Introduction
Attempting to make sense of how subjectivity is implicated in choices to leave or stay at school, whilst also acknowledging the impact of broader social structures, requires an approach that bridges the gap between subjective practices and the influence of external influences. One of the most sophisticated contributions to this theoretical predicament is Bourdieu’s attempt to mediate between objective social structures and subjective everyday practices with his concepts of social and cultural capital and the habitus (Harker, Mahar and Wilkes 1990). Exploring young people’s decisions to leave or stay in the education system through the lens of Bourdieu’s theory has the potential to provide insights into the low Year 12 completion rates in rural Australia through a focus on how external social structures are internalised through the habitus and manifested in individual practice.
This chapter introduces Bourdieu’s concepts of social and cultural capital, the habitus, field and symbolic violence in the context of his broader theory of culture as a principal source of power and catalyst for privilege and disadvantage. It also introduces Simmel’s (1950) ideas on the differences between rural and urban lifestyles, and Connell’s (2005) theory of
hegemonic masculinity. Simmel’s and Connell’s theories are introduced to help to understand the gendered and rural dimensions of the habitus. In this chapter I argue that using Simmel’s and Connell’s ideas to theorise the features of the rural habitus provides a unique framework for exploring the meanings and beliefs underpinning young rural people’s educational decisions.
Pierre Bourdieu: Social and cultural capital
Early attempts to explain educational inequalities drew on Marxist concepts of class. Bowles and Gintis’s correspondence theory (1976) argued that schools replicate the hierarchical division of labour and reproduce the social relations of the workplace. Willis (1977) and Connell et al. (1982, 1983) introduced notions of agency into neo-Marxist theories of education by focusing on the intersection between objective settings and the subjective experiences of students. They explained educational failure as the unintentional outcome of working class students’ rebellion against what they saw as the hypocrisy of a supposedly meritocratic system. Later work by theorists such as Bourdieu (1990) attempted to move
45
further away from structuralist explanations and to acknowledge the role of culture as an autonomous sphere (Hall 1996; Althusser 1971).
Bourdieu’s concepts of the habitus and cultural capital distinguish him from other theoretical perspectives on educational inequality (Webb et al. 2002). Bourdieu defines habitus as a set of durable dispositions which are inculcated and internalised in the individual and manifested and perpetuated in social practices. An essential part of an individual’s habitus is their level of economic capital (wealth), social capital (the social networks of families and their
relationships) and cultural capital (a form of value associated with such things as
consumption patterns, social attributes, skills and awards) (Webb et al. 2002: 22; Robbins 1991: 32). Bourdieu pays particular attention to cultural capital because, he argues, it has become a marker of privilege and thereby social division through its association with knowledge. Through the process of symbolic violence, some groups are led to believe that such divisions are natural and legitimate (Jenkins 1992: 104; Bourdieu 1990: 4).
The premise of Bourdieu’s theory – that social relationships are mediated by cultural capital via its association with a hierarchy of knowledge – affords a way to understand how young people’s subjective knowledges and beliefs are implicated in shaping success and failure at school. In this study Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital is used specifically to explore how the young people’s sense of place, school experiences and relationships with family and community differ according to their cultural knowledge and practices. The concept of social capital assists this analysis by providing a tool to understand how the young people’s cultural knowledge is mediated by their social networks.
Because these different forms of capital intersect and create different social, cultural and economic dispositions, internalised and subjectively practised through the habitus, this concept is used to capture the young people’s worldview, especially how they subjectively understand their choices to continue or leave formal education. The idea of symbolic
violence, an integral but often neglected element of Bourdieu’s theory, helps to explain how the young people come to perceive certain pathways as natural rather than constructed through cultural differences. Bourdieu’s concept of field is furthermore employed to loosely capture the education system as a field in which a person’s habitus assists or thwarts their educational attainment. In the meeting with the formal school culture valorised by the education department, the cultural knowledges young people have internalised through their
46
habitus are either constructed as valid or invalid, ultimately allocating them a particular place in the cultural hierarchy of the school.
