History
The concept of cultural reproduction was first developed by the French sociologist and cultural theorist Pierre Bourdieu in the early 1970s. Initially, Bourdieu’s work was on education in a modern society. He believed that the education system was used solely to ‘reproduce’ the culture of the dominant class in order for the dominant class to continue to hold and release power. Bourdieu’s ideas were similar to those of Louis Althusser's notion of ‘ideological state apparatuses’ which had emerged around the same time. He began to study socialization and how dominant culture and certain norms and traditions effected many social relations.
One of Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron main concepts on Cultural Reproduction was in their book Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction. Bourdieu’s main focus was the structural reproduction of disadvantages and inequalities that are caused by cultural reproduction. According to Bourdieu, inequalities are recycled through the education system and other social institutions. Bourdieu believed that the prosperous and affluent societies of the west were becoming the “cultural capital”. High social class, familiarity with the bourgeois culture and educational credentials determined one’s life chances. It was biased towards those of higher social class and aided in conserving social hierarchies. This system concealed and neglected individual talent and academic meritocracy. Bourdieu demonstrated most of his known theories in his books The Inheritors and Reproduction in Education, Culture and Society. Both books established him as a progenitor of “Reproduction theory”
Bourdieu also pioneered many procedural frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field, and symbolic violence. Bourdieu's work emphasized the role of practice and embodiment in social dynamics. Bourdieu’s theories build upon the conjectures of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Georges Canguilhem, Karl Marx, Gaston Bachelard, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, and Norbert Elias, among others.
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