Pierre Bourdieu(1 August 1930 – 23 January 2002) was a French sociologist, anthropologist, philosopher, and renowned public intellectual. After graduating from college, he taught in a high school on the study of philosophy and spent two years in Algeria which lead to his writing of his first book, Sociologie de L'Algerie (The Algerians). In 1981, he was given the chair at College de France which is a presigious placing for a sociologist. Heavily influenced by Karl Marx, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim and many others, he introduced a different concept of capital such as cultural, social and symbolic capital which is different from the usual economic capital, as well as habitus, field and symbolic violence.
Cultural Capital …show more content…
Habitus is grown by the large amount of exposure to society. “Thus, habitus varies depending on the nature of one’s position in that world; not everyone has the same habitus” (Ritzer, 2007, p.175-176). Habitus is about an individual body, which can be formed by two contributing factors, distance from necessity and education. Distance from necessity is simply saying how an individual has need for living and the distance is pointing towards the upper class of the society pyramid (elites) whereby they distance themselves from necessity as they have no pressure as it is easily accessed, whereas for the lower class of the society pyramid will be struggling to make end meet and therefore feel pressured. Let’s take an example of hobbies, the lower class will have to work for the elites to have a stable income to get those necessity whereas the elites have all time in the world to do whatever they want. Talking about preferences, take food for example, the homeless will eat to survive, to get on day after day, food act as their necessity for survival and they will eat anything they can get their hands on. The working class, a little better off than the homeless, have the choice of getting what they want to eat, but it revolves around the basic necessity of food which is staple food (rice or potatoes). The elites will state that they eat to live because it is a need, but they do not focus on "eating for life" but "eating for class". So if you are in distant from necessity, you would less likely feel pressured to survive in the ever competing world of society. Education is where you learn skills and knowledge to use them in the society. There is a difference in the type of education you receive which depend on your social placing. “One obvious difference between the education of the elite and that of the working classes is the kind of social position in