Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [217]
To make this book more readable, I refrained from burdening it with Bourdieu’s terminology. Still, the book is a reasonably straightforward, if partial, empirical application of Bourdieu’s broader theoretical model. For example, in Distinction: A Social Critique on the Judgment of Taste as well as other works, Bourdieu clearly intends for habitus to be a set of internalized dispositions that operate in a large number of social spheres.4 In his discussion of habitus Bourdieu includes the preferences in food, furniture, music, makeup, books, and movies. The focus of Unequal Childhoods is much narrower, looking primarily at time use for children’s leisure activities, language use in the home, and interventions of adults in children’s institutional lives. Still, it is reasonable to assert that the elements discussed in this book, taken together, do constitute a set of dispositions that children learn, or habitus. Concerted cultivation and the accomplishment of natural growth are aspects of the habitus of the families discussed in this book.5
Bourdieu also points to nuanced class differences in the interactions between actors and institutions. He notes that people have a wide array of resources, social networks, and cultural training, and that they do not always use all of these resources in all settings. This sensitivity to the complexity and fluidity of social life makes his theory significantly more persuasive than other theories of social inequality, such as a culture of poverty model.6
Bourdieu builds his model using a (cumbersome) specialized vocabulary. The central concepts are the three mentioned above: habitus, field, and capital. The notion of habitus stresses the set of dispositions toward culture, society, and one’s future that the individual generally learns at home and then takes for granted. Bourdieu suggests that differences in habitus give individuals varying cultural skills, social connections, educational practices, and other cultural resources, which then can be translated into different forms of value (i.e., capital) as individuals move out into the world. It is possible to adopt new habits later in life, but these late-acquired dispositions lack the comfortable (natural) feel associated with those learned in childhood.
The concept of field is crucial. It encompasses some of the same dynamics captured in terms such as market or social institution. But, as David Swartz points out, Bourdieu also seeks something broader with the idea of field: “Bourdieu . . . sees the image of ‘field’ as superior to that of ‘institution’ for two reasons: first, he wants to emphasize the conflictual character of social life where the idea of institution suggests consensus; second, he wants a concept that can cover social worlds where practices are only weakly institutionalized and boundaries are not well established.”7
Bourdieu argues that in key areas, social space is stratified—some groups will be excluded and others included (and some will exclude themselves). He draws an analogy with a card game: there are fields that provide both the “rules of the game” and the social space wherein variations in capital exist. Bourdieu focuses on the intersection of the cards being dealt and the skill with which players play.8 He emphasizes that the nature of the game is arbitrary and the slots at the top are limited. He would never suggest, for example, that more parents could improve their children’s school success by adopting particular practices. Instead, he would point out that the number of elite slots in society is limited. Thus, any effort to spread an elite practice to all members of the society would result in the practice being devalued and replaced by a different sorting mechanism. In this sense, his model suggests that inequality is a perpetual characteristic of social groups. In any given interaction, however, Bourdieu stresses that the outcome