“Depending on the field in which it functions, and at the cost of the more or less expensive transformations which are the preconditions for its efficacy in the field in question, capital can present itself in three fundamental guises: as economic capital, which is immediately and directly convertible into money and may be institutionalized in the form of property rights; as cultural capital, which is convertible, on certain conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the form of educational qualifications; and as social capital, made up of social obligations (“connections”), which is convertible, in certain conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the form of a title of nobility.”
Capital is not something we are taught to or sometimes even able to see when trained to. Bourdieu describes capital as being within “guises” for a reason. The three types of guises, he theorizes, are economic, cultural and social. Economic capital is or can be converted by monetary exchange. Types of economic capital are property: estates, cars, money, bonds, etc. Because economic value is always somehow physical, it can be passed down and inherited, and therefore is somewhat flexible. It can be gained and lost fairly easily. Cultural capital can sometimes be converted into economic capital but isn’t inherently economic. A way for it to be institutionalized as economic, Bourdieu states, can be through educational qualifications. For example, if someone has a degree from Harvard University, their education in itself is cultural capital because they had access to a certain level of knowledge and background that gives it to them, but this can be translated into things like higher pay wages since they have the reputation of being “from Harvard” as a sort of brand name- allowing them to be part of something exclusive (social capital) and providing them with economic capital they may not have had access to before. Social capital, or “connections” are those relationships or names that allow one access into certain social spheres and translating sometimes to economic and cultural capital by doing so, i.e. the Harvard example, membership to a fraternity or sorority, membership to the Athanaeum library, etc.
"Cultural capital can be acquired, to a varying extent, depending on the period, society and the social class, in the absence of any deliberate inculcation, and therefore quite unconsciously. It always remains marked by its earliest conditions of acquisition which through the more or less visible marks they leave (such as the pronunciations characteristic of a class or region), help to determine its distinctive value. It cannot be accumulated beyond the appropriating capacities of an individual agent: it declines and dies with its bearer (with his biological capacity, his memory, etc.)."
In other words, cultural capital is often acquired by a person by accident. It is often passed along to one through family members, upbringing, education, society, media and other external resources that shape a person in terms of their background, accents, characteristics, the way they carry themselves, the way they handle money, etc. For example, one night my partner and I were out with my family for dinner. My partner commented on how he could tell that my grandmother came from wealth after that interaction. When I asked how he knew, he told me that it was apparent in the way she discreetly handed her card to the waiter before the check even came without anyone else taking notice. I thought about this for a moment and realized he was right…if my parents, who are a textbook example of “working class” had attempted to cover the check it would’ve been somewhat of a production and an act of martyrship, showing off that they had the money to cover the bill and were nice enough to be willing to do so. These practices are individual characteristics and acts that die with that individual, in other words, they are not physically passed down in the ways that property can be.
“The profits which accrue from membership in a group are the basis of the solidarity which makes them possible. This does not mean that they are consciously pursued as such, even in the case of groups like select clubs, which are deliberately organized to concentrate social capital…”
An example of social capital, highlighted in this quote, could be the membership to a university. Alumnae of a certain class, college or major have solidarity; there are commonalities amongst the group that are recognized on some conscious or subconscious level. Bourdieu argues that this kind of solidarity is not necessarily pursued by people, but individuals may desire to be part of a specific social group because they internalize the meanings of what being a part of that social circle means and want to reap the benefits of membership to it.
Sunday, April 21, 2013
Kozol's "Amazing Grace" Reflection
By page three of Kozol's excerpt from "Amazing Grace" I recognized the intersections depicted of race, class, age, health and ability. Kozol, when talking about the neighborhood around St. Ann's, mentions high use of heroin and other drugs, children who cannot sleep and are burdened with anxiety, depression and other mental health issues, asthma, and high rates of murder and other crimes. Kozol states that if there is a more dangerous area for children to live in the United States, he doesn't know what it is. When children grow up in environments like these that have unpredictable violence leading to these sorts of mental and physical health problems, it's easy to see how they would be candidates for early mortality, suicide, drug use and more. When you are taught that your own home is dangerous due to pollution and crime, recognizing even if only subconsciously that the world is a scary and unpredictable place, it makes it difficult to grasp what is beautiful and worth living for. Police officers start to look like monsters, not people who are supposed to protect you. Parents don't seem like providers. Things become bleak and hopeless, and this is an underlying point Kozol is trying to make in this piece.
