Childhood with Bourdieu

L. Alanen, E. Brooker, B. Mayall, L. Alanen, E. Brooker, B. Mayall

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137384744
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études du développement mondial

This collection is an engaging exploration of how Bourdieu's key concepts - field, habitus and capital - help us re-think the status of childhood. The authors are committed to improving the social status and well-being of childhood in social, economic and political worlds that too often fail to accord children respect for their human rights.

1

Introduction

Leena Alanen, Liz Brooker and Berry Mayall

Our aims

In compiling this book, our principal aim has been to offer a contribution to work on the sociology of childhood. For us this means considering the social status of childhood in relation to the large-scale influences, sedimented in history, that condition childhood’s social status in any given society or setting. Carrying out this work can be understood as requiring analyses of societal institutions and agencies, over time; thus, to refer to an important instance, Jens Qvortrup (1985) considered the social status of childhood in minority world societies nowadays, through consideration of the history of children’s contributions to the division of labour in those societies. In this work at macro-level, Qvortrup was pointing out that childhood is a structural component in society; and that the social grouping represented by the term childhood has to be considered in interrelations with adulthood. This set of propositions can be contrasted (to some extent) with a strand of work that starts from the lived experiences of children, as recounted by children; and that seeks to foreground children’s agency. What we see as especially exciting and challenging is to put together these two sorts of work, with the aim of reaching better understanding of why and how childhoods on-the-ground are as they are, through interrelating private troubles with public issues. Like many others we have become enthused by the work of Pierre Bourdieu, whose life-long passionate concern was to investigate these interconnections, and whose inspirational work has led to many investigations – mainly focused on adult lives. Our book brings together contributions from some of the researchers who have sought to work with Bourdieu’s concepts, in order to work towards understanding childhoods.

In setting out thus briefly our aims, we do not wish to discount the valuable work that has been carried out using a range of disciplines under the heading of childhood studies, especially over the last 30 years or so. People, especially in the UK, have become accustomed to thinking in terms of social constructionism: differences between childhoods, as they are understood and operationalised by adults, across time and space. We now know much more than we did about how children experience childhoods, and about the varieties of children’s experiences. Many studies have sought to work with and for children, by placing children’s experiential knowledge of childhood at the forefront of their observations. Here one important strand has been consideration of whether and how far children’s rights (as set out in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989) are respected, again with a focus on how children themselves experience such respect or disrespect. Examination of possibilities for and hindrances against respect for children’s human rights, with accompanying consideration of what changes in conceptualisations of children and of childhood are required in order to respect their rights, has been hugely important, both in leading to new thinking and in practical terms. Work carried out in the ‘majority’ or ‘developing’ world,¹ notably on children’s work and the emerging clash now that global forces promote schooling, has not only been valuable in itself, for those societies, but has forced rethinking of the division of labour in children’s developed world lives, between work and schooling.

Underpinning these important developments has been the work of both scholars and activists, working in a range of disciplines. Anthropology has been important in alerting us to variation in childhoods across time and place; historical research has not only uncovered such variations, but has shown how the social is rooted in the historical; geographers have explored the significance of people’s understanding of the meanings of the place they know or live in; economists have taught us to think harder about the economic contributions children make to family and societal welfare. Activists working for the welfare of children have analysed the practical applications of state policies – in education, health, welfare – in order to uncover how children themselves fare in their relations with such services and with the adults who control them.

However, in this book, we want to align ourselves with those who take a sociological approach to childhood. And by this we mean that we try to understand how a society conceptualises childhood, which requires studying the policies and practices – and their historical bases – that construct or modify how childhood is lived. Using that understanding we can move to better appreciate how children themselves live their lives; and what their knowledge about their experiences depends on and relates to. Central to consideration of childhood are childhood’s relations with adulthood; for generational relations, operating at every level of society and intersecting across the macro and micro, serve to define childhoods.

