When Cha and Eli attempted to unwrap the warped mind of Pierre Bourdieu, they decided to create a post together to help one another better understand his work. The first thing that came to Eli’s mind was the classic introduction to Will Smith’s greatest acting feat, the great American sit-com, Fresh Prince of Bel Air. This work portrays the life of a young man who finds himself outside of his first “habitus” and must learn to adapt and live in an entirely different socio-economic situation, while still managing to maintain his incredibly high social and cultural capital. He manages to be extremely individual in this new environment, but Bourdieu’s work would suggest that he is really taking everything and everyone who had formed him in his early life (his first Philadelphia family) and integrating that into his new family and social structure. We think the introduction to Fresh Prince can illustrate some of Bourdieu’s ideas about society.
Now, this is a story all about how
My life got flipped-turned upside down
And I liked to take a minute
Just sit right there
I'll tell you how I became the prince of a town called Bel Air[1]
In west Philadelphia born and raised
On the playground is where I spent most of my days
Chillin' out maxin' relaxin' all cool
And all shootin some b-ball outside of the school
When a couple of guys
Who were up to no good[2]
Startin making trouble in my neighborhood
I got in one little fight and my mom got scared
She said 'You're movin' with your auntie and uncle in Bel Air'[3]
I begged and pleaded with her day after day
But she packed my suite case and send me on my way
She gave me a kiss and then she gave me my ticket.
I put my walkman on and said, 'I might as well kick it'.
First class, yo this is bad
Drinking orange juice out of a champagne glass.
Is this what the people of Bel-Air Living like?
Hmmmmm this might be alright.
I whistled for a cab and when it came near
The license plate said fresh and it had dice in the mirror
If anything I can say this cab is rare
But I thought 'Now forget it' - 'Yo homes to Bel Air'[4]
I pulled up to the house about 7 or 8
And I yelled to the cabbie 'Yo homes smell ya later'[5]
I looked at my kingdom
I was finally there
To sit on my throne as the Prince of Bel Air[6]
While we love Fresh Prince, we believe that Bourdieu would find the sit-com itself impossible. Will’s character would have certainly changed his lifestyle and personality. He would likely start wearing sweater vests and khakis and not refer to the butler or cab-driver as “Homes”, but rather see them purely has “the help”. He would have made these changes because Bourdieu says that the dominate culture, while they appreciated the deviance of Will’s character, would not have allowed him to gain any more social capital within their structure. This is actually shown in the fact that most of those that Will socializes with do not change their own sweater-vest-wearing ways.
[1]Will is going to Bel Air and is going to be accepted to a degree for his social capital (he is both radically different and equally endearing), but other areas of his symbolic capital (economic and cultural primarily) are going to be a more difficult adjustment for him. “Symbolic capital is any property (any form of capital whether physical, economic, cultural or social) when it is perceived by social agents endowed with categories of perception which cause them to know it and to recognize it, to give it value.” (47)
[2]Even though Will shared this space with these guys “who were up to no good”, there was a difference in their social categories. Their gold chains suggest that because of their social, economic and cultural capital, they had created their own sense of domination, which Bourdieu defines as, “the indirect effect of a complex set of actions engendered within the network of intersecting constraints which each of the dominants, thus dominated by the structure of the field through which domination is exerted, endures on behalf of all the others” (34).
[3]His mom might use the excuse of violence in his neighborhood to send him to his Aunt and Uncle in Bel-Air, she might even believe that that is the reason she is sending him away (to avoid violence). In reality, the fact that his aunt and uncle are of high economic-means, might have more to do with her decision than she realizes. The family, as Bourdieu states, is well-founded, but it’s also driven by economics.
[4]Although Will probably didn’t pick this cab intentionally, he just thought its fuzzy dice and sweet style were appealing to him on a surface level, Bourdieu would likely suggest that this was a product of practical reason (not the intentional choice, but the way in which we can exist in the world so that we can survive). Will creates patterns of choice in his world to make his life easy to live.
[5]Just like our discussion of bell hooks and Stanford, Will wants to be in Bel Air for certain amounts of capital (reputation of the local and social capital), but does not want to wear the sweater vests like his cousin Carlton. He maintains his own cultural capital by wearing wild, neon colors despite the blandness of his new surroundings.
[6]Will has an interesting outlook on his social status as he moves to a completely new place. He probably believes that he can be “prince” or have domination over his social structure because he is accustom to that type of domination in his Philadelphia habitus. His own cultural capital, which was founded in his original habitus, is what keeps him both radically respected in his new social structure, but also equally opposed.
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