view that combines destiny and endeavors harmoniously; an elastic and comparative view of Islamic law; and Sufistic behavior that combines ritual and social worship in terms of cultural capital. Third, the behaviour of pesantren residents who remain active in carrying out activities at the pesantren but are disciplined in complying with health protocols in terms of social capital. Fourth, the economic independence of the pesantren in fulfilling the needs and social assistance to the peripheral community in terms of economic capital. In summary, the residents of Pesantren Tangguh show moderate character in aspects of attitude, mindset, and behavior related to symbolic, cultural, social, and economic modalities, enabling the pesantren residents to be able to control the Covid-19 pandemic crisis well.

Masculine Domination in Henry James's Novels: The Art of Concealment by Wibke Schniedermann

Reviewed by: Masculine Domination in Henry James's Novels: The Art of Concealment by Wibke Schniedermann Shuqin Fu Wibke Schniedermann. Masculine Domination in Henry James's Novels: The Art of Concealment. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, 177 pp., $18.61 (electronic), $18.02 (hardback). Gender issues in James's oeuvre have been subjected to extensive academic scrutiny. Among the scholarly works that probe into James's stance and speculation on gender, Wibke Schniedermann's Masculine Domination in Henry James's Novels: The Art of Concealment contributes impressively to work on gendered power relations and the narrative representation of these structures in James. Building on Pierre Bourdieu's relational sociology theory as well as his assumptions on masculine domination, the book specifically examines the female protagonists' personal struggles against and strategies to break from gender-based symbolic violence and symbolic power in three major James novels––The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Wings of the Dove (1902), and The Golden Bowl (1904). Although much has been written about James's sensitivity to power disequilibrium, Schniedermann sheds new light on James's depiction of social power and its problematic implications that "account for this power's social conditionality" (2). This book is composed of six chapters. Chapter 1, which serves as an introduction, presents the subject and structure of the study. In particular, Schniedermann introduces the book's critical practice in "Daisy Miller: A Study" (1879) via Bourdieu's terms habitus, field, capital, symbolic violence, and symbolic domination. The author contends that a micro field is created in the novella, in which clashing habitus leads to the conflicts among the characters, whose capital distribution can be analyzed to disclose the represented social hierarchies. In this sense, symbolic capital works as the premise for the exercise of symbolic power, which can only exert its influence by means of actual misrecognition. Thus, Daisy's failure to recognize the established symbolic power literally plunges her into a closely knit and inescapable web of gender-specific domination as "the form par excellence of symbolic domination" (24). As a result, her absence and death at the end of the story constitute a doom foretold in the androcentric society. As Schniedermann explains, James's treatment of a female protagonist's absence in "Daisy Miller" is an experiment in the androcentric basis of feminine absence, which James develops in Isabel Archer. Thus, chapter 2 ("The Presence of Absence in The Portrait of a Lady") focuses on feminized vacancy and (absence of) visibility as well as the female character's inner struggle against gendered domination. The author contends that Isabel's fighting back is fully manifested through her feminized absence in the beginning of the novel, the constantly changing perspective toward her view, and her self-chosen absence at the end of the story. Unlike Daisy Miller, who is short on wisdom and lacks the disposition to empower her own subversiveness, Isabel's penetrating cognition and critical temperament make her subversion truly potent. Just as absence is a common topic of the textual analysis of "Daisy Miller" and The Portrait of a Lady, inheritance as a species of symbolic capital turns out to be [End Page E-11] a shared theme of the textual interpretation in chapter 3 ("The Grip of Inheritance in The Wings of the Dove") and chapter 4 ("How to Survive One's Inheritance in The Golden Bowl"). Revolving around "the unequal distribution of capital and the gender-dependent sphere of influence provided by and through a character's resources" (26), the third chapter concludes that Milly's controversial triumph comes less from a misjudgment of her class privilege than from the latter's intricate interconnection with her wealth and fatal illness. Compared with Milly's moderate success, Maggie's victory is a full one in that "she achieves exactly what she aims at" (27): Maggie's astute cognition, firm decision, and consequent actions enable the novel to uncover the powerful effect of the well-disguised system of masculine domination. Firmly believing that her father deserves honor and authority, Maggie spares no effort in maintaining his power by hiding Amerigo and Charlotte Stant's adultery. In essence, what Maggie tries to cover is just what the text tries...