Pedagogic action and symbolic violence
The overall relevance of Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic violence to this project’s aim of understanding young rural people’s school experiences and educational choices lies in the theory’s key principle that no meanings and understandings are neutral but, rather, embedded in a web of power relations. These power relations, however, and the knowledges derived from them are invisible to most individuals who instead accept them as legitimate and true through the process of symbolic violence. Using this approach aids the examination of the subjective, contradictory or ambiguous feelings and emotions young people may associate with particular educational choices.
At the base of Bourdieu’s analysis of the education system is the role of symbolic violence. This theory is systematically laid out in the first half of Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction5 as four main propositions and sub-propositions, and it provides the foundation for the theoretical applications carried out in the second part, including the development of his broader theory of social and cultural capital (Robbins 1991: 63). Symbolic violence is defined in the first axiom as ‘every power which manages to impose meanings and to impose them as legitimate by concealing the power relations which are the basis for its force’
(Bourdieu 1990: 4). Thus, symbolic violence is the imposition of symbolism and meaning upon groups or classes in such a way that they are experienced as legitimate (Jenkins 1992: 104). The imposition of meanings and values upon groups and individuals is achieved through the process of misrecognition, defined by Bourdieu as ‘…the contradiction between that objective truth and the agent’s practice, which objectively manifests the misrecognition of that truth’ (Bourdieu 1990: 12). In this way Bourdieu suggests that the force of symbolic power lies in the role of ideology whose function is to legitimate particular forms of
knowledge and arbitrarily impose this knowledge on other groups in society. The theory of symbolic violence is a key feature of Bourdieu’s model of social and cultural reproduction, although an often neglected one, which works from the premise that cultural meanings are expressions of an imposed arbitrary (Robbins 1991: 66).
5 Hereafter Reproduction
47
In Reproduction Bourdieu attempts to shed light on the relationship between pedagogy as a form of symbolic violence and the education system. To this end he proposes the four propositions of pedagogic action (PA), pedagogic authority, pedagogic work (PW) and the educational system (ES). The first proposition on the ‘Twofold Arbitrariness of Pedagogical Action’ posits that ‘All pedagogic action (PA) is, objectively, symbolic violence insofar as it is the imposition of a cultural arbitrary by an arbitrary power’ (Bourdieu 1990: 5). Thus, all pedagogic action is arbitrary, including that of parents in the family home, because the differential power relations in our culture are not natural or necessary but reflect the interests of the dominant groups in society. The arbitrariness of pedagogic action is twofold because (proposition 1.1) it contains not only the imposition of the cultural arbitrary, but also
(proposition 1.2) the concealment of the cultural arbitrary (Robbins 1991: 63). One condition of PA is pedagogic authority: ‘PA necessarily implies, as a social condition of its existence, pedagogic authority (PAu) and the relative autonomy of the agent to exercise it’ (Bourdieu 1990: 12). In this way, PA logically needs the pedagogic authority of an agent to conceal the arbitrariness of its procedures (Jenkins 1992: 105). Proposition 3 shows how PA entails pedagogic work (PW) which operates to ensure that all members of society internalise the values arbitrarily transmitted by the dominant class. Pedagogic work is a substitute for physical coercion and its function is to keep order by legitimising exclusion through self- exclusion (Bourdieu 1990: 31; Jenkins 1992: 107). Proposition 4 deals with the specific symbolic violence carried out by the education system. One key argument is that the
pedagogic authority of the education system facilitates the illusion that schooling is a neutral process unrelated to the overall structure of power relations. Schools monopolise the
production of new teachers and thus inculcate new teachers in the culture that they want to pass on. In this way schools become self-reproductive systems which appear to be value free (Bourdieu 1990: 67; Jenkins 1992: 109). In this seemingly neutral environment the failure of certain groups of students is projected as their lack of natural talents and not as their inability to handle and decode cultural information which is alien to them (Gorder 1980: 341).
The forms of capital and the cultural arbitrary
With his concept of cultural capital Bourdieu seeks to explain how different forms of cultural knowledges and understandings are developed and possessed by different families through a process of cultural osmosis. This approach lends itself to this study’s concern with the role of rurality in educational decision making because of its emphasis on the socially constructed nature of knowledges, and hence the existence of multiple forms of cultural capital. Thus, the
48
concept of cultural capital serves as a valuable tool through which to investigate the characteristics of a rural culture and its relationship with choices to leave or stay in the education system.
