 Cultural capital is a theory developed by French theorist Pierre Bourdieu and is the cultural knowledge that serves as currency that helps us navigate culture and alters our experiences and the opportunities available to us. While cultural capital can be material objects such as clothing or a car you drive, Bourdieu also focused on the symbolic elements that embodied cultural capital such as tastes, manners, skills and credentials that one receives or earns. Cultural capital really isn't about economics or how much money you have but it can be exchange for money and the crazy thing is this money can help you earn more cultural capital. According to Bourdieu, cultural capital can be a source of social inequality too. It is hard for those who are poor or who are part of the working class to gain the types of cultural capital that are valued in society. For example, having an education and earning a degree is a very important piece of cultural capital. Let's say a student in poverty has difficulty finding time to study because he works evenings to help support his low income family. This leads to poor performance due to his lack of studying which results in lower test scores and then being placed in lower ability classes which in turn affects his GPA and what college he is able to get into if he goes to college at all. In the United States, if you are in a lower social class such as the student in our example, you tend to have less cultural capital. The upper middle social classes have more cultural capital and therefore their social class views tend to dominate in culture. Society also tends to get the more prestige. Cultural capital takes on three forms, the embodied state, the objectified state and the institutionalized state. The embodied state refers to capital in the form of knowledge that resides within us. While capital in the form of formal schooling is part of the embodied state, this type of capital also refers to knowledge that we seek out on our own. One of the earliest forms of capital in the embodied state is that which we acquire through language. When formal education and culture expect you to not only be able to know your ABCs but to write or recognize words before entering kindergarten, it has become important to be exposed to such things as books at home and to be read to. In our earlier example, the student who cannot study because he works to help support his low income family may also not have had books in the home or was not read too early in life and therefore lacked capital. Next, cultural capital in the objectified state refers to material objects that we use to indicate our social class or how much capital we have. This might be the easiest state for us to recognize since we focus a great deal on acquiring things and we often tend to assign social class based on a person possessing certain material items. For example, a person owning a Mercedes or a Lexus indicates greater capital than a person owning a Ford Focus. In today's technological world, we can express our capital through buying only Apple products as they tend to carry a certain amount of prestige and are an expression of our identity. Even the type of food such as a person buying only expensive organic food because they have the means to afford it or boxed dinners because they are inexpensive and they must do so out of necessity indicates an abundance or lack of cultural capital in the objectified state. Last, the institutionalized state refers to the way that society measures cultural capital. One of the best examples we have is the type of post-secondary degree that we have and how society tends to view our value us based on that degree. A doctor degree has more social capital than a master's degree and a master's degree has more capital than an undergraduate degree. We can say that each degree gives a person more prestige than the next. This capital and prestige can then be exchanged for actual economic capital and it is evident that the higher the degree, the more money you can expect to make it your lifetime. Unfortunately, the institutionalized state values formal education and rewards it accordingly but often places a lesser emphasis on capital that is not considered prestigious such as being streetwise. Essentially, if you are born into a family with cultural capital, it is easier for you to acquire more because you are socialized to embody the values and behavior society rewards. For example, if a student is part of a family where they were read to every night and they were taught manners such as being polite and to listen to adults, this will benefit them when they go to school. A student who can read and write and who is also respectful may earn opportunities such as being placed in advanced classes or receive higher grades. This then gives them more opportunities later on such as being accepted into a prestigious college and then that college then connects them with a strong network of people and companies they can work for when they graduate. This is not the same with people who are either born into or grow up with less cultural capital. So, what is one well-known public figure that you can think of that has significant cultural capital? How can you demonstrate that they have that capital? Other than education, what ways does society reward or punish people based on their having or lacking cultural capital? And how has cultural capital changed over time? What is one example of a type of capital that is no longer valued as it was in the past? And what is one new type of cultural capital in our society?