Forms Of Cultural Capital Research Articles

Cultural icons and urban development in Asia: Economic imperative, national identity, and global city status

Abstract Global cities are characterized by the multiplicity of flows that they are implicated in – flows of people, goods, services, ideas, and images. Yet, global cities do not derive their status only on the basis that they are networked nodes. They also require particular forms of cultural capital. Cities with global aspirations have thus increasingly recognized the need to accumulate cultural capital, for which one means is to create new urban spaces, in particular, new cultural urban spaces (e.g. grand theatres, museums, libraries). These often monumental structures are intended to support a vibrant cultural life, in order to attract and sustain global human and economic flows. In this paper, I examine the efforts by Shanghai's, Singapore's and Hong Kong's governments to develop cultural icons as part of the strategy to help their cities gain global city status, and in the process, constructing shared national and city identities. I illustrate how such efforts are not universally interpreted in the manner intended, with city populations sometimes protesting, sometimes simply oblivious. At the same time, I argue that such strategies to achieve global city status are sometimes at odds with projects of nationhood.

Why Tuscany is the new Provence: Rituals of sacred self-transformation through food tourism, imagined traditions, and performance of class identity

Within the last few years the number of books, articles, movies, and cooking schools focused on the northern Italian regions of Tuscany and Umbria has increased dramatically, superceding the intense interest in all things Provencal so prevalent in the 1980s and 1990s. I use Graburn's theory of sacred touristic self-transformation to argue that this shift represents a change in perception of what it means to perform a professional, upper-middle-class dietary and health identity. In particular, the ‘Tuscan Experience’ represents new concepts of the idealized-self created through dietary renewal, lifestyle management, and rituals of imagined tradition and community. The notion of Tuscany as a prime location for self-transformation is not new, but the underlying belief systems about what ‘Tuscany’ means to travelers and lifestyle-seekers have altered as the increased popularity of the ‘villa rental’ vacation experience and second-home culture favor a situated class space that requires and creates particular forms of cultural capital. The avenues for personal and social transformation represented by the ‘Tuscan Experience’ are mediated through ideals about landscapes of food and community situated in discourses of appropriate health and nutrition behavior. These class-specific knowledges reify the goodness of the ‘Tuscan Experience’ and the perceived nutritional superiority of the Italian-Mediterranean diet as a means to meet health, social, and emotional needs not thought to be fulfilled by a professional Western lifestyle. In this process, these culturally- determined belief systems further cement a faith in the goodness of the Mediterranean Diet in the minds of Western elites.

‘The Taste of Paradise’: Selling Fiji and FIJI Water

Abstract: Effective global competitiveness is rare in the Pacific islands, yet FIJI Water has been a major success story since 1997, exporting bottled water to the USA and elsewhere. A bland commodity has been linked to an ‘exotic’ place, and sold to elite consumers, as a form of cultural capital. The company website and newspaper extol the virtues of a ‘pristine’ product, produced in a natural context, in an environmentally sensitive manner. Marketing these themes and product placement have enabled success in a highly competitive market. Place has been used as a means of marketing perceived taste, distinctiveness and quality.

Nonformal Education and Informal Economies in Sub-Saharan Africa: Finding the Right Match

Education policy in sub-Saharan Africa is predicated on human capital assumptions and therefore promotes the expansion of formal education as a way to promote economic growth. As a result, formal education is valued primarily as a private consumer good, a form of cultural capital that allows some to get ahead and stay ahead, rather than as a public good that also benefits the overall society. In the absence of vibrant industrial labor markets, job prospects for school leavers are poor, which places an inflated premium on educational credentials. The collapse of formal economies combined with high population growth rates suggests that higher social rates of return might accrue from more investments in nonformal adult education aimed at improving the skills and labor productivity of rural populations.

Reviewing Symbolic Capital

Reviewing Symbolic Capital

Seishin Habitus

Sport, including club activities in Japanese schools and universities, occupies an important place in educational curricula; but is it imbued with what Bourdieu suggests are guaranteed capital properties? That is, can sport and physical education help to accrue capital, and can such capital become cultural and economic capital? Further, is this capital similar to that resulting from academic education? Although western culture recognizes Cartesian differentiation, mind and body are seen as one in the Japanese understanding of the individual, unified by the concept of spirit (this is different to the concept of soul). Recognizing this concept of the body is crucial in addressing the question of transferring educational (in this case physical) capital into forms of cultural capital. This article investigates the responses of members of a Japanese University Rowing club when addressing questions dealing with various uses of the body in rowing and perceived opportunities for future employment.

Bulwer-Lytton's Pelham : The Disciplinary Dandy and the Art of Government

The shifting strata of society following Napoleonic Wars heralded emergence of a literary genre which would effectively market social emulation. For reading public, silver-fork novels of 1820s seemed to advance what Pierre Bourdieu identifies as an of and were thus read as instruction or initiation manuals for rising above. With its painstaking attention to day-to-day details of fashionable living, silver-fork novel was a public source of knowledge for an ideology of social differentiation and distinction; it was required reading for nouveaux riches as well as a guidebook to exclusive society for aspiring social climbers. For Bourdieu, objectively and subjectively aesthetic stances adopted in matters like cosmetics, clothing, or home decoration are opportunities to experience or assert one's position in social space, as a rank to be upheld or a distance to be kept;1 that is, aesthetic taste is not so much a matter of individual preference as it is a form of cultural capital. Indeed, according to Bourdieu, taste is a knowledge of high culture; it is a material and institutional practice with definite social and cultural effects.2 The tendency, however, of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Pelham; or Adventures of a Gentleman (1828) silver-fork novel that would come to be considered the hornbook of dandyism was fundamentally opposed to these popular expectations.3 Bulwer recognized and took advantage of power of taste, but he mobilized this ideology to construct a new form of cultural capital. In Pelham, Bulwer assiduously disrupts and reconfigures moral and social authority by bodying forth an aristocratic hero whose very privilege challenges political hierarchy and social decorums he supposedly enforces. Thus, Pelham works not only to interpellate its dandy hero into a grid of liberal values, but also acts as a relay of social mechanisms of regulation, conscripting and disciplining readers to a new (Victorian) moral order. Though he was an advocate of political reform,4 Bulwer saw that England's post-Regency society was most in need of a fundamental reform

