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Conceptualizing “unrecognized cultural currency”: Bourdieu and everyday resistance among the dominated

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Abstract

Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital is important for understanding the cultural processes of domination but less helpful in understanding the agency and creativity of the dominated. This article develops the concept of “unrecognized cultural currency” (UCC) to theorize how certain cultural competencies specific to the dominated can facilitate in their everyday resistance. I theorize UCC as cultural resources that have little symbolic value but that nonetheless may be used by the dominated to acquire other valuable resources and push back, to some extent, forces of domination. A case study of low-income LEP (limited English proficiency) immigrant patients concretizes this theoretical argument, highlighting the contrast between practices of “covert maneuvering,” which are enabled by UCC, and practices of “passivity or withdrawal,” which characterize most patient behaviors in situations where UCC is unavailable. The concept of UCC supplements Bourdieu’s framework of cultural capital with further explanations for intra-class stratification among dominated groups. Meanwhile, this article also helps advance recent discussions about everyday resistance.

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Notes

  1. Bourdieu’s conceptual model of class is structured by the total volume and the relative composition of capital (Bourdieu 1984, pp. 128–129). In Distinction, he identifies a three-tiered class system in France: the dominant, middle, and working classes, in which the working-class are defined as those who lack both economic and cultural capitals (Bourdieu 1984). In his later works, Bourdieu uses a broader concept, “the dominated,” to refer to the working class and other groups who are similarly deprived of economic and cultural capitals, including, for example, women and stigmatized minorities (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 82). It is in this sense that I use the term “the dominated” in this study.

  2. Thus, research on the intra-class stratification among the dominated supplements rather than contradicts Bourdieu’s framework. It is a topic that Bourdieu acknowledges as relevant but has not pursued in depth in his own research. I am grateful to a reviewer for Theory and Society for the reminder to make this point explicit.

  3. Bourdieu defines “the real logic of the functioning of capital” in terms of “the conversions from one type to another” (Bourdieu 1986, p. 252). But he also notes that not all different types of capital are equally convertible to one another. Instead, economic capital is “at the root of all the other types of capital and that these transformed, disguised forms of economic capital, never entirely reducible to that definition, produce their most specific effects only to the extent that they conceal … the fact that economic capital is at their root” (ibid.).

  4. Since this article focuses on the dominated, I discuss habitual reflexivity specifically in terms of how it develops among these groups. But the notion of habitual reflexivity is not developed exclusively for that purpose. As Sweetman 2003 argues, in late modernity social groups are traversing disjointed fields and experiencing conflicting identities so, for them, refashioning has become second nature. See McNay 2008 and (Reay et al. 2009) for ethnographic illustrations of reflexive habitus among various groups.

  5. Framing my inquiry in this manner, the article necessarily brackets the question of what happens if UCC is available to someone who does not possess a reflexive habitus. It is, however, beyond the scope of this article to address that question.

  6. Obviously, cultural hybridization is not always covert. Eric Wolf’s and Clifford Geertz’s notion of cultural brokerage describes a general process of bridging, linking, or mediating between groups or persons from different cultures. This body of research recognizes that cultural brokerage is rarely a matter of one-to-one correspondence, but must involve hybridization of elements from both cultures (Gershon 2006). Cultural brokers or hybrids may very well be seen as serving a useful professional function, e.g., bi-cultural nurses, teachers, or medical interpreters (Hsieh 2006). What is often neglected—and what I focus on here—is that the dominated who are viewed as mono-cultural and incapable of meaningful cultural brokerage actually do engage in cultural blending, but often covertly.

  7. Burawoy 2012 characterizes the difference between Gramsci’s hegemony and Bourdieu’s misrecognition in terms of acceptance versus misrecognition. For Gramsci, workers understand that they are being dominated but “they simply have difficulty appreciating that there could be anything beyond capitalism” (Burawoy 2012, p. 203). For Bourdieu, “consent is far too weak a notion to express submission to domination and must be replaced by the idea of misrecognition that is embedded within the habitus” (ibid.).

  8. Each patient might report multiple frustrating clinical encounters. If using patient rather than clinical encounter as the unit of analysis, the finding yields the following results: 20 patients featured a strong tendency of “passivity with occasional confrontation,” 19 were grouped under the category of “covert resistance,” and 21 patients displayed a mixture—they negotiated covertly in some situations and retreated back into passivity in others.

  9. This observation resonates with Bourdieu’s general argument about the inter-convertibility among different forms of capital. But just as his notion of cultural capital focuses on high-status signals, Bourdieu’s social capital mainly refers to the social ties of “honorability and respectability” (Bourdieu 1984, p. 122), potentially giving rise to the question of whether connections among the dominated should count as social capital, and if so, whether these ties benefit them. See Stephens 2008 for a review of the growing literature on these and related issues in the field of health and illness management.

  10. The rising popularity of CAM (complementary and alternative medicine) in the United states is well documented among “women, whites, and the more highly educated” (Goldstein 2002, p. 45), with many users finding CAM an attractive tool for expressing unconventional views regarding mind-body connections, acting upon their critical reflections about biomedical frameworks, and increasing control over their illness experiences (Foote-Ardah 2003). LEP immigrants’ medical pluralism, however, was practiced in very different ways. First-generation, less westernized immigrants differ from mainstream patients in their orientations toward CAM. What is called alternative medicine in the United States is more a tradition than an alternative for immigrants, whose use of ethnic medicine seems to rely much less on the approval of biomedical authorities than that use does for highly-educated, American-born patients (Chiu 2006). Their models of medical brokerage may also differ from those of mainstream patients, as LEP immigrants have different access to herbal cures (e.g., through ethnic herbalists rather than state licensed acupuncturists), use different cultural brokers (e.g., community herbalists rather than dual-trained allopathic doctors), and probably assign different meanings to medical brokerage (e.g., as a coping mechanism for inadequate care rather than an additional step beyond having received full service from institutional healthcare). More generally speaking, we should note that the “compliance” issue goes well beyond the dominated classes. As I have elaborated elsewhere, middle-class and other “empowered” patients also often overtly and covertly challenge their doctors and other institutional gatekeepers. I am grateful to an Editor at Theory and Society for helping me nuance my argument here.

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Lo, MC.M. Conceptualizing “unrecognized cultural currency”: Bourdieu and everyday resistance among the dominated. Theor Soc 44, 125–152 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-015-9249-4

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