Bourdieu et Moi

Bourdieu et Moi

Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu frames culture in a social context that is relational, connecting individuals with their familial, community and national environmental influence. He advises educators and researchers to analyze or be aware of cultural social context which he labels as reflexivity. Agents or individuals (i.e., students) function in the context of the culture of their milieu, creating their habitus or patterns of thought and behavior, and gain cultural and economic capital or knowledge, experience and connections facilitating success. A tennis player, observes Bourdieu, moves into the net to successfully lob the ball, according to prior knowledge, experience and connections rather than an explicit directive from the coach, (Sayer, 2005, p. 26). Capital facilitates agency success.


Language (from the perspective of a second language teacher) can be defined as a type of cultural capital. Immigrants who resettle come with a first language that is often different from the national language in their new country. This first language knowledge and skill is a type of cultural capital. However, it is not always perceived as capital, and is often lost within the context of a larger dominant society.

“According to Michel Foucault, the official discourses occlude forms of knowledge that are different and distinct from them,” (Zayat, 2008, p. 1).

Zygmunt Bauman takes this a step further with his analysis of globalization where, on a global scale, a dominant culture pre-empts the individual and the cultural capital of their local milieu (including language). Humphrey Tonkin, in his article in the Winter 2001 ADFL Bulletin, explains this as lingual imperialism:

"Today, a key to entry into the community of the educated elite—or at least a necessary if not in itself a sufficient qualification for a membership card—is the English language... In short, English is the Microsoft of languages—the linguistic medium that has acquired such a dominant role in the marketplace that it seems to have become self-perpetuating. The parallel with computers is by no means far-fetched: just as the colonial powers laid down railroads and installed telephone systems that depended for their maintenance and spare parts on industries based in the mother countries, so the British Empire and, in its way, the United States, developed a linguistic software infrastructure that is today heavily dependent on the cultural products—everything from entertainment to education—of the English-speaking world. Apparently the only way for other countries to share this global market is to adopt its linguistic software. Accordingly, we find many countries whose languages are essentially local and marginal that use English as a medium of instruction in colleges and universities or in publishing or the entertainment industry,” (Tonkin, 2001, pgs.6-7).

As a language teacher, this is a study regarding developments in the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) within the context of the works of Bourdieu and Bauman.

Social Context: Macro (Fields) and Micro (Habitus) with SLA

First language acquisition (or L1) and second language acquisition (SLA or L2) involve social contexts, including the macro-social factors of community and lingual hegemony (the linguistic context of a national language) and the micro-social factors of psychological and familial contexts. Due to social context, there are variables in SLA. We will consider two.

The national language (what is defined as literacy in schools) is established by which group is politically and economically dominant in a multi-ethnic society, often the one that has majority status. Two outcomes of SLA are two types of bilingualism, (Saville-Troike, 2005, p. 127): additive bilingualism, where a second language is added without interference with L1 competence or ethnic identity; or subtractive bilingualism, where members of a group learn the dominant language as L2 and experience loss of ethnic identity and attrition of L1 skills. Many social variables contribute to additive versus subtractive outcomes, including the degree of opportunity for continued contact with L1 community, family life, and whether the L1 fulfills a function or is valued as cultural and or economic capital.

Immigration and Additive Language Learning
My husband and his family came to the United States during his youth, fleeing the Cultural Revolution. The family speaks Chinese (Cantonese). My husband uses Chinese even as he added English as a second language from his US schooling, experiencing additive language learning. His parents use Chinese working in businesses, never learning English. We speak primarily English at home and but predominantly Chinese with relatives and in the Chinese community. Chinese is cultural capital that became economic capital for the family in what Bourdieu would label as the field of their business community. The family, Chinese community, Chinese businesses, and travel to China have kept the Chinese language alive for this family in the midst of an English-dominant society. These entities or fields (family, Chinese community, Chinese businesses, China) value the Chinese language as capital. Two years ago, with the Mandarin Initiative in the State of Minnesota, our State recognized Chinese language skills as economic and cultural capital. For me as a language teacher, and an alien member of this Chinese family, the Chinese language became economic and cultural capital with the opportunity to teach Chinese.

Immigration and Subtractive Language Learning
My grandparents were immigrants from Norway in the 20th Century. One set used some English and worked in accounting, crunching numbers with minimal literacy. The other farmed and never learned English; my father still has a Norwegian accent yet Norwegian is neither spoken nor passed on. English, at school and in the community, replaced Norwegian in a subtractive fashion. However, it is understood that we as an extended family are neither assimilated nor do we belong to the greater American community no matter what language we use. We, Norwegians from a remote mountain village, are from a small, obscure tribe and nation that is insignificant, backwards or unmaterialistic, and different. For example, there is little communication; language has a minimal role and is not considered capital. Work ethic is both communication and capital. I do not recall having an actual conversation with anyone in my family.

