ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at how different, mutually transforming forms of capital were worked out among those occupying and challenging positions in the field of ceramic art: in other words, at how the different participants occupying competing positions capitalized on ‘art’. Symbolic capital, referring to ‘the degree of accumulated prestige, celebrity, consecration or honour’, and cultural capital, or ‘forms of cultural knowledge, competences or dispositions’. The concept of ‘field’ has been most clearly enunciated by Pierre Bourdieu who developed it primarily in relation to forms of cultural production. The structure of each field was determined by the relations it had with other fields, as well as by ‘all relations among agents and institutions of diffusion or consecration’. Bourdieu argued that the structure of any field of cultural production is characterized by a fundamental opposition between the sub-field of restricted production and the sub-field of large-scale production.
