From Parental to Adolescents’ Habitus: Challenges and Insights When Quantifying Bourdieu

Abstract

How does one approach empirically capturing the ways of ‘thinking, feeling and acting, and common sets of expectations’, as Wacquant (2014, p. 119) referred to habitus? Where does the theory end and methodology start? I have been an enthusiastic Bourdieu fan since the very first time I encountered his work in the Introductory Sociology course that I took as an undergraduate student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I was particularly taken by the concepts of cultural capital and habitus. It seemed like a fascinating idea that individuals and groups not only differ by wealth, status, or political power, but they also possess different cultural resources (that can be distinguished from education per se), and those resources play a role in social competition. I was born and raised in Soviet Moscow, and now I’m a professor at a US university. For many American students and scholars, the works of Bourdieu may seem a bit abstract because in the United States, the knowledge of and familiarity with high culture has become much less of a necessity in school exams, university admissions, or job interviews. By contrast, Russian society before the Communist revolution was extremely highly stratified by class. Higher classes admired, and to a certain degree adopted, features of European culture. A higher-class citizen in Tzarist Russia was often fluent in several languages (e.g., French, English and German), and was familiar with the European art, literature, music, and fashion.