Class in the realm of everyday practices

Classes are made and unmade through political, economic and ideological struggles and can be understood only by a close examination of social history (Wacquant, 1992). Even when material differences are present, it is human activity which transforms these paper classes into real social groups. The ‘movement from theoretical group to practical group’ requires political work ‘to impose a principle of vision and division of the social world, even when this principle is well-founded in reality’ (Bourdieu, 1987, p. 8). Bourdieu’s writings (1984, 1985, 1986a, 1986b, 1987) are particularly useful to understand the practice of class in contexts where there is no overt class conflict, and there is a relative absence of strong class based identities. For Bourdieu, class is made and unmade in the realm of cultural practices, in the everyday life. People produce classificatory schemes for their social worlds and make claims to distinction vis-à-vis each other. The struggles to establish class boundaries take place in the everyday, where individuals try to impose their representations of the world and themselves, as well as in collective, political efforts. Bourdieu’s conceptualisation of social class is relational, continuously made and contested.

For Bourdieu, the social world is made up of many autonomous fields, each with its own doxic logics, i.e. regulative principles. The field is where ‘the work of class

making’ (Bourdieu, 1987, p. 9) takes place. Bourdieu compares the field to the structure of a game. While there are rules to be followed, ‘playing with the rule is part and parcel of the rule of the game’ (Wacquant, 1992, p.18). The field of education plays an

important role in the redistribution of valuable cultural capitals. Educational institutions effectuate the monopolisation of credentials important in the labour market, and crucial to the making of middle classes. It is in schools that dominant social groups legitimise their cultural competencies. These groups, ‘give the educational certificate the value of a natural right and make the educational system one of the fundamental agencies of maintenance of the social order’ (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 387). Educational institutions play an important role in the production of institutionalised cultural capital. They are

particularly powerful in a neo-liberal occupational world, because of their power to legitimise skills required in the labour market. Bourdieu (1998) argues that:

The generalization of electronics, IT and quality standards, which requires all wage-earners to retrain and perpetuates the equivalent of school tests within the enterprise, tends to reinforce the sense of insecurity with a sense of

and by extension the whole social world, seems based on a ranking by ‘competence’, or worse, of ‘intelligence’.

Bourdieu (1998, p. 109) Bourdieu recognises that in a late capitalist society, power consists of more than just financial capital. Social capital is ‘made up of ‘social obligations’ (“connections”) which is convertible in certain conditions into economic capital’ (Bourdieu, 1986a, p. 243). Cultural capital is more corporeal, linked to the body through a process of embodiment and incorporation. It requires, ‘a labor of inculcation and assimilation, costs time, time which must be invested personally by the investor’ (Bourdieu, 1986, p. 244). Capitals are integrated into the body through the habitus, which is the ‘embodied sedimentation of social structures’ (Wacquant, 1992, p. 19). It is the habitus which links economic and social conditions to distinctive lifestyles, which express differential class positions (Bourdieu, 1987).

In Bourdieu’s theory, consumptive aesthetics make for one’s class positioning and are also the organising principles for formation of class based collective identities

(Bourdieu, 1987). Class position is not a permanently attained status, it is open to contestation and is in continuous negotiation.

Bourdieu’s theoretical concepts are powerful for investigating the production of distinction in the different realms of life, including in the institution of school. They make possible the recognition of the exchange value of particular social networks and embodiments. They help understand that everyday practices of school life are related to macro politico-economic processes and dominant values in a particular society. They help understand how schooling works to legitimise as well marginalise identities. It is therefore not surprising that Bourdieu’s theory has been deployed in empirical studies on the Indian middle classes (Upadhya, 1997; Donner and De Neve, 2011) and their schooling practices (Sancho, 2012; Gilbertson, 2014). However, Bourdieu’s conceptual and theoretical apparatus is also limited for certain reasons. Firstly, habitus has been critiqued for being a reproductionist concept in an ordered world, inadequate for explaining change and resistance (Butler, 1997; Skeggs, 2004b). Butler’s concept of performativity on the other hand, has greater potential to disrupt the social order:

performatives do not merely reflect prior social conditions, but produce a set of social effects, and though they are not always the effects of “official” discourse, they nevertheless work their social power not only to regulate bodies but to form them as well. Indeed the efforts of performative discourse exceed and confound

the authorizing contexts from which they emerge.

(Butler, 1997, pp. 158-159). Second, Bourdieu’s conceptual vocabulary is unable to encompass the complexities of sexualities and gendered capitals and their intersections (Skeggs, 2004b). It has also not been reworked to conceptualise caste as practice. Finally, Bourdieu is unable to altogether break free of the antinomies of structure/agency and of the binaries of culture/nature. Bourdieu’s ‘subject’ uneasily shifts between a rational subject who accesses universal principles of truth and normative subjectivities produced by symbolic power (Skeggs, 2004b). Skeggs’ development of Bourdieu’s writings are more useful to understand the Indian middle classes.