Kozol states at the end of page three, “…do they think that they deserve this? What is it that enables some of them to pray? When they pray, what do they say to God?” This is a poignant question, because it’s known by sociologists and other professionals who study religion and poverty, that working class communities and/or communities of color tend to be very religious. bell hooks has written pieces on why this is, stating that when living in communities that face lots of the problems listed above, prayer and faith can easily become the only sources of solace and hope for their people and the future. Simple treasures have infinite worth, such as crosses and churches- or the chairs trash picked by a woman referenced on page eleven. Kozol goes on to talk about the massive presence of children in St. Ann’s parish, referencing one little boy named Cliffe, who’s mother warns Kozol that he fibs often. Perhaps this is also common, a way for children to escape the realities of the world they live in through make believe and storytelling. Cliffe then begins to talk about how he saw a boy shot in the head near a particular tree, in a “not particularly sad” way, then quickly changing the subject to ask the author if he wants a chocolate chip cookie.
It’s clear that Cliffe is not lying about this incident, but has internalized it as normal, so normal that he can immediately think about cookies after death. This is proven by the following conversation, when Cliffe tells the author that there is an incinerator burning bodies down one of the streets, a seven year old’s understanding of an incinerator made to burn amputated limbs, syringes and other waste from a hospital. Reaching for his inhaler moments later, I feel sad as I continue to read, recognizing the asthma and internalized grief I’ve experienced in some parts of Providence growing up, though I’ve been privileged enough to only attend schools and events in these areas and being exposed to them temporarily rather than living inside of it and dealing with smog and the smell of burning bodies on a regular basis. Providence is a lot like the train in Manhattan referenced at the beginning of the piece in that way- in a matter of bus or train stops you can get from the East Side to the South Side of Providence- seemingly, two very different worlds and cultures. Not the kind of inequality and worlds described in Kozol’s piece, but a connection I felt was noteworthy.
When Kozol asks Cliffe who his heroes are and he responds with Michael Jackson and Oprah, but says he doesn’t know who George Washington is, I think of Bordeiu’s theories on different kinds of capital- since Cliffe clearly hasn’t had too much of a good education (cultural capital) but his heroes are both Black people reflecting his identity back to him as a boy and he has a big family since he runs into multiple “cousins” (is this social capital? I think so.). People get self worth out of affection and connections to families and media, and I consider that social capital, however limited it may be.
Kozol states at the end of page three, “…do they think that they deserve this? What is it that enables some of them to pray? When they pray, what do they say to God?” This is a poignant question, because it’s known by sociologists and other professionals who study religion and poverty, that working class communities and/or communities of color tend to be very religious. bell hooks has written pieces on why this is, stating that when living in communities that face lots of the problems listed above, prayer and faith can easily become the only sources of solace and hope for their people and the future. Simple treasures have infinite worth, such as crosses and churches- or the chairs trash picked by a woman referenced on page eleven. Kozol goes on to talk about the massive presence of children in St. Ann’s parish, referencing one little boy named Cliffe, who’s mother warns Kozol that he fibs often. Perhaps this is also common, a way for children to escape the realities of the world they live in through make believe and storytelling. Cliffe then begins to talk about how he saw a boy shot in the head near a particular tree, in a “not particularly sad” way, then quickly changing the subject to ask the author if he wants a chocolate chip cookie.
