David Osa Amadasun suggests why black people don’t go to galleries and poses some ‘awkward questions’ surrounding cultural value, taste and minority groups.
Since childhood I have always been curious as to why rich people were rich and the poor were poor. Fast-forward two decades and that same curiosity has evolved into a call for action to do something about the insidious ways in which inequalities infect our daily lives. It was during the second year of my undergraduate degree, at the age of 32, that I became aware of the limited exposure I had had to certain social and cultural resources as a child and young adult. As a teenager my experience and aspirations were heavily influenced by two things: the media (mainly TV and music) and the church – my mother was an international evangelist. During one of my undergraduate courses I was mentally conversing with a lecture about the ideas of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu on Social and Cultural Capital. I had one of those eureka moments, I wonder if I can use these ideas to increase my kids’ life chances? Bourdieu was the son of a farmer who went on to become an academic and public intellectual. Despite his success Bourdieu always felt out of place among the middle-classes, ‘like a fish out of water’ – a concept he called ‘hysteresis’. The matter of how class is reproduced by the unconscious imbibing of tacit rules, values, dispositions and tastes was to become an enduring theme in Bourdieu’s writing and research.
In order to get on in life Bourdieu believed that you had to have a ‘feel for the game’ of different social situations or ‘fields’ and the different types of cultural capital and taste that each demanded. For Bourdieu the body, how we carry ourselves, how we dress, how we feel, was key to how the game of power within any field was played out. When there is a fit between us and a particular social field there is ‘ontological complicity’; we are like a fish in water.
Since childhood I have always been curious as to why rich people were rich and the poor were poor. Fast-forward two decades and that same curiosity has evolved into a call for action to do something about the insidious ways in which inequalities infect our daily lives. It was during the second year of my undergraduate degree, at the age of 32, that I became aware of the limited exposure I had had to certain social and cultural resources as a child and young adult. As a teenager my experience and aspirations were heavily influenced by two things: the media (mainly TV and music) and the church – my mother was an international evangelist. During one of my undergraduate courses I was mentally conversing with a lecture about the ideas of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu on Social and Cultural Capital. I had one of those eureka moments, I wonder if I can use these ideas to increase my kids’ life chances? Bourdieu was the son of a farmer who went on to become an academic and public intellectual. Despite his success Bourdieu always felt out of place among the middle-classes, ‘like a fish out of water’ – a concept he called ‘hysteresis’. The matter of how class is reproduced by the unconscious imbibing of tacit rules, values, dispositions and tastes was to become an enduring theme in Bourdieu’s writing and research.
In order to get on in life Bourdieu believed that you had to have a ‘feel for the game’ of different social situations or ‘fields’ and the different types of cultural capital and taste that each demanded. For Bourdieu the body, how we carry ourselves, how we dress, how we feel, was key to how the game of power within any field was played out. When there is a fit between us and a particular social field there is ‘ontological complicity’; we are like a fish in water.