How is culture like currency? Do we collect, exchange, or sell our cultural knowledge like it’s cash?

The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu was interested in how the organisation of culture and the social world around us could affect our individual view of the world. How we didn’t just pick the culture we liked, but in some ways culture picked us – made us more or less likely to act in certain ways.

For Bourdieu, facts about the world could be measured, collected, and recorded; but they were also instinctively absorbed by us from a young age – they became subjectified into our own behaviour.

He was interested in how these cultural and social phenomena could connect us to the wider world.

Our tastes, accents, styles of speaking, mannerisms, and values can be the product of our social environment and our own minds.

He sought ‘the subjective dispositions within which these structures are actualized’.

Our preferences in art, literature, or music are, in large part at least, determined by our social positions, our family’s exposure to specific cultural artefacts, our economic possibilities, or the interests of the faculty of the school we attend.

In the most obvious sense, an American girl attending high school today is unlikely to enjoy 16th century Mongolian folk songs.

But why is this? Why are our tastes often so uniform?

Bourdieu’s answer is cultural capital.

He saw that if we are brought up in an aristocratic family whose friends and teachers all read the Homeric epics then we too are more likely to attach a value to those particular cultural artefacts.

If everyone tells us these stories are good as a child we are of course more likely to value them because praise for reading them is a reward as powerful as any financial reward.

Economic capital, like money, can be exchanged for other goods. And so too can cultural capital.

When the aristocrat gets to school or university he’s more easily going to be able to exchange his knowledge of Homer for good relations with teachers and higher grades, which then lead to better jobs.

But why is it, Bourdieu asks, that it’s Homer or Shakespeare or Bach or Rembrandt that is valued more highly as cultural capital? Ready to be exchanged for what he called institutional capital – grades, test, qualifications, job experience, references.

He argued that the line between these works and cultural artefacts considered less tasteful – like soaps and pop music – was largely arbitrary.

The tastes of certain social groups are valued more highly than others because they confer status and exclude those who don’t have the technical language or knowhow to talk about them properly.

This way of talking – of thinking – might be thought of as ‘the rules of the game’.

If you can apply the rules you can become part of the club.

Learning the rules of course takes time, connections, and money, and so many are excluded from the start.

Bourdieu argued that cultural capital exists in two forms. It can be embodied in our understanding and knowledge of the world – what he called our habitus – and objectified in cultural artefacts like books, records, schools, museums, and galleries etc.

Access and time to access is important if cultural capital is going to be embodied.

Imagine going to a gallery.

It’s free – which is great. But there’s only a small plaque on the wall.

You stand in front of a Picasso.

You stare at it. You think about it.

For it to keep your attention you have to understand what’s going on. In order for any cultural object to justify its existence, it must be appreciated in some way.

The more informed you are, the more time you spend appreciating the culture.

In The Love of Art, Bourdieu and his team interviewed visitors to museums and galleries in France.

He writes that, ‘in addition to visiting and its patterns, all visitors behaviour, and all their attitudes to works on display, are directly and almost exclusively related to education, whether measured by qualifications obtained or by length of schooling’.

They found that, independent of wealth or class, education determined how long a visitor would spend in the museum or gallery.

Any cultural artefact has a message.

A message that can be received and decoded by a receiver.

You might understand the message, you might not.

The message – intended or otherwise – has lots of components, lots of information, and related information.

You might first look at the shading or colour. You might see a metaphor or wider symbolism. You might know or not know the artist. A bit about their lives. You might then know something about the period, the genre, and the school the artist belonged to, and why this particular piece is important or unimportant, influential or uninfluential.

You apprehend all of this in the message. You recognise the code of the message.

Bourdieu writes, ‘someone who only knows how to divide art into Romanesque and Gothic, puts all Gothic cathedrals, undifferentiated, into the same class, whereas someone with greater competence can discern stylistic differences between the ‘primitive’, ‘classical’ and ‘late’ periods, or even recognize the works of specific schools within each of these styles’.

Bourdieu argues that you can only appreciate the cultural artefact as long as your attention is drawn to it, and so, as soon as you run out of things to think about, you move on.

This ability is cultural capital – again, it can be more readily exchanged at school for qualifications, or at parties for new friendships or connections, and finally for financial reward.

Some cultural capital is valued more highly than others. And within any type of cultural capital, some knowledge is valued more highly than other knowledge.

Some of this is of course justified – learning rocket science or neuroscience has a particular culture that is highly valued and becomes increasingly difficult at higher levels for a very good reason.

And in many ways Homer is valued justifiably too.

