From “cultural capital” to knowledge
Introduced by P. Bourdieu and J.-C. Passeron in the 1960s, the term capital, applied to culture, has become a widely used concept in sociology. It refers to the conceptualization of the explanatory factor of social reproduction, via school, to the social distribution of cultural tastes and practices and, finally, to the constitution of an individual (one of the dimensions, with the ‘economic capital’, of habitus). The notion is critical because of its consideration of the uses and social functions of culture, as well as through the functioning of culture in a relationship of domination. Cultural capital is supposed to take its sociological content, according to P. Bourdieu, in relation to the concept of “field”, which is its strictly relational definition. This article discusses the universal meaning that this notion has taken, which is manifested by a generic use, an indistinction of the dimensions of domination and cognition, and a use that goes beyond the process of socialization initially to its foundation. It is the epistemological status of the analogy in sociology that is examined. I argue that the notion of cultural capital should be reserved for the description of the social uses of culture in an arbitrary social relation and replaced by that of knowledge, declined in the plural, whenever it is a question of designating an acquaintance or a practical competence adequate to its object in a situation that requires it.