BECOMING ΚΛΕΙΝΟΣ IN CRETE AND MAGNA GRAECIA: DIONYSIAC MYSTERIES AND MATURATION RITUALS REVISITED

AbstractThis article reconsiders the historical and typological relation between Greek maturation rituals and Greek mystery religion. Particular attention is given to the word κλεινός (‘illustrious’) and its ritual uses in two roughly contemporary Late Classical sources: an Orphic-Bacchic funerary gold leaf from Hipponion in Magna Graecia and Ephorus’ account of a Cretan pederastic age-transition rite. In both contexts, κλεινός marks an elevated status conferred by initiation. (This usage finds antecedents in Alcman'sPartheneia.) Without positing direct development between puberty rites and mysteries, the article argues on the basis of shared vocabulary and other ritual elements that age-transitions influenced the ideology of mystery cults. It is further claimed that puberty rites and mysteries performed similar functions in their respective social contexts, despite obvious differences of prestige and visibility. Age-transition rites have been analysed in Bourdieu's terms as ‘rites of institution’, in which young elites were publicly affirmed in civic roles: private mysteries can be described in analogous but opposed terms as rites of ‘counter-institution’, in which familiar ritual language and symbols of elite status were used to construct an alternative ‘imagined community’ of mystery initiates.

Momentums of success, illusio and habitus: High-achieving upper secondary students’ reasons for seeking academic success

Through interviews with 52 upper-secondary students from different socioeconomic, educational and migrant/native backgrounds, the article examines students’ own stories of what drives them to perform well in school. Different kinds of ‘illusios’ are reconstructed in terms of Bourdieu's sociology; Revanche, Proficiency, Fear of failing and Expectations. They relate to different forms of social energy and emotions, such as the desire for rehabilitation of the self or family in the eyes of the other, and the drive for justification. Some is fuelled with social shame of not reaching the same position as parents, or meaning falling out of the system, while others are driven by an urge to be knowledgeable. These illusios work differently in relation to the students’ habitus.

REPERTOIRES OF CONTENTION IN REPRESSIVE STATES: THREE-GORGES-DAM MIGRANTS’ PETITIONING IN BEIJING*

This study advances our understanding of the processes whereby actors select and play out particular tactics and framings from “repertories of contention” to fight against repressive states. Empirically, it focuses upon a unique dataset captured from a discussion group of 140 participants in an instant messenger app—WeChat. Related to a petition campaign in Beijing, the data reflect the claims of over 1,000 petitioners who had been forced to relocate to different parts of China by the building of the Three Gorges Dam (1994–2006). The real-time chronological exchanges online among petitioners and other displaced persons reveal the petitioners’ tactics against the state’s counterpetition strategies, and the motives behind the petitioners’ repertoire selection. Theoretically, this study seeks to understand this case of grassroots resistance in terms of Bourdieu’s concept of habitus. It shows that the actors pursued parochial and rent-seeking motives—as symbolized in the discursive usage of nao (or troublemaking)— more than their defense of legal and constitutional rights as citizens. Both the characteristics and outcomes of such repertoire selection, shaped by what I call the habitus of nao, are discussed.

Power Relations in Science

Pierre Bourdieu challenged the notions of science when he presented it as a field of peers competing for the monopoly of scientific authority. As scientific capital equals power, science disputes become disputes for power. Yet, simultaneously, those disputes occur within the internal logic and language of the scientific field. In this article, we present those ideas and examine a case study within the history of quantum mechanics, a dispute inside the ongoing controversy about the foundations of quantum mechanics. We present the Wheeler-Everett and Bohr dialogue in terms of Bourdieu’s sociology of science and discuss the insights that such ideas can bring into the history of science.

Artistic Work as Symbolic Capital

Female artists and performers are at the top of the scale of precarious work relations in post-Fordist society. Their work is undervalued and seldom paid. This article deals with the issues arising from the controversial relations between the cultural, social and economic value of their work. How to re-valorize artistic work performed by women? In providing the answer to this central question, the value of artworks will be defined in terms of Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital and in the context of Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism. The article argues that a contemporary alternative can be sought in the new chain of value accumulation, in which the surplus-value of the artwork is created by shifting its symbolic value into a direct relationship to the material resources. This point will be illustrated with the art projects presented at City of Women, an international festival of contemporary arts based in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

