Gardening Taste: Theoretical Concepts and Framework - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 39

of perception that recognise its specific logic' (Bourdieu and Waquant 1992, 119).
Symbolic capital is the form that other forms take once they have been recognised
and ordained as consecrated, legitimate forms of culture.
Bourdieu's 'economistic metaphors' (Skeggs 1997, 9) offer a dynamic model of
class based on the acquisition and subsequent distribution of capital endowments
across social space. Individuals are born with historically generated capital assets:
these might, for example, exist in an objectified state as cultural goods or in an
embodied state within the habitus as competencies or dispositions. Agents then
engage in a lifelong trajectory of struggle to sustain or improve their location in the
field by pursuing methods of reconversion, in which one form of capital is traded for
another. To that end, individuals strive to make investments in a bid to accrue forms
of capital with the highest symbolic returns. As Bourdieu argues, he understands,
'all practices, including those purporting to be disinterested or gratuitous, and hence
non-economic, as economic practices directed towards the maximising of material
or symbolic profit' (Bourdieu 1977, 183). The conversion rates between capitals
however, are set to some extent by institutions, for instance the media, the labour
market or the education system; these bodies can work to confer value and power on
types of capital or they can de-legitimate or place a ceiling on its tradeability.
Habitus is the term Bourdieu (1977, 1986) uses to describe the system of
competencies and dispositions which govern the movement of the individual through
social space. Central to his theory of taste and social distinction, he describes it as:
the strategy-generating principle enabling agents to cope with unforeseen and ever-
changing situations … a system of lasting, transposable dispositions which, integrating
past experiences, functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations
and actions and makes possible the achievement of infinitely diversified tasks, thanks to
the analogical transfer of schemes permitting the solution of similarly shaped problems
(Bourdieu 1977, 82-83).
Acquired in childhood, built upon through the education system and within the
context of the family, habitus is primarily determined by one's class position. It is
revealed through the cultural value of the unconscious, yet seemingly naturalised
everyday tastes of the individual's choices of food, fashion and cosmetics, sport,
music, art - and, though Bourdieu is silent on them, garden design and horticultural
preferences. It is also actually lived out through bodily social practice: one's gestures,
facial expression, accent and speech patterns, the amount of space one feels one has
the right to absorb in social encounters - all these physical encounters reveal one's
habitus (Bourdieu 1986, 190). Habitus is embodied: indeed some have argued that his
theory of habitus emphasises the 'corporeal sedimentation' of social practice (Lovell
2000, 14). Bourdieu's account of the construction of subjectivity through habitus
is deeply engrained, so rigidly is it bound to the social processes through which
it is formed. Throughout life in the cultural field individuals use the 'transposable
dispositions' of habitus in their everyday encounters; the commonplace familiarity
with one's cultural milieu creates a seemingly 'natural' context for existence, or
what Bourdieu calls a 'doxa' (Bourdieu 1977, 164; 1986, 471). It is one's habitus
which enables agents to make consumer choices which in the wider culture are
subject to classifications. For example, those with a bourgeoisie habitus would be