Bourdieu first applied his concept of cultural capital in Reproduction where he used it to analyse the unequal distribution of the cultural capital he found in his empirical data on the correlation between academic performance and social background in France in the 1960s (Bourdieu 1990: 74-75 and 92; Bourdieu 1986: 19). In developing the concept of cultural capital, Bourdieu draws on Basil Bernstein’s ideas on restricted and elaborated codes (Collins 1993: 117). Bernstein’s work focuses on connecting differences in class-based language codes to differences in educational attainment. He argues that because the social environment of the working class is often close-knit, local and characterised by a common cultural
identity, members of this group of people tend to rely on a restricted code of communication characterised by grammatically simple and often short-hand sentences which convey
dependent and particularistic meanings (Bernstein 1971: 297). In contrast, the social
environment of the middle class tends to be much more fluid and diverse why, in addition to a restricted code, they frequently need to verbalise an elaborate code where meanings are made explicit in a universalistic and independent manner.
Bernstein further develops these concepts in his distinction between a visible form of pedagogy, characterised by performance and meeting criteria, and an invisible pedagogy, characterised by procedures of acquisition such as cognition and motivation. Bernstein
contends that visible pedagogies are more likely to be embraced by that fraction of the middle class whose employment is in the economic field, such as in production and distribution, whilst the assumptions of invisible pedagogies are more likely to be met by that fraction of the middle class who are involved with the field of symbolic control (Bernstein 1990a: 202). Although Bernstein concedes the relationship between transmitters and acquirers of
knowledge to be ‘essentially and intrinsically’ asymmetrical (Edwards 1995: 104), he also believes it entirely possible to reduce this asymmetry through ‘…a visible pedagogy that would weaken the relation between social class and educational achievement’ (Bernstein 1990a: 79). Contemporary studies drawing on Bernsteinian theory suggest that the
differential treatment of students according to their adherence to an elaborate code highlights how pedagogical practices and discourses can deny a group of children the development of knowledge that moves past the mundane towards the esoteric. According to these studies, the means to achieving social change in the school system is to make evaluation criteria explicit
49
while maintaining a high level of conceptual demand (Morais, Fontinhas and Neves 1992; Lubienski 2004; Rose 2004).
Drawing on Bernstein’s ideas of restricted and elaborated codes, Bourdieu suggests that linguistic capital is one key component of cultural capital, and an especially important element in a context of formal schooling. In defining the concept he pays particular attention to the style, use and understandings of language:
Moreover, language is not simply an instrument of communication: it also provides, together with a richer or poorer vocabulary, a more or less complex system of categories. So that the capacity to decipher and manipulate complex structures, whether logical or aesthetic, depends partly on the complexity of the language transmitted by the family’ (Bourdieu 1990: 73).
According to Bourdieu, style rather than content is the mechanism through which cultural privilege is reinforced and cultural disadvantage left unattended (Swartz 1977: 549). Bourdieu locates linguistic capital within a ‘system of manners characteristic of social position’ which signifies the level of cultural capital possessed by groups or individuals (Bourdieu 1990: 118-119). In his (1984) work Distinctions, Bourdieu conceptualises cultural consumption and taste as key signifiers of social class (Jenkins 1992: 138), allowing him to move beyond the economic reductionism of Marxist theories of inequalities at the time of his writing. Thus, cultural capital can be conceptualised as a broad form of value associated with such things as language, consumption patterns, social attributes and educational skills and awards (Webb et al. 2002: 22) which shape one’s position in the social and cultural hierarchy. In his later work Bourdieu developed a more consistent account of cultural capital and
divided it into the embodied state, the objectivated state, and the institutionalised state. An embodied form of cultural capital is incorporated in the body to produce the long-lasting dispositions of the habitus through the investor’s labour. Bourdieu is at pains to explain how the acquisition of embodied cultural capital is a process of hard personal labour, with a vast investment of subjective time and effort (Bourdieu 1986: 19). Cultural capital in its
objectivated form concerns such things as paintings, the media, and monuments. Although cultural goods can be purchased with economic capital, a form of capital ‘immediately and directly convertible into money’ (Bourdieu 1987, cited in Calhoun 1993: 70), they can only be decoded by a person with the appropriate level of embodied cultural capital. Institutional recognition can be conferred on the cultural capital possessed by an individual to form an
50
embodied cultural capital with a ‘legally guaranteed value’ relatively independent of the bearer (Bourdieu 1986; Robbins 2000: 34). Bourdieu points out that the forms of capitals intersect and that a high degree of conversion exists between them (1990: 19). For example, objectivated cultural capital intersects with cultural capital in its embodied state, as investors who are able to purchase cultural goods also need the cultural capital to appropriate or use them. Similarly, whilst some forms of goods and services can be readily purchased with economic capital, others need to be accessed via social and cultural capital.