“Мягкая сила” и “культурный капитал” наций: пример киноиндустрии

The article showcases the similarities between Joseph Nye’s concept of soft power and Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of capital, and attempts to draw upon the latter to deepen the understanding of the role of culture as a source of soft power. This approach is applied to study the role of a national film industry as a soft power tool. First, based on the existing academic literature, some key concepts relevant to the film industry are conceptualized in terms of Bourdieu’s theory of capital. After that, Bourdieu’s research frameworks – particularly, the concept of cultural capital – are used to describe how national film industry contributes to a nation’s cultural influence on the global stage. The author specifically highlights the importance of consideration of “institutionalized cultural capital” (or institutional recognition) and presents some evidence on film awards, namely, the awards from three large European film festivals (Berlin, Venice and Cannes) and Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film. It is emphasized that European countries (such as Italy and France) and the U.S. are in advantageous position in regard to this component of cultural influence: motion pictures produced by these countries receive awards very frequently, while, for instance, African and South American films are awarded scarcely. Such tendencies demonstrate unequal possibilities of countries for the use of national cinema as a tool of cultural influence. The author asserts that a national “soft power strategy” can be seen, in terms of Bourdieu’s theory of capital, as a capital conversion strategy, and discusses the implications of such approach. Furthermore, the applicability of Bourdieu’s theory of capital for the analysis of Russian cinema as a soft power tool is discussed. In conclusion, the author summarizes theoretical and practical implications of the proposed approach, draws attention to some of possible directions for further research.

Beyond Puppet Journalism: The Bridging Work of Transnational Journalists in a Local Field

ABSTRACTThis article examines the position and relative power of local journalists who produce foreign correspondence in contemporary authoritarian states. The study uses field theory to examine the forms of capital and the field positions these journalists hold in a context where the local field imposes strong, unwritten boundaries around acceptable methods and forms of storytelling—leaving local journalists to practice what one correspondent called “puppet journalism.” This study draws on data collected during seven months of fieldwork, including participant observation in several newsrooms and interviews conducted in and around Kigali, Rwanda. I find that local-foreign correspondents in Rwanda occupy a bridging position, drawing from local and transnational journalism fields to construct their understanding of the journalism game (in Bourdieu's terms, their habitus). These journalists incorporate values into their work routines and news coverage that align with the transnational field, while adapting these values to better coexist with the expectations of the local field. This analysis offers insight into the routines and capital of local-foreign correspondents in a development-oriented authoritarian country and, more broadly, unpacks the ways that a journalist might draw from multiple fields to construct a bridging habitus.

The Turn to the Object: Recent Developments in the Field of Nineteenth-Century Latin American Cultural and Literary Studies

This essay provides an overview of the current state of nineteenth-century Latin American literary and cultural studies. It begins by reviewing some of the key critical interventions in the field, including Doris Sommer’s Foundational Fictions and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, and argues that Sommer’s and Anderson’s postulations helped turn the critical gaze away from a vision of nineteenth-century Latin American literature as subsidiary to the subsequent, supposedly superior literary movements of the fin de siglo and the twentieth century. Critics of nineteenth-century Latin American literature have increasingly focused on previously less-studied texts, on those not typically considered literary, and on other cultural phenomena that can be both read as texts and alongside written texts, such as music and visual imagery. The essay also resists binarisms and implicit hierarchies and conceptualizes nineteenth-century Latin America in terms of Bourdieu’s field of cultural production, while taking into account Bottero and Crossley’s “concrete connections” among actors in that field. In that way, I conclude that the two chief critical tendencies today in nineteenth-century Latin American literary studies may be categorized as a focus on the circulation of ideas and on the circulation of objects.

La inmaterialidad y normatividad del patrimonio cultural

El presente artículo tiene como objetivo analizar la producción social del patrimonio cultural inmaterial como un campo que es atravesado por lógicas normativas. En este sentido, se busca abordar el patrimonio cultural inmaterial como un campo (en los términos de Bourdieu) y analizarlo a la luz de los aportes de la antropología para así poder llevar a cabo una lectura que vuelva visible la heterogeneidad omnipresente de prácticas, ideas jurídicas, definiciones, conductas y normas. Para ello se recuperarán algunas de las normativas vigentes -internacionales y nacionales- para comprender el conjunto de las disputas que refuerzan o limitan en cada contexto la vigencia del mismo, así como sus múltiples interpretaciones.

'My desire is to be the possessor of all the best books in this world of struggle': Respectability and Literary Materialism in Colonial Ibadan

This article argues for the importance of ‘literary materialism’ in colonial African understandings of respectability. It draws attention to a particular form of acquisitiveness that placed value on the materiality of literary things. That is, literary objects – books, journals, magazines, notebooks, diaries and encyclopaedia volumes – were valued for their material and physical qualities as well as for their use in imparting ‘knowledge’. They had the capacity, in Bourdieu's terms, to display cultural capital. My focus is Akinpelu Obisesan, a voluminous diarist whose life spanned the entire colonial period in the Yoruba city of Ibadan. The article first re-examines Obisesan's early years of diary writing, particularly how the activity related to his professional identity as a clerk, and then goes on to reconstruct the fraught circumstances that surrounded his purchase of the Encyclopaedia Britannica between 1928 and 1931. Obisesan struggled to pay his debt for the encyclopaedia, and all the time used his diary to confess his dire financial state. Ultimately, his claim to the cultural capital that the encyclopaedia embodied was undermined by his lack of economic resources.

