The concept of “cultural capital” in Pierre Bourdieu and the ethnographic inheritance

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to conduct a retrospective analysis of the genesis of the concept “cultural capital” in Pierre Bourdieu, formalized initially in collaboration with Jean-Claude Passeron in Les héritiers, published in 1964. Our initial hypothesis is that the intellectual trajectory prior to Bourdieu may have conditioned observations about attitudes about the school and the culture of students from different social classes, as analyzed in the work mentioned above. We will use a review of this work to investigate the contributions of the firste thnographic registers made by Bourdieu, found in the seminal works the Sociologie de l´Algérie and Travail et travailleurs en Algérie. The intial presumption of this paper is that it is not possible to conduct an essentialist analysis of the uses of cultural capital. The text thus investigates how Bourdieu’s ethnographic works influenced the formalization of this concept.