The idea of cultural capital is intimately linked to the concept of social capital, the ‘durable networks’ of connections that ‘provide[s] each of its members with the backing of the
collectively-owned capital, a credential which entitles them to credit…’ (Bourdieu 1986: 19). Thus the extent to which an individual can mobilise her ‘networks of connections’ is linked to her access to different forms of capitals. Bourdieu (1986: 20) highlights that these types of relationships do not happen naturally but are the end product of conscious or unconscious investment strategies aimed at establishing strong social relationships which ‘implies durable obligations subjectively felt’. This takes place through the symbolic constitution of
consecration and its constant exchange which requires mutual knowledge and recognition. In this way both the specific characteristics of the group and its differences from other groups are affirmed (Bourdieu 1986: 20). Once social and cultural capital are perceived and recognised as legitimate Bourdieu argues that they take on a symbolic form because of the prestige and honour they are associated with (Calhoun 1993: 70).
Bourdieu specifically developed the concept of cultural capital to explain differences in educational performance and cultural practices that remained unexplained by theories of economic inequality at the time (Brubaker 1985: 757). With the concept of cultural capital Bourdieu offers the unique explanation that social position is modified by cultural tastes and knowledges (Robbins 2000: 32) and thus points to the existence of different forms of cultural knowledge. His argument that these differences are turned into an arbitrary hierarchy of cultural understandings, due to the ability of the possessors of the dominant form of cultural capital to ideologically privilege and legitimise particular forms of knowledge, provides a sophisticated tool to highlight the differences and tensions between rural knowledges and the middle class urban forms of knowledge that characterise the curriculum (Bourdieu 1990; Brubaker 1985: 757).
51
Habitus and field
Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus is an attempt to account for ‘the internalisation of
externality and the externalisation of internality’ (Bourdieu 1990: 72). It is a complex account of how the objective social reality and the internalised subjective worlds of individuals are inextricably bound together in the explanation of how the reproduction of social, cultural and economic dispositions is made possible through the habitus and manifested and perpetuated in the social practices of individuals. Because social practices are the product of the
encounter between the habitus and the structures of the social environment of the habitus, this concept ‘rather than regulate what one does…tells one who one is’ (Bohman 1999: 132). Thus, it has the potential to deepen the insights into how the young people’s everyday world, their practices and personal views, relate to their educational decisions.
In his theory of symbolic violence Bourdieu introduces the idea of the habitus as ‘…a process of inculcation which must last long enough to produce a durable training, i.e. a habitus, the product of internalization of principles of a cultural arbitrary capable of perpetuating itself after PA [pedagogic action] has ceased and thereby of perpetuating in practices the principles of the internalized arbitrary’. Habitus, then, constitutes the basis for the production of certain practices in individuals. It is the ‘sedimentation of history, structure and culture in individual disposition to practice’ (Lingaard, Rawolle and Taylor 2005: 6). In a footnote in
Reproduction Bourdieu points out that his use of the term ‘disposition’ particularly denotes predisposition, propensity or inclination. In the same footnote he defines habitus as ‘a system of dispositions’ (Bourdieu 1990: 67). In addition to dispositions such as taste and
expectations that results in particular ways of feeling and thinking and operating in the world, in a later work Bourdieu clarifies that this ‘system of dispositions’ includes the ‘bodily