ABSTRACT
In the sociology of culture, Pierre Bourdieu's notion of cultural capital has become a key conceptual tool for examining how the ‘dominant’ social classes use culture as a means of storing and accentuating privilege. Bourdieu (1984) argued that the upper middle classes are inculcated with valuable cultural resources during primary socialisation. These resources are then augmented in the fields of education and occupation, and activated in the social world in the form of ‘legitimate’ cultural tastes. In turn, he argued these expressions of cultivated taste should be considered cultural capital, because when they are deployed in social life they mark strong symbolic boundaries between the dominant and dominated in social space.
