cultural capital

friends have often heard me go off on rants about cultural capital in the academy. as the daughter of a working-class single mother i've often felt acutely my supposed lack of that caché of knowledge and experience which, as pierre bourdieu so famously pointed out, is the property of those in a normative class position in society. i'm incredibly sensitive to issues of class -- some would say 'oversensitive', and they wouldn't be wrong; i have a hair-sensitive trigger, and i don't like the way in which our current cultural climate likes to pretend issues of class don't exist.

don't get me wrong -- i'm in no way at odds with the palimpsest with which my habitus marks me. unlike some i know who work very hard to hide their origins, affecting behaviours they believe obscure what to them are embarrassing tell-tale signs, i see no problem with where i come from. however, i also think that acknowledging origins, at least in my case, doesn't necessitate aping "the folk". for me it's a strange balance -- i'm always already outside and inside at the same time. for example, i am often candid and colloquial (remember uncle ted?) but in a context that is in many ways the furthest thing from my mother's life experience.

now i would be guilty of oversimplification if i was to not discuss a facet of this whole situation that complicates things even further -- i was raised not only as the daughter of a working-class materialist feminist with conflicting conservative religious beliefs (wow -- that's another post all on its own!), but also as the daughter of a first-generation immigrant. my mother, with her german birth and french childhood, brought to our single-parent, low-income household a longing and nostalgia for her origins that inflected my class-proscribed experience of the world. at the same time that my mother butted heads with hegemony on many fronts, she also longed for the culture of her childhood that has in many ways been fetishized by the north american middle class as "european". mom's homestyle lunches of lipton chicken noodle soup and white bread, in many ways markers of class status, took on an intriguing hybridity with the addition of maggi seasoning and liverwurst. this hybridity has often helped me to "pass". other times, it serves as a glaring contradiction to all the things people assume i should be. i once remember having dinner at a friend's house when i was in high school. this friend's mother knew a little bit about my family background and had presumed to make assumptions about what kind of 'culture' i had therefore been exposed to. imagine her surprise when i manifested not only what she dubbed "european table manners" but also enough know-how to eat an artichoke uninstructed and unassisted.

this morning, when my browser opened to its home page, i noticed an article about the new biopic about edith piaf being released in france. the article discusses the nation-wide wave of nostalgia for the socio-cultural values connected to piaf. i confess to being overwhelmed by a nostalgia of my own, a nostalgia for a time when i wasn't so aware of the complexities of my identity -- when 'being' seemed much more simple. when my mother would get incredibly homesick, she would dig around in the stereo cabinet in the living room and come out brandishing an edith piaf recording. she had almost every recording piaf ever made. (sadly, in one of our many moves, the box containing all of these vinyl treasures was inexplicably lost). playing those records, and thus instilling in me an almost absurd knowledge of the french singer (absurd in that at the age of 6 i would ride my bike around the neighbourhood belting out the words to "non, je ne regrette rien"), she was momentarily back in the south of france with my grandfather patiently helping her guide her bicycle over the cobblestones.

there are times when i revel in my inbetween-ness and my awareness of it. i'll be the first to admit that the power of that knowledge has helped me negotiate the (at times) bewildering world of the academy. there are also times, like today, when i just want to be me: to eat my maggi infused lipton soup and sing along with la môme.