Whilst Bourdieu has attracted many scholars, who have investigated a range of topics in the light of analysis of his famous concepts (field, habitus, capital), most of the work has focussed on adults. However, important work on childhood has included for instance: in the UK, Paul Connolly’s work on sexual and racial identities among primary school children (1998), and Diane Reay’s on the intersections of social class and gender in primary schools (1998); in the US, Joseph Agbenyega and Sunanta Klibthong’s study of inclusion in preschools (2012); and in continental Europe, the work of Charlotte Palludan (2007) and, much earlier, of Chamboredon and Prévot (1975). We wanted to include chapters dealing with a range of topics concerning children in society; and the contributors in the end were those who had some experience of working with Bourdieu in relation to childhood and who had the time to commit to our enterprise. This book aims, through consideration of a range of examples, to provide perspectives on how Bourdieu can help us to understand childhood. We say more about the chapters below.

We aimed to be as collaborative as possible, given that all our contributors are busy people. So we held an initial meeting to discuss the prospects for the project, and two subsequent meetings to consider drafts. Each of the contributors also took on the task of commenting on two of the draft chapters. We hope that these processes helped to make the book into a whole, where we share similar concerns, where each chapter follows much the same ordering, and where we address a range of issues that affect children’s experiences. Finally we note here that since each of the book’s editors have contributed what they can to the work, we list ourselves, as editors, in alphabetical order to make that point clear!

Bourdieu’s concepts

We have found that Bourdieu provides a convincing and useful way of linking up societal concerns, ideas and institutions with the detailed examination of everyday negotiations. And since a crucial component of how children negotiate childhood is through intergenerational negotiations, where their social status is consolidated or challenged, Bourdieu provides a toolkit that helps us to understand these negotiations.

Here we give a brief introduction to his key concepts: field, habitus and capital. Our authors each take account of these and consider in detail how the particular case they have studied is illuminated by investigation of these concepts.

Field

The chapters in this book each focus on an arena, an environment, or a space in which childhood is under question. This may be ‘the family’ or a preschool, for instance. In his work Bourdieu uses the term ‘space’ in two interconnected senses. The first meaning is literal: activities occur and actors act in physical spaces that also have both practical and symbolical significance in relation to each other. The second Bourdieusian meaning of space is metaphorical, as he speaks of space as also social. In this latter sense, actors are conceived of as occupants of multiple places within multiple relatively autonomous domains – fields – that together constitute the total social space. These multiple fields in turn constitute the status, class and social positions of the actors, their place in society. Thus, a person, an actor is always placed, or located, which means that Bourdieu’s social topology is also always an embodied sociology, and this means forefronting habitus as another key concept in the Bourdieusian frame.

Especially in his later works, Bourdieu repeatedly underlined the centrality of thinking of society and social life in terms of fields:

The notion of field reminds us that the true object of social science is not the individual, even though one cannot construct a field if not through individuals ... It is the field that is primary and must be the focus of the research operations. This does not imply that individuals are mere ‘illusions’, that they do not exist: they exist as agents – and not as biological individuals, actors, or subjects – who are socially constituted as active and acting in the field under consideration by the fact that they possess the necessary properties to be effective, to produce effects, in this field. And it is knowledge of the field itself in which they evolve that allows us best to grasp the roots of their singularity, their point of view or position (in a field) from which their particular vision of the world (and of the field itself) is constructed. (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 107; our emphasis)

The notion of field gained this analytical weight and methodological significance for Bourdieu’s sociological thinking when he moved towards analysing contemporary French society and its structuredness into fields and as fields (Swartz 1997: 117). He argues from his 1960s study of Algeria (Kabylia) that in an ‘archaic’ society there is only one field, whereas in modern differentiated societies their number grows: fields exist in parallel to each other, they intersect and subfields may emerge within larger fields.

