Should We Use a Capital Framework to Understand Culture? Applying Cultural Capital to Communities of Color

Abstract

Social science research on communities of color has long been shaped by theories of social and cultural capital. This article is a hermeneutic reading of metaphorical capital frameworks, including community cultural wealth and funds of knowledge. Financial capital, the basis of these frameworks, is premised on unequal exchange. Money only becomes capital when it is not spent, but is instead invested, manipulated, and exploited. Metaphorical capitals have been criticized as imprecise, falsely quantitative, and inequitable. Some research assumes that, rather than reinforcing economic class, metaphorical capital somehow nullifies class or replaces economic capital. Yet marginalized students, by definition, have been excluded by dominant culture. Compared to low socioeconomic status (SES) students of color, high SES students have a wealth of capital, in all forms. Metaphorical capital conjures the economic worldview of capitalism, imposing a capitalist, market-based worldview. Frameworks of metaphorical capital use neoliberal vocabulary, arguably endorsing capitalism's hegemony. The supposed metaphorical capital is not capital at all; by presenting it as capital, researchers’ goals become inconsistent with their own theoretical frameworks. There may be better ways to theorize culture. This article concludes by proposing four frameworks—possibilities that interpret culture without relying on capital.

Notes

¹My limited review of literature found 48 theories of metaphorical capital. The timeline in Figure 1 includes theories having multiple citations (except 2013–2014, which were not yet cited).

²Some of these studies purport that social capital is a quantity belonging to each individual, rather than the network of interpersonal relationships that Bourdieu (1972) and Coleman (1988) claimed it was (e.g., Karlan, 2005).

³That is, research databases contain thousands of studies that discuss cultural capital, most of which either measure a proxy or cite cultural capital only as background.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kip Austin Hinton

Kip Austin Hinton is an assistant professor of Bilingual, Biliteracy, and Intercultural Studies at the University of Texas at Brownsville. He received his Ph.D. in Cultural Studies in Education from UCLA, and his research interests include educational equity, multiliteracies, borderlands, and race.