On Cultural Capital and Taste Cultural Field in a Turkish City in Historical Perspective

English (OpenAlex)

ABSTRACT Through the application of Bourdieu's ideas of culture and cultural capital to a specific city located in Southeastern Turkey, this article identifies the forms of cultural capital, including education and consumption, that became important in class formation since the end of the nineteenth century. The article identifies changes in the historical forms which symbolic and cultural capital have taken. In this city, as non-Western pre-capitalist culture was abandoned, partly due to forced modernization, previous patterns of hierarchies that generated the social groups/relations began to transform. While a nuanced set of practices were distinguishing features of social life, the whole set of practices of generosity, kindness or politeness was filtered through the prism of paternalist domination. From the end of the nineteenth century onwards, however, a symbolic struggle involved questions of taste and culture. Drawing on the struggle between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ wealth, this article scrutinises the role of cultural capital in class formation from a historical perspective in relation to family, embodiment and education.