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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT
This paper examines the engagement of young people in Australia with the field of politics in terms of Bourdieu's notion of habitus. Survey responses of pre-voting youth at three very different schools indicate a sense of being left out of the field of politics through responses which reveal both cynicism and disengagement. However, distinctions of political engagement are certainly evident between the three cohorts. Those higher in cultural and economic capital more readily express the importance of politics in society and demonstrate more direct engagement with the field of political ideas and opinions. The young people from the school lowest in socio-economic status seem at first to be more disengaged from the field of politics. However, a detailed treatment of the data reveals that their engagement may be a different kind, more localised, more immediate and more pragmatic.
Keywords: youth; political interest; Bourdieu; habitus; class; cultural capital
Young people are often stereotypically seen as negative parts of society. Not much has been done not just to get rid of this image, but to get past it and see what young people really need. (Female survey respondent 17 years).
INTRODUCTION
This paper examines the opinions of young Australians in the field of politics from the reference point of Bourdieu's notion of habitus. Following Connell's (1) early work. there were some attempts in the 1990s to evaluate and analyse the political knowledge of Australian young people (2). Finding out more means both listening to young people and contextualising what they say (3). If young Australians do show only modest interest towards the field of politics, then it would seem they are little different from their parents '. The data in this paper imply that regardless of their political interest, young people do engage in political activities relating to issues that affect them, their community and their outlook towards what is happening in the world (5). In the context of a wider study. young people aged sixteen to eighteen were asked questions about politics. Since only a few of them had ever voted, they represent a significant sectional interest. They are standing at the cusp of legal citizenship in an age of rapid social and workplace change. We propose that the young people's differing opinions about politics evident in our data is a further example of distinction in practice (6). The data in this paper illustrate an aspect of habitus through the lens of young peoples' opinions regarding specific issues about politics.
BOURDIEU'S SOCIAL THEORY
Bourdieu's central concepts of habitus, field and cultural capital are useful analytical tools for understanding young people's differing opinions about politics. People develop cultural and social capital in relation to their habitus. Habitus is both one's outlook towards society and the place where the outlook is formed; it is a structuring mechanism that operates from within agents (7). It is a concept that expresses both the way in which individuals 'become themselves' and the ways in which those individuals engage in various practices (8). One's habitus is formed by elements of family, friends, education, biology, geography, class, race and gender. It is the set of regulating principles and dispositions that generate and organise practice, 'enabling agents to cope [or not cope] with unforeseen and ever-changing situations' (9). Habitus can be understood as the durable and transposable values, generative dispositions and principles inculcated from our personal and general cultural history that remain with us across contexts. As habitus allows for improvisations, it allows us to follow and respond to cultural rules and contexts in a variety of ways. Nevertheless, an individual's responses are always regulated by who and where we are, and where we have been in a culture (10).
Habitus is a complex notion and we acknowledge that it is a problematic element of Bourdieu's theory to explain and understand. Nevertheless, we prefer using habitus instead of fixed notions of class position because of this very complexity, as it takes into account a matrix of possibilities that form one's outlook towards life. Habitus is not as deterministic as traditional notions of class as its improvisational aspect allows for the possibility for human agency while theorizing the influence of the social structures that shape agency. Habitus is informed by, without being utterly explicable in terms of, class affiliations (11). 'Habitus' and 'class', therefore, are not interchangeable. Nevertheless, for Bourdieu, class location is one, if not the, central factor of habitus that shapes one's ability to engage in successful practice within a particular field.
A 'field' is where the relationship between structure and agency takes place; it 'defines the structure of the social setting in which habitus operates' (12). A field may be of any size and any importance from large general fields of power, education, economics, culture or politics to smaller specific fields. As Bourdieu says, 'there are ... as many fields of preferences as there are fields of stylistic possibilities' (13). Fields are hierarchically organised where the agent's access to, or ownership of, various forms of capital constrains the possibility for success.
The notion of cultural capital is vital for understanding tastes, preferences and, in this case, political affinities which adhere to habitus within fields. Cultural capital includes verbal facility, general cultural awareness and aesthetic preferences within the paradigm of recent social change. The importance of cultural capital in terms of social reproduction lies in the fact that what is valued culturally is relative to who defines what is cultural capital. According to Bourdieu, this is the intellectual ruling-class elite (14). This is illustrated in the conflict between 'high' culture and 'low' culture (15). However, some recent work has redeveloped the notion of cultural capital to illustrate how distinctions are made within 'low' or popular culture (16). Here, it is important to note that the 'new middle class' (17), or what Bourdieu refers to as 'cultural intermediaries' (18), are largely responsible for the collapse of the distinction between high and low culture (19). The new postindustrial middle class, with bases in professional employment, the media, higher education, finance, advertising, merchandising, and international exchanges, provides an audience for postmodern culture (20) to articulate its own forms of distinction. This notion of cultural intermediaries is important for understanding distinction in the two middle-class schools in the survey. For Bourdieu (21), economic capital is simply wealth and property, while social capital is defined by one's access to social connections that enhance the possibility of success in any given field (22). In Bourdieu's model, those high in economic capital have more cultural and social capital. At the same time, both cultural and social capital have the potential to be transformed at some stage into economic capital.
One's possession of cultural capital informs the 'distinctions' (23) made by individuals in various fields, including politics. Distinction is the process whereby cultural capital is employed to form categorical judgements of taste and discrimination. Possession of cultural capital informs the choices an individual makes in any given field. The Australian study by Bennett, Emmison and Frow (24) demonstrates how distinction remains a major signifier of social-class membership in Australia.
YOUTH IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY
Australian youth unemployment (16-24 year olds) is still very high. Furthermore, restructuring of labour markets, expanding the need for suitably qualified workers, flexible specialisation, and social policies extending the period of youth dependency (25) impact on youth transitions (26) and on youth perceptions of their own citizenship (27). Young people's orientations towards the field of politics need to be understood within this context, in which they often express feelings of powerlessness (28). Youth in Australia enter a highly demanding global/informational economy (29) when they come into the labour market. The transformation from an industrial to an informational economy has intensified previous inequalities inherent within the capitalist system. This has engendered a 'winners' and 'losers' logic based on the individual's access to what Castells calls 'the space of flows' (30) . Beck (31) describes this new kind of life-course and work in economically wealthy countries as 'risk society'; where the term 'risk' encapsulates individuals' experience of the day-to-day dangers such as unemployment or health problems, and large scale threats that seem uncontrollable to the individual such as global warming, nuclear disaster or terrorism. In the Australian context, Pusey (32) notes the expansion of perceptions of inequality in an increasingly uncertain middle class. Giddens (33) describes processes of 'detraditionalization' and the growth of the sense that individuals must constantly enact entrepreneurial strategies to manage perceived and actual risk. The primacy of risk in the lives of young people must therefore be understood 'as a governmental strategy of regulatory power by which populations and individuals are monitored and managed through the goals of neo-liberalism' (34).
The modern young citizen constructs a biography in ways that do not correspond any more to the familiar sequences of the 'industrial' life-course of the twentieth century (35). However, the extent of likely exposure to hardship (risk) is still largely dependent on the individuals' access to, and possession and maintenance of, various forms of capital. So despite some claims that class is increasingly irrelevant within these paradigms (36), and even though cultural capital has been extensively redefined within these transformations, we argue that recent social, economic, political and technological changes are engendering new forms of 'distinction' and inequality which 'still look a lot like class differences' (37). In these terms, risk is...
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