From Annihilation of Indigenous Cultural Capital to Re-establishment
Historically, sometimes the indigenous tribes suffer the great loss of their language and culture when another group moves in, dominates, and requires the annihilation of the original culture. This was the case with the native tribes in the United States and the aborigines in Australia. Native American children were plucked from their parents and forcibly schooled in English and Western ways.

These children were forcibly removed from their parents by soldiers and many times never saw their families until later in their adulthood. This was after their value systems and knowledge had been supplanted with colonial thinking. One of the foundations of the U.S. imperialist strategy was to replace traditional leadership of the various indigenous nations with indoctrinated "graduates" of white "schools," in order to expedite compliance with U.S. goals and expansion, (from www.learn.org).

This represents a shortfall of cultural capital for these children and for the society at large. When the dominant class eliminates languages and culture it is a loss for all.

The greatest linguistic diversity is found in some of the ecosystems richest in biodiversity. These regions are inhabited by indigenous peoples, who represent around 4 percent of the world’s population, but speak at least 60 percent of its 6,000 or more languages. For centuries, individual communities relied on traditional knowledge—much of it encoded in distinctive ways in their languages passed down orally for generations—and carried out resource management at local levels. Cultural, linguistic and biological diversity are related, and often inseparable, connected through co-evolution in specific habitats. Where there are indigenous peoples with a homeland, there are still biologically rich environments… Why Language Loss Matters…the world’s many languages encode critical knowledge of use in areas such as land management, marine technology, plant cultivation, and animal husbandry. Finally, linguistic diversity is an irreplaceable resource for future generations. Languages and Critical Knowledge...The next great steps in scientific development may lie locked up in an obscure language in a distant rain forest or on a remote island… Languages, like species, are highly adapted to their environments. Some of the detailed knowledge of the natural environment, encoded in human languages spoken by small groups who have lived for centuries in close contact with their surroundings, may provide useful insights into management of resources on which we all depend. The disappearance of hundreds of species of fish, birds, and other forms of life, along with their names and related knowledge of their habitat and behavior, represents an enormous loss to science at precisely the time when we most urgently need to manage local ecosystems more effectively, (Nettle, Romaine, 2008, p. 3).

Today, educators in general and language teachers in particular, are changing this paradigm of replacing one language with another. There are leaders and models that seek to build on the cultural capital students bring with them from their families and the community at large, into the educational system.

Educators Change the Paradigm
Two model programs capture the language children bring in that is not the majority language in the United States (English). The Dual Immersion School requires a elementary-aged body of students that have a language different from the majority, such as a group of students from Mexico who only speak Spanish. These students represent one-half of the dual immersion model; the other half is English-speaking wanting to learn Spanish. Paired together in an elementary school, each half teaches the other the second language, while the curriculum is presented in both languages; the staff is bi-lingual. A second school model is the Heritage Language Program. The Heritage Program has some classes in the native language enabling students to continue to use their language from home in the academic setting, while adding the societal dominant language in other classes. In a study of a Heritage Language Program among Inuit students in Canada, the Heritage Language Program students tested with higher literacy skills than those Inuit students who were simply school in English or French, the societal dominant languages in Canada.

Compared with Inuit in heritage language and mixed-heritage children in a second language, Inuit in second-language classes (English or French) showed poorer heritage language skills and poorer second-language acquisition. Conversely, Inuit children in Inuit classes showed heritage language skills equal to or better than mixed-heritage children and Whites educated in their heritage languages. Findings support claims that early instruction exclusively in a societal dominant language can lead to subtractive bilingualism among minority-language children, and that heritage language education may reduce this subtractive process, (Wright, Taylor, & MacArthur, 2000, p. 63).

Thus, the additive program produced a higher literacy than the subtractive program, even in the societal dominant language. The Dual Immersion School and the Heritage Language Program are two successful additive SLA models now found throughout the United States.

There are educational leaders who seek to build on what students bring to school, culturally and linguistically, instead of completely replacing or destroying their identity. One example is found on the blog of Professor Deborah Appleman with her teaching at Stillwater Prison, (Appleman, 2008, online). She is having her students identify their use of language and vernacular in their present environment and their past.

October 8th, 2008 “Last week, the students wrote ethnographies of the communication patterns they see in their daily lives at the prison. Monday’s class began with a lively discussion of what they discovered in their ethnographies, including a discussion of some of the factors that influence patterns of speech and communicative practices…” (Appleman, 2008, online blog).

