Teaching Bourdieu: Observing the Habitus in Sites of Consumption
by William Hayes, Sociology
While sociology of culture courses regularly assign selections from his text, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, US students usually encounter these readings without the necessary theoretical knowledge (symbolic capital) or cultural knowledge (cultural capital) for understanding the main arguments or referents in his survey analysis of 1960s Paris. Hence, the teaching problem emerges of how to “materialize” these Parisian abstractions within our Berkeley students.