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Ideas do have consequences in history, yet not because those ideas are inherently truthful or obviously correct but rather because of the ways they are embedded in very powerful institutions, networks, interests, and symbols. Cultures are very resistant to change, but they do change under specific conditions.

Focusing on Charles Burney's 1772 central European journey to collect material for a general history of music, this chapter shows how travel and musical mapping were co-opted for the making of a German cultural imaginary. It transnationalizes Bourdieu's notion of symbolic capital to show how national cultural identities were mobilized via the figure of the traveler. It was the traveler who was authorized to traverse liminal spaces, compare cultural systems, and exercise aesthetic judgments. German scholars like Christoph Daniel Ebeling, Johann Nicolaus Forkel, and Johann Friedrich Reichardt saw the Englishman's journey as an opportunity to reprioritize German over French and Italian music, and thereby contribute to a German Kulturnation. Yet Burney preferred a protosociological approach to the study of music and this helps explain his negative reception in Germany. The dispute between Burney and the Germans highlights the problems with an epistemology of music based on travel: the unreliability of the musical informant and the social and political uses of music did not ultimately cohere with the kinds of music-immanent criteria upon which the German scholars' project depended.

Everyone exercises leadership to varying degrees for we all exercise relative influence in the wide variety of contexts in which we live. By the same logic, we are all also followers in a sense, for even where we exercise leadership, we are held to account—we follow the dictates, needs, and standards of others. Faithful presence in practice is the exercise of leadership in all spheres and all levels of life and activity. It represents a quality of commitment oriented to the fruitfulness, wholeness, and wellbeing of all. Faithful presence generates relationships and institutions that are fundamentally covenantal in character, the ends of which are the fostering of meaning, purpose, truth, beauty, belonging, and fairness—not just for Christians, but also for everyone. It is an assault on the worldliness of this present age. The burden of shalom falls to leaders.

A movement to ‘revive’ the spirit of the Punjabi language, the Punjabiyat movement, has been catalyzed from within Pakistan — raising intriguing questions about language, nationalism, and the cultural basis of the nation-state. Although the Punjabiyat movement bears the surface features of a classical nationalist formation — insistence upon recovering an unfairly oppressed history and literature, one unique on earth and uniquely imbued with the spirit of the local people and the local land — its structural features differ markedly. Pakistan’s Punjab has long functioned as an ethnic hegemon, the centre against which other regions struggle in a search for power. Yet the Punjabiyat movement presents Punjab as an oppressed victim of Pakistan’s troubled search for national identity. This essay argues that a theory of symbolic capital best explains this otherwise peculiar inversion of perceived and actual power, and underscores culture’s critical role in the nation’s political imagination.

The Introduction argues that masculine ideologies and roles are central to the men who participate in sóma rituals in ancient India and these ideals are encoded in the three manly gods, Agni, Indra, and Soma. In order to understand and fruitfully interpret these ideals and roles, it further examines various social science and cultural studies approaches, such as theories on discourse, practice, ritual, and the body. It thus explores various ways in which R̥gvedic poet-priests produce and justify their institutionalized androcentric ideology in ritual performances; how they define and enforce social relationships and masculine practices, especially the patriarchal socio-political order; and how they maintain their own positions of power, wealth, and ultimately their ritual tradition.

Based on the premise that the growth of bilingualism in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century is a consequence of post-1965 immigration, the chapter presents the book’s dual objective of tracing the effects of the social changes to bilingualism in cultural representations of bilingual personhood and of querying how these representations illuminate the social lives of bilingual persons. Crucial to the book’s discussion of bilingual personhood is the two poles of good and bad bilingualism, of bilingualism as asset and liability, which emerges in the social perception of language difference as it intersects with racial difference. Relying on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital, but also supplementing it with ideas of symbolic capital that emerge in the debates on bilingualism, the introduction makes a case for how the idea of bilingualism as human capital shows the assimilation of Asian Americans and Latinos into racial capitalism. The story of bilingual personhood shows that the economy of liberal personhood allows for a split between desirable and undesirable bilinguals. The introduction suggests a structure of feeling in Asian American and Latino literature around this polarizing economy of language difference through which dimensions of a liberal subject’s life, such as inclusion, belonging, rights and entitlement, are contemplated and questioned.

This case study on German subsidy troops fighting in the American War of Independence understands surrender as a ritual performance, turning defeated soldiers into symbolic capital. If the ritual was staged as a rite of passage, as at Saratoga in 1777 and Yorktown in 1781, it provided the vanquished with a safe and respectable transition from the state of armed soldiers to that of unarmed prisoners of war. The victors, in turn, gained an opportunity to demonstrate and communicate their success within their own ranks and a wider public. The observance of rigidly structured rituals guaranteed that the surrender, this dangerous bargain between victors and vanquished, actually succeeded. When rites of passage were missing, as happened at Trenton and many other battles and skirmishes, defeated soldiers were nervous about their future in enemy hands and violence toward prisoners became a distinct possibility.

