Bourdieu’s Three Key Concepts

1. Field (Champ) → Social spaces with their own rules, hierarchies, and struggles.

   • Examples: The political field, the economic field, the academic field, the artistic field—each has different forms of authority and logic.

   • Fields are semi-autonomous but influenced by larger power structures (e.g., the economic field can distort the artistic field by making profit the main criterion for value).

   • Each field is a site of competition for legitimacy, status, and resources.

2. Habitus → The ingrained dispositions, tendencies, and ways of being shaped by social conditions.

   • It’s how social structures get embodied—our unconscious ways of thinking, moving, and perceiving the world.

   • Example: A working-class student in an elite university might struggle because their habitus doesn’t align with the dominant academic culture.

3. Capital (not just economic) → Different forms of power that allow people to succeed in a given field.

   • Economic Capital → Money, property, assets.

   • Cultural Capital → Education, tastes, credentials, aesthetic knowledge.

   • Social Capital → Networks, connections, who you know.

   • Symbolic Capital → Prestige, legitimacy, reputation.

   • Some fields value certain types of capital more than others (e.g., academia values cultural capital, business values economic capital).