What Is Cultural Capital?

Le capital culturel or the cultural capital is a theory or an idea in the field of sociology which has attained great fame on a large scale since it was initially propounded by Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu, along with Jean-Claude Passeron first made use of the phrase in their work titled Cutural Reproduction and Social Reproduction. Here Bourdieu tried to describe variations in educational results in France at the time of the 1960s. Since then, the concept has been developed in further detail as compared to other kinds of capital. To Bourdieu, capital is a social relation entrenched in a structure of exchange and transference, and the term attains a broader scope to describe all material items as well as those symbolic in nature, which shows them as being rare and capable of being pursued in a certain social system.