It’s clear that Cliffe is not lying about this incident, but has internalized it as normal, so normal that he can immediately think about cookies after death. This is proven by the following conversation, when Cliffe tells the author that there is an incinerator burning bodies down one of the streets, a seven year old’s understanding of an incinerator made to burn amputated limbs, syringes and other waste from a hospital. Reaching for his inhaler moments later, I feel sad as I continue to read, recognizing the asthma and internalized grief I’ve experienced in some parts of Providence growing up, though I’ve been privileged enough to only attend schools and events in these areas and being exposed to them temporarily rather than living inside of it and dealing with smog and the smell of burning bodies on a regular basis. Providence is a lot like the train in Manhattan referenced at the beginning of the piece in that way- in a matter of bus or train stops you can get from the East Side to the South Side of Providence- seemingly, two very different worlds and cultures. Not the kind of inequality and worlds described in Kozol’s piece, but a connection I felt was noteworthy.
When Kozol asks Cliffe who his heroes are and he responds with Michael Jackson and Oprah, but says he doesn’t know who George Washington is, I think of Bordeiu’s theories on different kinds of capital- since Cliffe clearly hasn’t had too much of a good education (cultural capital) but his heroes are both Black people reflecting his identity back to him as a boy and he has a big family since he runs into multiple “cousins” (is this social capital? I think so.). People get self worth out of affection and connections to families and media, and I consider that social capital, however limited it may be.
Sunday, February 24, 2013
Debt & "Morality"
"Where to start? I could have begun by explaining how these loans
had originally been taken out by unelected dictators who placed most
of it directly in their Swiss bank accounts, and ask her to contemplate
the justice of insisting that the lenders be repaid, not by the dictator, or even by his cronies, but by literally taking food from the mouths of
hungry children. Or to think about how many of these poor countries
had actually already paid back what they'd borrowed three or four
times now, but that through the miracle of compound interest, it still
hadn't made a significant dent in the principal. I could also observe
that there was a difference between refinancing loans, and demanding
that in order to obtain refinancing, countries have to follow some or
thodox free-market economic policy designed in Washington or Zurich
that their citizens had never agreed to and never would, and that it was
a bit dishonest to insist that countries adopt democratic constitutions
and then also insist that, whoever gets elected, they have no control
over their country's policies anyway. Or that the economic policies
imposed by the IMF didn't even work. But there was a more basic
problem: the very assumption that debts have to be repaid."
Economic colonialism? If we fuck other countries out of their money, resulting in the starvation and deprivation of basic resources for regular citizens who may not even be engaging in politics, preventing them from achieving any sort of upward mobility, status or even basic rights like decent health and clean water, that's like a war on other nations in itself. Other nations who our society then turns around and condemns for being underdeveloped, savage, communist, what have you.
"Actually, the remarkable thing about the statement "one has to pay one's debts" is that even according to standard economic theory, it isn't true. A lender is supposed to accept a certain degree of risk. If all loans, no matter how idiotic, were still retrievable--if there were no bankruptcy laws, for instance--the results would be disastrous. What reason would lenders have not to make a stupid loan?"
Student loans? What would happen if we all just said, we are unemployed or underemployed and can't pay it? MUTINY.
The idea that the whole system of banking wouldn't actually work if they were sure they'd get money back from loans doesn't make sense to me. Can we elaborate on this in class? I understand that there are "smart" loans to invest in and there are "stupid" ones, which the author makes some light reference to, but isn't paying back loans what keeps money flowing in the system? If people didn't pay back their loans, wouldn't that make it so there would be no money to then pay forward to new loans? This relates to the second quote in the opening of the chapter about "owning the bank," which also doesn't make sense to me. I suppose, as I suggested above about the student loans, on a collective level (i.e. if everybody just agreed to not pay back student loans) we would then essentially "own" the capital, being our educations, and what would the government really have the power to do? But on an individual level, being someone who is terrified of debt, I don't get it.
""Surely one has to pay one's debts." The reason it's so powerful is that it's not actually an economic statement: it's a moral statement. After all, isn't paying one's debts what morality is supposed to be all about? Giving people what is due them. Accepting one's responsibilities. Fulfilling one's obligations to others, just as one would expect them to fulfill their obligations to you. What could be a more obvious example of shirking one's responsibili ties than reneging on a promise, or refusing to pay a debt?"