This chapter describes the symbolic divisions and differences within the field of humanitarian relief NGOs. In developing their distinctive position on questions of humanitarian policy, agencies draw on different intellectual and national histories, but diversity is also shaped by competition for a specific type of symbolic capital: humanitarian authority. While some field approaches following the work of Bourdieu posit a two-fold division between economic and cultural capital, this chapter maps organizations along the dimensions of field-specific capital, on the one hand, and different kinds of capital dependent on other fields on the other hand. The field of humanitarian relief NGOs has its origins in a move that combined the authority of the suffering produced by war with the authority of states, and the authority of the medical profession. When the pioneering position of the International Red Cross was challenged on its own terms by Doctors without Borders (MSF) in 1968, the contestation around humanitarian authority that defines the field became possible.

This chapter explores the relationship between organisations and valuation by focusing on corporate museums. Drawing on work in the anthropology and sociology of culture, it considers how products acquire sociocultural meanings and become vehicles for communication, and how core competences and resources — namely, cultural capital and symbolic capital — enable producers to endow products with desirable cultural meaning — that is, symbolic value. It also discusses symbolic production through design and advertising before presenting the results of an empirical study that looked into how heritage artifacts preserved in corporate museums and archives facilitate dynamics of accumulation and deployment of cultural and symbolic capital. It shows that corporate museums function not only to sustain the ‘myth’ of the product as a form of symbolic value in the perception of (potential) customers who visit the museum, but also to maintain this myth in the cognitive frame of the employees and thereby in their work practices.

This chapter spells out major sociopolitical forces that have contributed to the widespread adoption of official multilingualism, and offers an explanation of how official multilingualism works through law. Jurisdictions that adopt multilingual law are primarily driven by pragmatic rather than normative forces. Official language law can perform a plethora of instrumental functions because such law works chiefly through its symbolic power. This discursive reading of law is contrary to the dominant, positivist view of law as command of a sovereign backed by force. Although symbolism is sometimes defined in opposition to what is real or substantive, law that works through symbolism is not necessarily empty in content or limited in impact. In fact, its semiotic flexibility has allowed it to be used to pursue a wide range of instrumental goals, which consist mostly of political and economic capital.

The Leadership Capital Index utilizes the conceptual terminology of Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory. This chapter presents the groundwork for the LCI as it clarifies Bourdieu’s key concepts and traces the evolution from political capital to leadership capital. With an overview of Bourdieu’s three core concepts of economic, cultural, and social capital, plus the more elusive symbolic capital, the chapter assists with an appreciation of the analytical potential of the concept of political capital. The notion of leadership capital integrates many (but not all) aspects of Bourdieu’s field-specific notion of political capital and the LCI succeeds in translating his complex conceptualization into a manageable set of ten indicators. The chapter explains how together Bourdieu’s political sociology and the approach suggested through the LCI create numerous synergies and are promising and useful endeavors in the analysis of political leadership.

Chapter 1 traces the multiple genealogies of the Indian IT industry, contextualizing its growth within national, regional, and local political–economic configurations. It shows how the operations of software capital and its modes of value production have been shaped by its history and social location, especially its relation to the middle class. The chapter argues that the rise of software capital represents a decisive shift in modes of capital accumulation, in the social composition and ideological orientation of Indian capital, and in the relation between market and state in India. The argument focuses on the production and circulation of symbolic capital and social imaginaries that work to reconstitute the relation between the ‘national’ and the ‘global’ in post-liberalization India. The chapter unpacks the cultural and social specificities of this global assemblage and maps larger political and symbolic reverberations of software capital as ideologies and imaginaries emanating from this social field traverse diverse sites.

This chapter narrows the contextual focus to concentrate on the role of dramatic authorship within the broader cultural field. First, it examines how authors traditionally shaped their careers in Parisian theatre, and outlines the different types of financial and symbolic reward that were offered by the Comédie-Italienne and the Comédie-Française in the 1760s. Then, it reconstructs the career trajectories of some of Goldoni’s contemporaries, including Marmontel, Sedaine, and Riccoboni, examining how their involvement in theatrical and non-theatrical enterprises contributed to their social and financial position by earning them money and/or cultural capital in high or low circles. This analysis suggests that the Comédie-Italienne provided a more commercial alternative to its French counterpart, but also reveals the extent to which literary consecration of dramatic authors was enacted outside of the theatres altogether.