Homer is culturally useful – the Iliad and the Odyssey teach ethics and morals, philosophy and rhetoric. Knowing homer can be useful for society and so is valued more highly.

But it is when this knowledge is cut off from certain groups and classes that a problem arises. Culture can be made exclusive and inaccessible and this often is reducible to economics. You need the time and money to learn or purchase entry or buy books.

Bourdieu asks, ‘is it surprising that the tastes, and the good taste, of more cultivate individuals derive from the homogenous, and homogenizing, ‘routinized’ and ‘routinizing’ action of the academic institution, and, when all is said and done, are highly orthodox, and that, as Boas noted, ‘the thought of what we call the educated classes is controlled essentially by those ideals which have been transmitted to us by past generations?’’.

Take music in its most aesthetic form.

That is, stripped of its moral messages or social goals.

An instrumental hip-hop beat.

Or an orchestra playing a simple melody.

What reason is there to privilege one over the other?

What makes Beethoven more respectable than LL Cool J?

The field of cultural capital across society values certain types of cultural knowledge higher than others. This evaluation is often purely arbitrary, having the effect of ‘making sure you’re one of us’.

In academia, for example, a certain style of writing, using certain language, signals that you know the rules of the game.

In interviews, a certain accent is judged, often subconsciously, very quickly.

If you’re at a party and a circle is talking about Wagner, the ability to partake in the conversation makes it more likely you’ll get ‘accepted’ by that group.

But these dominant values can also be subverted.

In other words, under-privileged groups don’t always have to learn the rules of the dominant game but can create new rules, a new game, a new type of capital.

Take hip hop.

It is commonly argued that hip hip arose out of four main elements – DJ-ing, MC-ing, breakdancing, and graffiti. In other words, music, dance, and fine art.

In one article, ethnomusicologist Adam De Paor-Evans points out that graffiti grew out of a number of other elements – including urban destitution and a strong but subordinated diaspora culture.

This group is unlikely to be able to afford to go to the opera, or have the time to sit and read Homer.

There is an alternative though: create new capital.

The common struggle and the shared strength of subordinated groups, the infusion of different cultural heritages, the uniqueness of their environment, mean that each member of the group can recognise a shared and distinct culture. Social groups then discuss them, find meaning in them, review the merits of each piece of graffiti or each DJ set, having the effect of building their own cultural discourse in their own unique social surroundings.

De Paor-Evans writes that, ‘knowledge sources in hip-hop are wide-ranging and multifarious and are located in the processes and productions of hip-hop practices such as lyrics, rhythm and scratch sonics, graffiti pieces and lettering styles as well as the more ephemeral dance moves, speech, and body language of B-boying’.

New cultural forms can also borrow from existing forms to legitimise them. De Paor-Evans notes how Michelangelo was cited often by early hip hop artists like Rakim and LL Cool J.

Melle Mel’s lyrics include: ‘Cause each and every time you touch a spray-paint can/Michelangelo’s soul controls your hands’.

New art forms arising from unique cultural and social contexts become both embodied in the artists, musicians, and dancers, and objectified in graffiti tags, events, and vinyl.

This becomes powerful.

Users value this capital because it says something about their environment socially and politically, and when a group homogenises in this way the cultural capital becomes valued by others outside of the group, as, for example, the music spreads.

In the UK, grime has been slowly entering the mainstream with Stormzy recently playing the headline spot at Glastonbury Festival.

Originating as a fringe expression of inner city culture, grime has started to play a major role in national politics with hashtags like #grimeforcorbyn trending and a huge spike in registrations to vote after a number of artists simultaneously encouraged their followers to do so.

Now the cultural capital of grime is more likely to be exchanged into political and social capital.

In other words, the common purpose of the group is more likely to be accepted by wider society.

The seriousness of the art form is more likely to be accepted by the stuffy music professor. More likely to be exchanged into qualifications.

Bourdieu’s thought has a range of consequences, and can be interpreted and applied in many ways.

At its core, for me it suggests two things.

First, equality of access. It’s not enough that museums and galleries are free, education is widely funded, and gigs are affordable. If you go into the national gallery in London the plaques are tiny. You need to be able to learn what the culture means, understand its wider context, be able to access the information required to decode the message.

And second, the culture of economically disadvantaged groups is important, powerful, and should be emphasised, platformed and engaged with by wider society.

Cultural capital, embodied as it is over lifetimes and generations, is often more powerful than economic capital.

In many ways, Bourdieu is expanding on the 500-year-old adage that ‘knowledge is power’.

Sources

Bourdieu, The Love of Art

Bourdieu, Forms of Capital

Bourdieu, Theory of Practice

https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/grime4corbyn-2019