Cultural capital, habitus, and the rules of the secondary school game. Evidence from an ethnographic study of a secondary school in the City of Buenos Aires

MEO, ANALIA

Masaryk University. Brnó, Czech Republic.

Workshop; Cultural Capital and Educational Inequalities: Concepts, methods and configurations; 2008

Financiado por European Consortium for Sociological Research (ECSR)

In this paper I apply an extended notion of cultural capital together with the concept of habitus to unpack the ways in which middle class girls and boys are able to engage with the rules of the schooling "game" (in a Bourdieuan sense) in a public secondary school. In my study, these concepts illuminate the routine ways in which students are able to pass school year in an instrumental and detached way. In a context of a fragmented educational system, I argue that middle class students coming from the "loser" sections of the middle classes developed a specific school habitus that I call zafar that both propelled them to "play" the game of schooling and hampered their educational opportunities. Zafar is a Spanish slang word, which means "releasing from a commitment or obligation"; "to escape or hide in order to avoid an encounter or risk"; and, "to avoid something that annoys you" (Real Academia Española 2001). Teachers and students used this word to refer to a variety of dispositions and practices regarding learning and educational performance. I use the term zafar to refer to the collective matrix of dispositions, classifications and classifiable practices that students routinely apply to make sense of crucial aspects of the "game" of secondary schooling. In so doing, students deploy a variety of cultural competences or "cards" to comply with the variable social and educational demands and standards of evaluation from their teachers.