Paper short abstract:

This paper considers whether or not Bourdieu's work on taste and distinction might be applied and developed in the context of diaspora or whether, despite his claims to thinking multi-dimensionally, it is in fact too static and bounded a theoretical model to deal with people's movements across time and space.

Paper long abstract:

Bourdieu's notions of social and cultural capital have been used to think through some of the issues involved in the complex movements of people and their social projects and relationships. However, there has been no systematic attempt to critically assess Bourdieu's complex model of Distinction (1984) in relation to the aesthetics of diaspora. Bourdieu's model provides a multi-dimensional and processual account of social struggles and reproduction that takes seriously the role of taste and aesthetics. At the same time that model relies on the static fiction of a national cultural space. In fact, the application of Bourdieu's ideas in migration and diaspora studies have tended to focus on processes within particular ethnic groups that paradoxically reproduces the idea of a bounded social space. The question is whether or not Bourdieu's model can be reconceptualised in a way that does not depend on a delimitation of a social space in ethnic or national terms, and more particularly whether or not we can usefully speak of a translocal field of distinction. I argue that at the very least thinking through the limitations and possibilities of a translocal field of distinction encourage anthropologists and other social scientists to think about the aesthetics of diaspora in ways that treat ethnicity not as necessary starting or end point of cultural practice but as one among a variety of ways that differently positioned social agents struggle for and contest the terms of symbolic capital or social legitimacy.