This really, really resonated with me. For some reason in our society, people use "morality" as reasoning for completely insane things that make no sense. For example, I can compare this rationale to stealing. Okay, fuck corporations. Slash their tires, prevent their sales, unionize their workers, jack their ingredients...that's what I'd like to see. So, I'm personally against stealing from say, a small family business that's 50 thousand dollars in debt from opening up their...I don't know...bakery, let's say. If an employee steals from them, that's kind of messed up. How much money are those owners really making, once you take away their bills, ingredients, what they pay out for help, etc. But, it's a totally different story if someone steals a few books from a Barnes & Nobles, a multi-million dollar (I'm estimating?) corporation that pays so many people minimum wage to be on their feet all day and pays 30 cents for the printing of a book in another country that they are getting 25 dollars in profit from all the "morally just" consumers who don't even think of just walking out with it as an option because everyone in our country is conditioned to be just like the next person and never critically think. If I steal 100 dollars worth of stuff from a Victoria's Secret and nobody's going to get in trouble or miss that stuff that was made by a 13 year old girl getting 2 pennies to cut her fingers sewing in Burkina Faso, then why the fuck should I be labeled a bad person? Does that make sense?
"The very fact that we don't know what debt is, the very flexibility of the concept, is the basis of its power. If history shows anything, it is that there's no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt-above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it's the victim who's doing something wrong. Mafiosi understand this. So do the commanders of conquering armies. For thousands of years, violent men have been able to tell their victims that those victims owe them something. If nothing else, they "owe them their lives" (a telling phrase) because they haven't been killed."
^This is also the rationale used against rape victims, for getting people to be patriotic (=nationalistic and unquestioning) and join/support the military without thinking, etc.^
Can I just say that I love the transparency of calling the u.s. out on being an empire and making an analogy to it as a gangster forcing other nations into giving it money with a gun?
"Our tendency to overlook this is all the more peculiar when you consider how much of our contemporary moral and religious language originally emerged directly from these very conflicts. Terms like "reck oning" or "redemption" are only the most obvious, since they're taken directly from the language of ancient finance. In a larger sense, the same can be said of "guilt," "freedom," "forgiveness," and even "sin." Arguments about who really owes what to whom have played a central role in shaping our basic vocabulary of right and wrong."
I love this, too, because I hate terminology surrounding the concept of "right" and "wrong" and other biblical notions of a moral compass. Everything is relative. I also admire that there is some mention of the correlation between debt and violence.
Economic colonialism? If we fuck other countries out of their money, resulting in the starvation and deprivation of basic resources for regular citizens who may not even be engaging in politics, preventing them from achieving any sort of upward mobility, status or even basic rights like decent health and clean water, that's like a war on other nations in itself. Other nations who our society then turns around and condemns for being underdeveloped, savage, communist, what have you.
"Actually, the remarkable thing about the statement "one has to pay one's debts" is that even according to standard economic theory, it isn't true. A lender is supposed to accept a certain degree of risk. If all loans, no matter how idiotic, were still retrievable--if there were no bankruptcy laws, for instance--the results would be disastrous. What reason would lenders have not to make a stupid loan?"
Student loans? What would happen if we all just said, we are unemployed or underemployed and can't pay it? MUTINY.
The idea that the whole system of banking wouldn't actually work if they were sure they'd get money back from loans doesn't make sense to me. Can we elaborate on this in class? I understand that there are "smart" loans to invest in and there are "stupid" ones, which the author makes some light reference to, but isn't paying back loans what keeps money flowing in the system? If people didn't pay back their loans, wouldn't that make it so there would be no money to then pay forward to new loans? This relates to the second quote in the opening of the chapter about "owning the bank," which also doesn't make sense to me. I suppose, as I suggested above about the student loans, on a collective level (i.e. if everybody just agreed to not pay back student loans) we would then essentially "own" the capital, being our educations, and what would the government really have the power to do? But on an individual level, being someone who is terrified of debt, I don't get it.
