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Exercising Privilege: The Cyclical Reproduction of Capital through Swim Club Membership
Author(s) -
DeLuca Jaime R.,
Andrews David L.
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
sociological inquiry
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.446
H-Index - 51
eISSN - 1475-682X
pISSN - 0038-0245
DOI - 10.1111/soin.12113
Subject(s) - cultural capital , privilege (computing) , habitus , social reproduction , sociology , cultural reproduction , reproduction , club , social capital , social class , subject (documents) , institution , power (physics) , ethnography , capital (architecture) , middle class , gender studies , class (philosophy) , field (mathematics) , symbolic capital , social science , epistemology , anthropology , law , political science , geography , ecology , quantum mechanics , medicine , philosophy , mathematics , archaeology , computer science , biology , physics , library science , pure mathematics , anatomy
According to cultural theorist Pierre Bourdieu, social class is defined by the interplay and operation of various forms of capital, within the set of durable and objective relations in which the classed subject is located. Informed by Bourdieu's understanding of social class, this article details the empirical dimensions of upper‐middle‐class familial involvement at the Valley View Swim and Tennis Club. An institution prefigured on the practice and development of important physical skills, Valley View represents a site for the complex interplay of capitals (economic, social, cultural, and physical) complicit in the preservation and reproduction of members' upper‐middle‐class habitus, and corresponding elevated and privileged social status. Specifically, we discuss the findings of ethnographic fieldwork focused on the acquisition, transmission, and conversion of economic, social, cultural, and physical capital in and through member families' club involvement. We argue that Valley View operates as a distinctive cultural field, wherein embodied techniques and expressions of class‐based power and privilege contribute to the reproduction of social class differences, boundaries, and hierarchies, in such a way as to render them natural, and largely unacknowledged, effects of being.