RC Passage 4 — Sociology, Culture & Anthropology

The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.

[Pierre] Bourdieu, as a social theorist, has always been concerned with the dichotomy between the objective and subjective, or, to put it another way, between structure and agency. Bourdieu has, therefore, built his theoretical framework around the important concepts of habitus, field and cultural capital. These concepts are based on the idea that objective structures determine individuals\' chances through the mechanism of the habitus, where individuals internalize these structures. However, the habitus is also formed by, for example, an individual\'s position in various fields, their family and their everyday experiences. Therefore one\'s class position does not determine one\'s life chances, although it does play an important part, alongside other factors.

Bourdieu used the idea of cultural capital to explore the differences in outcomes for students from different classes in the French educational system. He explored the tension between conservative reproduction and the innovative production of knowledge and experience. He found that this tension is intensified by considerations of which particular cultural past and present is to be conserved and reproduced in schools. Bourdieu argues that the culture of the dominant groups, and therefore their cultural capital, is embodied in schools, and this leads to social reproduction.

The cultural capital of the dominant group, in the form of practices and relation to culture, is assumed by the school to be the natural and only proper type of cultural capital and is, therefore, legitimated. It demands ―uniformly of all its students that they should have what it does not give. This legitimate cultural capital allows students who possess it to gain educational capital in the form of qualifications. Those lower-class students are, therefore, disadvantaged. To gain qualifications, they must acquire legitimate cultural capital by exchanging their own (usually working-class) cultural capital. This exchange is not a straightforward one due to the class ethos of the lower-class students. Class ethos is described as the particular dispositions towards, and subjective expectations of, school and culture. It is in part determined by the objective chances of that class. This means that not only do children find success harder in school due to the fact that they must learn a new way of being, or relating to the world, and especially, a new way of relating to and using language, but they must also act against their instincts and expectations. The subjective expectations influenced by the objective structures found in the school perpetuate social reproduction by encouraging less-privileged students to eliminate themselves from the system so that fewer and fewer are to be found as one journeys through the levels of the system. The process of social reproduction is neither perfect nor complete, but still, only a small number of less-privileged students achieve success. For the majority of these students who do succeed at school, they have had to internalize the values of the dominant classes and use them as their own, to the detriment of their original habitus and cultural values.

Therefore, Bourdieu\'s viewpoint discloses how objective structures play an imperative function in determining individual attainment in school, but allows for the exercise of an individual\'s agency to conquer these blockades, although this option is not without its penalties.