""Surely one has to pay one's debts." The reason it's so powerful is that it's not actually an economic statement: it's a moral statement. After all, isn't paying one's debts what morality is supposed to be all about? Giving people what is due them. Accepting one's responsibilities. Fulfilling one's obligations to others, just as one would expect them to fulfill their obligations to you. What could be a more obvious example of shirking one's responsibili ties than reneging on a promise, or refusing to pay a debt?"
This really, really resonated with me. For some reason in our society, people use "morality" as reasoning for completely insane things that make no sense. For example, I can compare this rationale to stealing. Okay, fuck corporations. Slash their tires, prevent their sales, unionize their workers, jack their ingredients...that's what I'd like to see. So, I'm personally against stealing from say, a small family business that's 50 thousand dollars in debt from opening up their...I don't know...bakery, let's say. If an employee steals from them, that's kind of messed up. How much money are those owners really making, once you take away their bills, ingredients, what they pay out for help, etc. But, it's a totally different story if someone steals a few books from a Barnes & Nobles, a multi-million dollar (I'm estimating?) corporation that pays so many people minimum wage to be on their feet all day and pays 30 cents for the printing of a book in another country that they are getting 25 dollars in profit from all the "morally just" consumers who don't even think of just walking out with it as an option because everyone in our country is conditioned to be just like the next person and never critically think. If I steal 100 dollars worth of stuff from a Victoria's Secret and nobody's going to get in trouble or miss that stuff that was made by a 13 year old girl getting 2 pennies to cut her fingers sewing in Burkina Faso, then why the fuck should I be labeled a bad person? Does that make sense?
"The very fact that we don't know what debt is, the very flexibility of the concept, is the basis of its power. If history shows anything, it is that there's no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt-above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it's the victim who's doing something wrong. Mafiosi understand this. So do the commanders of conquering armies. For thousands of years, violent men have been able to tell their victims that those victims owe them something. If nothing else, they "owe them their lives" (a telling phrase) because they haven't been killed."
^This is also the rationale used against rape victims, for getting people to be patriotic (=nationalistic and unquestioning) and join/support the military without thinking, etc.^
Can I just say that I love the transparency of calling the u.s. out on being an empire and making an analogy to it as a gangster forcing other nations into giving it money with a gun?
"Our tendency to overlook this is all the more peculiar when you consider how much of our contemporary moral and religious language originally emerged directly from these very conflicts. Terms like "reck oning" or "redemption" are only the most obvious, since they're taken directly from the language of ancient finance. In a larger sense, the same can be said of "guilt," "freedom," "forgiveness," and even "sin." Arguments about who really owes what to whom have played a central role in shaping our basic vocabulary of right and wrong."
I love this, too, because I hate terminology surrounding the concept of "right" and "wrong" and other biblical notions of a moral compass. Everything is relative. I also admire that there is some mention of the correlation between debt and violence.
Monday, February 4, 2013
An Introduction to Moi
Hi everyone! So I'm Deirdre, Dee, whatever you think is cooler or easier to say :) I'm a sex educator (not certified yet, though), a student, a community organizer, a politics-brain, and basically I care about everything that has to do with human sexuality and public health. I'm a open, spontaneous queer gal. I identify as a Femme, and a fierce one at that. I'm pretty easygoing unless I get revved up about sex, racism, classism, able-ism, cis-sexism, and more. I want *more* than equal rights. I want for there to be an absence of world government and a fierce social safety net at the same time. I want free health care, unions, free education and my own hand gun. You probably won't enjoy being around me if you're a Republican, a "free market capitalist", a homophobe or if you believe there is such a thing as "virginity."
"If you've come here to help me, you're wasting your time. But if you've come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together."
— Australian Aboriginal Elder Lilla Watson
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)