The Re‐Branding of Salsa in London’s Dance Clubs: How an Ethnicised Form of Cultural Capital was Institutionalised

This paper explores how participants in a popular dance scene renegotiate the aesthetics used to judge the acceptability of dances performed in those spaces. These issues are explored with reference to Bourdieu’s (1977) concepts of social fields and cultural capital and to ethnographic data collected in London’s Salsa clubs. The main argument is that Salsa dancing can function as a form of cultural capital that has with an ethnic dimension. This paper, based on participant observation in London’s clubs and the accounts of 31 of London’s Salsa club dancers, DJs and dance teachers, suggests that London’s Salsa dancers have competed with each other to establish a local de‐ethnicised interpretation of Salsa which refers to the forms of cultural capital to which they have access.

Keepin' it Real

The relationship between Black youth and hip-hop culture is the focus of this article. The author considers how African American youth use hip-hop as a form of cultural capital in everyday settings. By focusing on how Black youth interact with one another at the City Youth Center, the article examines how this particular form of cultural capital may be used to authenticate a Black identity. Finally, how the articulation of this identity is based on traditional gender roles is explored. Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital is heavily relied on to investigate how Black youth construct legitimate racial boundaries in predominately Black settings. The intention is to provide an extension of Bourdieu's theory by examining how Black youth identity is formed and renegotiated in everyday interactions with other Black youth and how this negotiation is mediated through hip-hop culture.

Mutable Identities: Moving beyond Ethnicity in Botswana

The adoption of a focus on minorities suggests a move away from a discourse revolving around notions of ethnicity to one emphasising personal participation in the political arena and leading to a devaluation of divisions among peoples demarcated by language, parentage, class or so-called 'race' in favour of a concept of citizenship. I argue that its frequent invocation notwithstanding, ethnic allegiance is a form of cultural capital that is increasingly marginal to social functions of the present. Not only do such constructions not stand up to historical scrutiny, but they can also be incorporated as an ingredient in a variety of potentially dangerous claims to cultural authenticity and the uniqueness of particular cultural visions. Understanding these constructions and their consequences requires detailed analyses of local ethno-histories, of colonial rule and policy, and of the connection between expansionary capitalism and the processes of social formation constitution. I turn first to the backgrounds of ethnicity in Botswana and then to languages of labour in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries before examining present-day languages of political contention among minority and elite fractions of the country. I conclude that an effective minority discourse would dissolve the surface appearance of ethnic disconnectedness and fragmentation and re-establish historic connections upon which an equitably served citizenship could be based.

The toilet paper: Femininity, class and mis-recognition

This article unpacks the paradoxical and ambivalent meaning and value of femininity; both its theorization and its practice. To do this it draws on specific empirical sites in the UK—women's toilets—to think through the significance of the contemporary politics of recognition, a politics that Nancy Fraser (1995) argues is displacing the politics of redistribution. The first part of the article explores how the appearance of femininity as a form of cultural capital is utilized and theorized. It also shows how femininity is known and judged and frequently mis-recognised through historical classed positions that are premised on appearance being read as a value of personhood. This analysis is then applied to the empirical research, drawing on two different research projects to make its arguments. Using examples of the tension in women's toilets, it shows how the feminine-appearing body is judged on the basis of excess and devalued but also, paradoxically, given authority to shame and judge. The different processes of mis-recognition invoked in the toilets expose the way class underpins any reading of bodies on the basis of appearance.

Educational Access and Social Mobility in a Rural Community College

Critics of the community college have argued that community colleges have not necessariily provided opportunity for lower socioeconomic groups to achieve social mobility. The findings of the study agree with assertions made by other researchers that social class position and class culture become a form of cultural capital that facilitates success in higher education. I have extended Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital through inclusion of the voices of working-class students in their definition of what knowledge is and how they proceed to claim the knowledge they need to make educational decisions.

Social Class Differences in Family-School Relationships: The Importance of Cultural Capital

This paper summarizes a qualitative study of family-school relationships in white working-class and middle-class communities. The results indicate that schools have standardized views of the proper role of parents in schooling. Moreover, social class provides parents with unequal resources to comply with teachers' requests for parental participation. Characteristics offamily life (e.g., social networks) also intervene and mediate family-school relationships. The social and cultural elements of family life that facilitate compliance with teachers' requests can be viewed as a form of cultural capital. The study suggests that the concept of cultural capital can be used fruitfully to understand social class differences in children's school experiences. The influence of family background on children's educational experiences has a curious place within the field of sociology of education. On the one hand, the issue has dominated the field. Wielding increasingly sophisticated methodological tools, social scientists have worked to document, elaborate, and replicate the influence of family background on educational