ABSTRACT
Introduction Much of Bourdieu’s thinking on the socially dominant class (‘the state nobility’, ‘the inheritors’), elite schools (universities) and the ‘field of power’ speaks, intimately, of the education system in France (e.g. Bourdieu 1996). But more and more, elite secondary schools’ clients (parents, students and ex-students) are on the move around the globe and such schools are increasingly globalising their practices (Kenway and Fahey 2014). Such changes have led those who currently study elite schools and their class practices to try to transcend Bourdieu’s ‘methodological nationalism’ (Amelina et al. 2012) on the education/class nexus. The conceptual moves usually involve a discussion of the ‘capitals’ that individuals have, gain or require in terms of their global mobility. But such work too infrequently engages the deeper logics of Bourdieu’s opus, or his later critiques of the ideological and economic elements of neoliberal globalisation (Bourdieu 1998, 2001) in which he does transcend methodological nationalism. But despite this, Bourdieu does not sufficiently consider cultural globalisation, its associated flows of people, imagin - ation, images and ideas and the implications for class formation trans-nationally. The questions that cultural globalisation raise for Bourdieu’s oeuvre include: can his ideas be modified to deal with the manner in which global mobility intersects with more embedded structures of class power? Might a focus on cultural globalisation help to address Bourdieu’s tendency towards class-centricism? And, further ing earlier work (Kenway and Koh 2013), how successfully do his ideas travel to other locations? I address these questions here with the aid of Ong (1999). Ong (ibid.) links Bourdieu’s thought specifically to cultural globalisation. She
asks how it might attend to travelling classed and racialised bodies in transnational and newly adopted national spaces and to people’s capital accumulation strategies in such spaces. She develops her arguments in relation to wealthy people from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South-East Asia, and particularly their ‘flexible citizenship’ strategies in the USA. Her focus is on the various manifestations of people’s agency but, like Bourdieu, also on the restrictions to their cultural accumulation strategies. Modifying Bourdieu, through her focus on the transnational space as well as
on multiple national places, Ong asks, ‘What are the effects of cultural
accumulation in a cross-cultural transnational arena where there is not one but many sets of competing cultural criteria that determine symbolic value in multiple class and race-stratified settings?’ (ibid.: 89). Second, she defies Bourdieu’s notion of capital accumulation. For these
migrants, cultural capital is not acquired over a long period of time and in almost sub con scious ways, as it is for Bourdieu’s ‘inheritors’ – those who inherit their privilege. Rather, it requires deliberate strategies of accumulation. Third, she challenges Bourdieu’s notions of capital conversions by focusing on race. She claims that despite wealthy Asian migrants’ attempts to convert their economic capital to other capitals, many restrictions arise, not least being Euro-American cultural hegemonies which require emulation and navigation by those from outside the ‘West’. The migrants she speaks of navigate the cultural hierarchies of their old and new locations, as well as those of transnational spaces, and adopt what she calls ‘flexible accumulation strategies’. In their spaces of relocation, she argues, they are weighed down by their ‘symbolic deficits’ (e.g. race, colour, accent, taste), which make it difficult for them to convert their economic capital to other capitals even when they have accrued the appropriate modes of culti - vation, taste and accomplishment in their quest for acceptability and respectability (ibid.: 91). Ong claims that the consumption of elite schools and universities is often a
central accumulation strategy for wealthy globally mobile Asians. However, unlike Bourdieu, she does not undertake any research inside such institutions to identify the fine grain of such strategies. Neither does she show how such institutions respond to these families in terms of their own cultural logics. Through an ethnographic examination of Founders,1 an elite private school in
Melbourne, Australia,2 and building on Ong’s Bourdieu, I identify the cultural accumulation strategies adopted by its Asian clients, the grounds for such adoption and the limits they confront. Unlike Ong and Bourdieu, I also show how the school uses these clients as part of its own accumulation strategies and the intersecting class, race and gender classification struggles that arise within the school as a result. My ultimate question is, how does such travelling with Bourdieu enrich his ideas?
