Cultural Capital And Habitus Analysis

Cultural capital and habitus will definitely impact one’s life in one way or another. First I would like to explain what is cultural capital and habitus in Bourdieu’s perspective. Followed by the three areas in life where cultural capital and habitus has an impact on, which are social, academic and employment. I would include some examples to aid the understanding of the impact in each aspect. Bourdieu strongly believe that the engraved habitus and cultural capital within individuals classify our social hierarchy which cannot be modified against our given class in society (Allan 2013).

Bourdieu pays attention to four different kinds of capital, economic, social, symbolic and cultural. I am only going to focus on cultural capital and habitus,

Relationship between parent and children is essential for a successful nurturing of cultural capital into their lives (Esther 2014). Family and home is fundamental to one’s life, thus family relations play a huge role in disseminating cultural capital to young ones. (Silva 2005). Taste, knowledge, and abilities are things that are being nurtured into one’s life by the family that they are born into. This shows that family holds the crucial role in determining social order, reproduction of structure and social connections in one’s life (Silva 2005). In a study conducted in the United Kingdom, a child’s communicating means is significant to his or her language development. Quoting that parents involvement in language development is crucial. (Roulstone et al. 2011). This indicates that without proper language up bringing given by parents it will affect the child’s ability to communicate with family members and mates in school thus leading to difficulties in making important social connections. This in turn results in a lack of social skills such as making friends and relationships with the educators. Not having a good social life in school would lead to negative impacts like dropping out of school due to lack of social integration (Wilcox et al.

Bourdieu’s perspective about the inability to change our habitus is not entirely valid. We can alter our habitus and pump up the level of cultural capital we have through life experiences, self-improving courses and etc. These steps will eventually accumulate and one will start to see progression in changing and shaping their lives. It may not earn them a level up in social class like for example from middle to upper, but there are cases where with the help of hard work and dedication, one is being able to reach their goals. It is not all about the money. One can be an average human being and still live happily without wealth and status. I also understand that my standing a biased towards my own experiences and that it is not significant enough to compare it to the famous Pierre Bourdieu but there are sources that point out that differences in cultural capital and habitus is not the only thing that categorize us into different class, inequalities do play a part too such as gender, ethnicity and race (Review & Tzanakis 2011). Which clearly in today’s society is a debatable