This has produced interesting and enlightening results regarding student identity and how students use language. Rather than simply correct their use of English, she is having them identify how they use English. Appleman’s initiatives are in sharp contrast to the “No Spanish” rules prevalent, for example, in US schools as recently as the 1970’s (Fine & Weis, 1993).

A second example is the Harlem project of Geoff Canada. Canada has a birth-through-college program for 10,000 children in Harlem, seeing them through into professional educated positions from a drug and prostitution rich neighborhood. However, Geoff makes very clear that he wants the children to not leave their roots in Harlem behind, but rather build on them and never forget where they came from. He grew up in Harlem himself and values the culture of his youth. In his program to facilitate the South Bronx students achieving a college degree and a professional career, Canada would like to,

…borrow some of these new ideas from the manic superparents downtown and combine them with the hanging-out-on-the-stoop beliefs that he grew up with,… he thinks he can carve out a unique set of Harlem values that will make instinctive sense to both parents and kids,” (Tough, 125, 2008).

These are two examples of educational leaders facilitating students’ building on what they have brought with them while advancing their education.

Bauman Sounds the Alarm of Globalization

Since Pierre Bourdieu completed his work, Bauman now reminds us that the majority defined as global culture threatens to once again destroy the cultural capital of our local cultures and languages. Globalization would seek to make the world mono-lingual and controlled by one dominant cultural mindset, with the loss of the capital of what can be called localized culture and identity. When I was a teacher at Normandale French Immersion School, the language teachers had a particular disdain for what they termed as the “mono-linguals” among us. They could feel the lack of understanding and depth among those who had never ventured outside of their English milieu. Mono-lingualism may seem efficient and progressive but indeed it is in reality simply, again, the annihilation of cultural capital like the situation of aboriginal tribes. Each culture has unique understanding. By understanding each other, our capacities grow and develop. Globalization has the earmarks of cloning the human race into a mono and dominant culture with loss of identity and self-determination. Bourdieu uses the analogy of the tennis player who meets the ball at the net. His habitus enabled him to succeed at that moment, not the robotic directive of the coach. We all need our individual backgrounds to succeed at the game of life, both collectively and individually.

References

1. Appleman, D., 2008, retrieved October 10th, from http://blogs.carleton.edu/Stillwater/.
2. Bauman, Z. (2008). Consuming life. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.
3. Bauman, Z. (1998). Globalization: The human consequences. NY: Columbia University Press.
4. Bourdieu, P. (1990). In other words: essays towards a reflexive sociology. Translated by Matthew Adamson. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
5. Canada, G. (1995). Fist stick knife gun. Boston, MA: Beacon Press Boston.
6. Diamond, J. (1997). Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: Norton.
7. Fine, L. & Weis, L., eds. (1993). Beyond silenced voices: Class, race, and gender in United States’ schools. NY: State University of New York Press.
8. Learn.org. http://www.learn.org/hgp/aeti/aeti-1997/native-americans.html, retrieved October 10th, 2008.
9. Nettle, D. & Romaine, S. (2000). The last survivors. Retrieved October 25, 2008 fromhttp://www.culturalsurvival.org/ Protecting the rights, voices, and visions of indigenous people, linked to: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~romaine/The%20Last%20Survivors.htm. Daniel Nettle is an anthropologist who has conducted extensive fieldwork in Africa. Suzanne Romaine, a linguist, is Merton Professor of English Language at the University of Oxford, and has done fieldwork in the island Pacific. Together they wrote Vanishing Voices: The extinction of the world’s languages (2000), NY: Oxford University Press.
10. Nietschmann, B. (1992). The interdependence of biological and cultural diversity. In Center for World Indigenous Studies Occasional Paper, 21, 3.
11. Saville-Toike, M. (2005). Introducing second language acquisition. New York: Cambridge University Press.
12. Sayer, R.A. (2005). The moral significance of class. New York: Cambridge University Press.
13. Swartz, D. (1997). Culture and power: The sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
14. Tonkin, H. (2001). “Language learning, globalism, and the role of English.” ADFL Bulletin 32, No. 2 (Winter 2001): 5-9.
15. Tough, P. (2008) Whatever it takes: Geoffrey Canada’s quest to change Harlem and America. NY: Houghton Mifflin.
16. Wright S. C., Taylor D. M., & MacArthur J. (2000). Subtractive bilingualism and the survival of the Inuit language : Heritage- versus second-language education. Journal of Educational Psychology, 92, (1), 63-84.
17. Zayat, I. (2008). “Tunisian photographer blurs gender boundaries”, Alarabonline. Retrieved October 19, 2008 online: http://english.alarabonline.org/print.asp?fname=2008\10\10-18\zculturez\998.htm.