‘My desire is to be the possessor of all the best books in this world of struggle’: respectability and literary materialism in colonial Ibadan

AbstractThis article argues for the importance of ‘literary materialism’ in colonial African understandings of respectability. It draws attention to a particular form of acquisitiveness that placed value on the materiality of literary things. That is, literary objects – books, journals, magazines, notebooks, diaries and encyclopaedia volumes – were valued for their material and physical qualities as well as for their use in imparting ‘knowledge’. They had the capacity, in Bourdieu's terms, to display cultural capital. My focus is Akinpelu Obisesan, a voluminous diarist whose life spanned the entire colonial period in the Yoruba city of Ibadan. The article first re-examines Obisesan's early years of diary writing, particularly how the activity related to his professional identity as a clerk, and then goes on to reconstruct the fraught circumstances that surrounded his purchase of the Encyclopaedia Britannica between 1928 and 1931. Obisesan struggled to pay his debt for the encyclopaedia, and all the time used his diary to confess his dire financial state. Ultimately, his claim to the cultural capital that the encyclopaedia embodied was undermined by his lack of economic resources.

Stories from the field: women\u2019s networking as gender capital in entrepreneurial ecosystems

Women are under-represented in successful entrepreneurial ecosystems and the creation of women-only entrepreneurial networks has been a widespread policy response. We examine the entrepreneurial ecosystem construct and suggest that it, and the role networks play in entrepreneurial ecosystems, can be analysed in terms of Bourdieu’s socio-analysis as field, habitus and capital. Specifically, we develop the notion of gender capital as the skill set associated with femininity or from simply being recognized as feminine. We apply this to the development of women’s entrepreneurial networks as a gender capital enhancing initiative. Using data from qualitative interviews with network coordinators and women entrepreneurs, we reflect on the extent to which formally established women-only networks generate gender capital for their members and improve their ability to participate in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. The paper concludes by drawing out the implications of our analysis for theory, entrepreneurial practice and economic development policy.

A emergência do campo de políticas públicas de dados abertos governamentais no Brasil

O trabalho faz uma leitura das políticas públicas de produção e consumo de dados abertos, pela teoria de campos de ação estratégica. No Brasil, o campo de dados abertos governamentais caracteriza-se como emergente, já que ainda não está estabilizado. Percebe-se que cinco grupos atuam em dinâmicas de cooperação e enfrentamentos: Estado, Unidades Internas de Governança, organizações da sociedade civil, universidades e empresas. As dinâmicas do campo são influenciadas pela posse de recursos, ou capitais, nos termos de Bourdieu. Os capitais identificados são: técnico, social, simbólico, econômico e informacional. A partir de análises qualitativas de narrativas dos sujeitos pesquisados, o trabalho apresenta uma agenda para negociação e ação, envolvendo os diversos participantes do campo. Destaca-se que essas narrativas estão associadas às funções da transparência, que correspondem-se com as preocupações de governo aberto trazidas principalmente por agentes legitimadores internacionais. Sob o ponto de vista acadêmico, este trabalho contribuiu para mostrar uma forma de operacionalizar conceitos trazidos pelas teorias que tratam de campos de ação estratégica, sobretudo no que diz respeito ao estado de emergência de um campo, além de ter evidenciado pontos fortes e sugestões de aperfeiçoamento dessas teorias.

언론사 및 뉴스 생산 요인에 관한 인식이 디지털 뉴스 활동에 미치는 관계성 : 부르디외의 장 이론과 루만의 체계이론을 중심으로

언론사 및 뉴스 생산 요인에 관한 인식이 디지털 뉴스 활동에 미치는 관계성 : 부르디외의 장 이론과 루만의 체계이론을 중심으로

Falling prey to the dominant culture? Demystifying symbolic violence against ethnic minority students in Nepal

Nepal’s multicultural society is hierarchical and divided along the lines of caste, ethnicity and language and its school system, including curriculum and pedagogy, is influenced greatly by the dominant language and culture. In this context, this article analyses the difficulties and struggle ethnic minority children experience as they move between the cultures of home and school. Drawing upon a narrative case analysis, this article argues that ethnic minority students are subjected to what Bourdieu terms symbolic violence with illustrations of how such violence is reproduced in schools’ everyday interactions, practices and dispositions. In particular, schools’ symbolic violence against minority students has been reproduced and manifested in various guises of language, peer culture and pedagogy. Given the problematic nature of schooling for such children in the majority of schools in Nepal, this article underscores the need for culturally responsive school policies to embrace the linguistic and cultural diversity of students as well as tapping into the cultural resources each student brings to the school.