In analytical terms, a field may be defined as a network, or a configuration, of objective relations between positions. ... In highly differentiated societies, the social cosmos is made up of a number of such relatively autonomous social microcosms, that is, spaces of objective relations that are the site of a logic and a necessity that are specific and irreducible to those that regulate other fields. For instance, the artistic field, or the religious field, or the economic field all follow specific logics: while the artistic field has constituted itself by rejecting or reversing the law of material profit, ... the economic field has emerged, historically, through the creation of a universe within which, as we commonly say, ‘business is business’, where the enchanted relations of friendship and love are in principle excluded. (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 97–8)

In Bourdieu’s conceptualisation, modern societies are composed of multiple domains of action – fields – that are distinct from each other. A field is a relational historical formation, ‘a network, or a configuration, of objective relations between positions’. Accordingly, action (practice) taking place in a field is understood and explained only by locating the agents – individuals and institutions – in their current social fields, the structure of relations that differentiate (and connect) the agents, and the ‘game’ that is taking place among them, the ‘game’ in the field being struggles over the control of the species of capital that is valued and held as legitimate in the field.

Moreover, each field has its own rules, or logic, so the game and the rules of one field are different from the games and the rules in other fields. What the fields do share is a homologous structure: all fields are structured by relations of dominance. Finally, fields are dynamic formations: they have their birth (genesis) and developmental history so the ‘game’ played in a field may remain even after the field disappears (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 94–115).

Habitus

Bourdieu developed his concept of habitus from his ethnographic studies in Algeria (see Goodman and Silverstein 2009) and in his natal province of Béarn, in the 1950s and 1960s. The concept is part of Bourdieu’s comprehensive theoretical effort to overcome the mechanical opposition between objectivism and subjectivism and to develop his solution to the problem of social change.

I developed the concept of ‘habitus’ to incorporate the objective structures of society and the subjective role of agents within it. Habitus is a set of dispositions, reflexes and forms of behaviour that people acquire through acting in society. It reflects the differing positions people have in society, for example, whether they are brought up in a middle class environment or in a working class suburb. It is part of how society reproduces itself. (Bourdieu 2000: 19)

Habitus is produced when people ‘internalise’ the material, cultural and intellectual structures that constitute a particular type of environment. Bourdieu (1977: 72) describes habitus as a ‘system of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures’. For him, the ‘primary’ habitus, created in early childhood, is the basis for the development of the ‘secondary’ habitus by various agents of secondary socialisation (schools, peer groups, the media and so on) which people meet as, in their social trajectory during their lifetime, they traverse a number of social fields and get involved with the practice specific to each field. Thus ‘the habitus – embodied history, internalized as a second nature and so forgotten – is the active presence of the whole past of which it is the product’ (Bourdieu 1990; 56). The nature of various habituses can thus be detected and tested in the practices people engage in, in distinct social fields.

Capital

The concept of capital derives from Bourdieu’s analyses of the educational system of France in the early 1970s. Usually in social science (and in everyday discourse) the term ‘capital’ is associated with the economic sphere and monetary exchange. Bourdieu’s use of the term however is broader and conceptually distinctive (Moore 2008).

Capital, in Bourdieu’s thinking, exists in three main forms: economic, cultural and social (Bourdieu 1986).

The main idea of economic capital comes from Marx, but in a Bourdieusian frame the concept covers all types of economic ownerships that can be capitalised in any distinct field.

Cultural capital in turn can exist in three forms: in the embodied state, that is, in the form of long-lasting dispositions of the mind and body; in the objectified state, in the forms of cultural goods; and in the institutionalised state, guaranteed by institutional recognition, such as academic qualifications and exam titles (Bourdieu 1986: 243). Social...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• 2  Intergenerational Relations: Embodiment over Time
• 3  Cultural Capital in the Preschool Years: Can the State Compensate for the Family?
• 4  Between Young Children and Adults: Practical Logic in Families Lives
• 5  Early Childhood Education as a Social Field: Everyday Struggles and Practices of Dominance
• 6  A Fish in Water? Social Lives and Local Connections: The Case of Young People Who Travel Outside Their Local Areas to Secondary School
• 7  Childhood in Africa between Local Powers and Global Hierarchies
• 8  Those Who Are Good to Us, We Call Them Friends: Social Support and Social Networks for Children Growing up in Poverty in Rural Andhra Pradesh, India
• 9  Struggling to Support: Genesis of the Practice of Using Support Persons in the Finnish Child Welfare Field
• 10  Decision-making Processes in Review Meetings for Children in Care: A Bourdieusian Analysis
• Index