Lea Perez Marasigan

Instructor, Sociology
UP Los Banos
Central concepts in Bourdieu’s
Framework
 A central element in the analytical framework of
Bourdieu is the examination of the on-going and
continuous competition for valued resources
(CAPITAL) and the relations of domination and
subordination found in the various FIELDS and in the
wider SOCIAL SPACE.
CAPITAL
 (Generative) Resources that are valued and that are
object of struggle

 There are various forms of capital

 Economic- money and property rights (considered to
be superior capital)

 Social- what you can get from whom you know

 Cultural- knowledge and skills

 Objectified: knowledge and skills transformed into
material products, ie. Cultural goods
 Institutionalized: knowledge and skills that are certified,
i.e. Diplomas, recognitions
 Embodied: including linguistics (habitus)
FIELD
 Fields are arenas for struggle for valued resources like the
academic field, field of the arts. Social Space as meta-field.

 Within fields, some have more resources (dominant) than others

(subordinate).

 Likewise, some fields have more ( and qualitatively more potent)

resources (field of power) than others in the social space.

 Fields as spaces of inequality and exclusion but exclusion is

misrecognized as not being exclusion because the outcome of
exclusion is considered legitimate.

 Since legitimation is central, the struggle for resources takes place

in the context of struggles for legitimation (of competing arbitrary
powers representing competing cultural arbitraries).
FIELD
 Power and dominance are imposed through symbolic
violence, violence misrecognized as not being violence.
(i.e. Diploma as sign of giftedness, competence).

 Exertion of arbitrary power and dominance is never

unmediated by legitimation. Never pure/ naked power.

 Arbitrary because there is really no ontological/

metaphysical basis for dominance of particular group or
individual.
FIELD
 That is why the exercise of power is always accompanied by the
imposition of a cultural arbitrary.
 Cultural arbitrary sets cultural standards, cultural hierarchies, ex.
“cultured”, good tastes, right accent.
 Legitimizing cultural arbitrary and the realization of worthlessness
of what the excluded have.
 Arbitrary because it is never pure reason.
 Cultural arbitrary is never completely constructed, always has an
“objective basis” in an arbitrary power.
 Cultural arbitrary and arbitrary power always go together.

 Practices of individual partly accounted for by location of that

individual in field given specific historical circumstances:
conservation, succession, submission, subversion.

 Struggle is continuous, no such thing as permanent domination.

 HABITUS
 Dispositions (tendencies, inclinations) as a form of capital

 “Systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures

predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles
which generate and organize practices and representations that can
objectively be adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a
conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations
necessary to attain them” (Logic of Practice, 1990).

 Examples of dispositions: bodily deportment (i.e. Accents and matigas na

dila, pagdadala ng sarili) (bodily thus durable, not conscious thought);
actions, patterns of thought

 Reproduction focuses a lot on relation to language

 Relation to language as cultural competence beyond vocabulary, beyond saying
the right words but the manner of articulation.
 Consequences:
“… the relation to academic language--- a relation which reverential, or casual,
tense of detached, stilted or easy, heavy-handed, ostentatious or measured, is
one of the surest distinctive signs of the speakers social position” (p. 117)
HABITUS AND FIELD
 Habitus formed within particular fields/ social space
 Dispositions/ Habitus is acquired (to speak of habitus is to say that
the individual is collective, socialized subjectivity); primary
pedagogical work, schooling

 Habitus as having a good sense of your place in the field and in the
larger social space, and having a good sense of what to do given
your social location and having a good sense of your trajectory.
(Subjective evaluation of objective probabilities).

 Habitus predisposes but predisposition is not destiny.

 Men make their own history but not of their own choosing.

 Habitus likely to reproduce the field and the outcomes are

legitimized.
SYMBOLIC POWER
Recognition of Legitimacy and Misrecognition of Symbolic power
 Symbolic power refers to the transformed, misrecognized,
transfigured and legitimated form of other forms of power.
(Domination concealed beneath the veil of an enchanted
relation).

 Notion and sources of symbolic power come from three symbolic

systems: as structuring structures (subjective structures),
structured structures (objective structures), and instruments of
domination (ideologies and division of labor).

 Dominant class fractions, whose power rests on economic

capital, aim to impose the legitimacy of their domination
through symbolic production or through conservative ideologies.
SYMBOLIC POWER
 Language is crucial in the formation of institutions, for
it makes possible the operation of naming,
classification and giving representation of world. The
very act of naming, classifying and representing help
establish the structure of the society. (Language as
structured and structuring, instituted and yet capable
of institution=to endow).

 The social condition of effectiveness of legitimate

language and discourse lies in the fact that its
authority comes from the outside; from a person
entrusted with delegate authority.
SYMBOLIC POWER
 The specificity of the discourse of authority consist in the fact that it is
not enough for it to be understood (in certain cases it may even fail to
be understood without losing its power), and that it exercise its specific
effect only when it is recognized as such. (illusion, or belief in the game)

 Rituals of social magic are part and parcel of misrecognition/

concealment of symbolic power and violence. The social function of
rituals is to consecrate, legitimate or institute.

 For rituals to be effective it should be known as legitimate and

presupposes recognition of authority. It also follows some conventional
elements, legitimacy of the speaker (delegated by an institution and
does not act on his own), public manifestation of authority, appropriate
discourse, ceremonial etiquette, code of gestures etc. Ritual symbolism
is not effective
How symbolic power is legitimized
and misrecognized?
 Rites of consecration or institution are to sanction
and sanctify a particular state of things, or an
established order. To institute is to give social
definition, an identify or impose boundaries. It is an
act of communication as much as it is to signify to
someone what his identity is. (‘Become what you are’ is
the principle behind the act of institution). (Rites of
institutions ex. graduation, oath taking, “tuli”)

 Delegation a recognized institution guarantees and

endows you a particular authority and power.
How symbolic power is legitimized
and misrecognized?
 Strategies of condescension are those symbolic
transgressions of limits which provide at one and the same
time, the benefits that result from conformity to a social
definition and the benefits that result from transgression.(
ex. Erap eating with the peasants with his bare hands,
French Mayor talks to the people in their dialect)

 Strategies of Euphemization and Censorship are

consist in imposing form as well as observing formalities.
The metaphor of censorship is the structure of the field
which governs expression by governing both the access to
the expression (deprivation) and the form of expression
(self-censorship).