This chapter explores the ‘complex presence’ (Mol, 2002) of things, environments, and people with their individual histories, acquaintances and capacities, and its impact on the formation of children’s practices. In the first section, it discusses various ways in which children encounter things, drawing the topographic lines of difference between individual children (or groups of children) and the ways in which they come to engage with things. The second section then focuses on the diversity of ways in which things affect children’s practices, drawing on Bourdieu’s idea of different forms of capital as a framework that emphasises the complex role of things in how children develop their agency.

This chapter highlights the dialectic of concealment and revelation, which secrecy involves and which counts as both a source of power and a liability for vital spot practitioners. Secrecy may convey authority and legitimacy, and hence may be described as a source of power or a form of symbolic capital, which may be translated into other forms of capital: social, cultural, or economic. Therefore, secrecy must be understood as crucial in practitioners’ endeavors for legitimacy, authority, and even (therapeutic or martial) efficacy. This, however, is always premised on a partial revelation of secrets. Practitioners engage in a kind of advertisement of secrecy, a back-and-forth between concealment and revelation, which is an inherent and constantly reproduced ambiguity of vital spot knowledge and its practitioners. This influences the status of vital spot practices and of its proponents.

In San Francisco, young economic developers help immigrant women turn their small, informal businesses into thriving corporations, while others try to take advantage of the boom in boutique food trucks. These entrepreneurs discuss how they package and market street foods for middle-class consumption. The chapter introduces basic urban geographic concepts, such as cultural capital, cosmopolitanism, symbolic capital, social distinction, and the geographic imagination. It argues that elevating immigrant foods for middle-class consumption creates complex issues that pertain to cultural appropriation, which can cause ethnic exclusion and spur gentrification.

George Putnam Upton, who accepted the role of cultural agent for Hans Balatka and his Chicago Philharmonic Society, publishing announcements, commentary, and favorable reviews, built up symbolic capital from 1862 to 1867 and invested it in Balatka's prestige. He withdrew that capital from Balatka over the next two years, when he reinvested it in Theodore Thomas. Upton could support the orchestra and encourage its public while displaying his ability as juridical critic and droll arbiter of taste. Balatka entered into the 1869–70 season with optimism for his “Orchestral Union” concert series. Upton reported that his investment of cultural capital in Balatka was not a mistake or a lapse. It was a down payment on a cultural investment that would eventually prove much more profitable for Upton, for the Tribune, and for Chicago.

This chapter examines independent filmmakers’ participation in the struggle to maintain South Korea’s screen quota system (a protectionist film policy against the “Hollywood invasion”). The chapter explores the screen quota struggle as a critical event, a catalyst for the transformation of the independent filmmaker community from being the marginal social dissidents in the 1980s to becoming a symbol of Korean cultural nationalism. KIFA members’ potent symbolic connection to the 3-8-6 generation became the uniting trope of cultural nationalism; they portrayed the screen quota struggle as a legitimate offspring of the Korean social movement against American influence both political and cultural.

Chapter 5 concentrates on the role of race and gender in the pursuit of recognition. Details about the role and influence of women in the early years of hip hop have mostly been ignored in previous works, but this chapter shows that women were significant to the internal logic of the scene. Exploring the rise and fall of The Mercedes Ladies, the first all-female DJing and MCing crew, we see that the masculine orientation of the scene limited how much symbolic capital could be accrued because the most important social networks in the scene (e.g., those of party promoters, club owners, and security crews) were dominated by males. This chapter also explores the rise of Charlie Chase, a popular Puerto Rican DJ, to demonstrate how race mattered in the pursuit of symbolic capital. Even though all young people in the South Bronx neighborhoods, including non-blacks, were invited to the parties, not all could, without opposition, become famous performers. This was because the most desirable role in the scene, being a performer, was reserved for blacks, while non-blacks who attempted to cross this boundary faced some resistance.

Chapter 6 considers the impact of exposure to urban lifestyles and cosmopolitan consumer culture on young migrant women’s subjectivity and gender identity. Concerns with consumer tastes and trends are emblematic of anxiety about belonging, identity, and social status. Learning and applying consumption techniques to their own bodies and lifestyles provides relatively powerless individuals some control and pleasure, as “country bumpkins” become “urban sophisticates.” Such symbolic capital may eventually garner significant social and economic capital. For example, savvy migrant women benefit financially by exploiting their youthful bodies and femininity. Yet, cannot fully overcome their marginalization in urban society or mitigate the stresses of migrant life. Also, their self-transformations and material indulgences may cause tensions with kin as they conflict with conservative rural ethics and social mores. As time passes, they identify less with the village, but are not fully integrated into urban society. They occupy an ambivalent in-between space of experimentation and negotiation.