Pierre Bourdieu Theory

An evaluation of Bourdieus theorys on social structure in relation to the Teddy Boys of 1950s- 1960s Britain.
This essay is a discussion of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological report on French culture, La Distinction(1979). The book is based on the author’s empirical research from 1963 until 1968. In the US the book was published as Distinction: A social critique of the Judgement of taste(1984). I would like to investigate how relevant Bourdieu’s theories are in relation to the sub- culture of Teddy boys, a British subculture wherein young working class men wore clothes that were partly inspired by the Edwardian period. In La Distinction (1979), Bourdieu writes about what he calls cultural capital. This term cultural capital refers to financial

It is then these specific tastes which guide us to our appropriate social positions. Therefore, apparent self-selection to a class fraction is actually achieved by a parent or other influence on a child’s life, influencing the child’s preferences for objects and behaviours deemed suitable for him or her as a member of their given social class. Therefore taste is an important example of cultural hegemony, of how class fractions are determined, not only by the possession of social capital and of economic capital, but by the possession of cultural capital, which is the social mechanisms that ensures the social reproduction of the ruling

One of his main assertions that ‘working class people expect objects to fulfil a function’’ does not apply to the Teddy Boys. Unless one looks at their style of dress as a way of antagonising and threatening the dominant class. In this way their costume can be seen as playing out a function.One area in which Bourdieu’s theory does not work is his theory of hegemony. The Teds never accepted the once upper class Edwardian look as just for the dominated class and decided to appropriate it for themselves. An area of Bourdieu’s wrtitng which is very evident is his belief that an individual’s predispositions in taste are instilled in them from a young age and cultivated by the culture or environment that they live in. As with the Teddy Boys their working class environment, anger at the disintegration of their communities, their higher wages for adolescence along with this new idea of the teenager all amalgamated into a recipe for the sub culture of the Teddy Boys to