Are there Different forms of Capital?

Since Bourdieu focuses heavily on cultural and economic capital (both material and objectified) it seems as though he gives agency to those factors to create classes of their own. Marx depicts an extreme image of this with having a defined class system with economic means. Bourdieu doesn't talk about the equity and doesn't acknowledge the idea that not all individuals in society have the same opportunity but measures economic prosperity solely based on the accumulation of capital. Individuals in society can be wealthy but lack cultural economic capital. Econcomic capital can also include access to private healthcare- like in the case of the United States.

Hi Namra,

The way I perceived Bourdieu is that he does acknowledge that all individuals in society do not have the same opportunities. For him, this lack of equality is based on the different cultural and economic capital individuals obtain. He splits up cultural capital and economic capital as two different and distinct forms of capital, however still underlining that they are interdependent. The forms of cultural capital that he alludes to are education and habitus. Both education and habitus provide the individual with unconscious orientations that guide individuals to their positions in line with their class backgrounds. These "orientations" are aspirations and expectations that individuals begin to acquire based on their status and what they see going on around them. This then gives way to accumulation of the respective economic capital, which individuals "aspire" for or are "expected" to have based on their standing in society. The interdependence between cultural capital and economic capital comes in with the concept of consumption, in which individuals use their economic capital to acquire more objectified and institutionalized states of cultural capital, such as (artwork-- objectified; and PhDs -- institutionalized). Therefore, I do believe that Bourdieu's whole argument is based on the unequal opportunities individuals have to endure based on their "capital" which includes economic and cultural capital, but definitely is not limited to it.