Antipodean fields

The antipodes

The antipodes, as we have seen, is one of those slippery terms whose meaning rests heavily on the context in which it is utilised. Used in Australia and New Zealand as a term to indicate a geographical (or perhaps geocultural) region, it derives from a more general evocation of an opposition, with specific intellectual (as in the journal Antipode) and scientific uses. However, being antipodean is not simply about being the opposite to a European homeland, or being on the opposite side of the world; it is also the restlessly subordinate entity in that relationship.

The key place to start to unpack this is the Antipodean Manifesto, written by Bernard Smith in 1959 in collaboration with a number of Australian artists such as Arthur Boyd, Charles Blackman and John Brack (Smith, 1975). It was conceived as a rejection of the trajectory of European modernism – and especially the vogue for abstract painting with its vague internationalist universalism – and an assertion of a particular type of figurative style that spoke to an emerging Australian cultural identity that was distinctive but critical, and not nationalistic (National Gallery of Australia, 1999). As Beilharz (1994: 101) suggests, for Smith, to be antipodean meant to be part of a ‘nether world, Europeans by heritage but not by birth, only partly at ease with the great southern land’. Smith explores issues of isolation, displacement, provincialism and discomfort in an alien land as central to the antipodean experience, yet, as Beilharz (1994: 101–2) goes on to argue:

antipodean does not mean detached, but connected to the European tradition, but from a distance … antipodean adds up to something like this: European, but different; Pacific, in the landscape if not originally of it, yet at home for all that; intruders not in the bush so much as already marked actors who do not simply receive inscribed identities, but also play some part in forming them. Imagining ourselves as actors in the antipodes thus implies working with the sense that identity might in some ways be circumscribed by birth or tradition, but it is also essentially unfixed or shifting, always between there and here, between yesterday and tomorrow.

Beilharz is claiming for Smith a sense of the antipodean as meaning ‘(t)o be other, displaced, a reflex of metropolitan culture, and yet part of it, elsewhere’, comprising a mixed identity, a dual vision, a relationality (1997: 97–9); something later theorised in the work of scholars like Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy in their deconstruction of postcoloniality and postmodernity, particularly Gilroy’s account of the ‘black Atlantic’ (Gilroy, 1993).

Yet we are not especially interested in Smith’s work per se here, nor is this special issue focused only on artistic traditions and themes in Australian and New Zealand art (though this is central to some articles). Rather, in thinking about the take-up of Bourdieu in the antipodes it is important to think more broadly about the consequences of the debates Smith sparked and which, in many ways, continue today about the relationship between the ‘new world’ and the old, and many other worlds as well. At the heart of Smith’s writings, both in the Manifesto and later work, is a contemplation not just of the meaning of the antipodean experience, but the very meaning of the nation, especially as it transforms and mutates in the postcolonial world, and the meaning of art and the organisation of the fields of culture more generally: not as media for expressing essentialised identities but as locations for the relational negotiation of social, economic, political and cultural processes. And it is thus fundamentally about the role of ideas and values that emerge in one context and their usefulness in quite a different context.

If Bourdieu is still, in some ways, very much part of an older European intellectual tradition, then the questions Smith poses for us in thinking about the relationship between European ideas and the antipodes are still poignant. Writers such as Connell (2008) have pointed to the need to engage with ‘southern theory’ in order to move away from our reliance on European (and North American) theory, but just as important for us is to think about how the antipodean perspective may require an appropriation of European ideas which improves the stock and complexity of our theoretical and empirical knowledge. Further, we need to ask how an increasingly globalised, transnational world changes the coordinates and vectors of that relationship.

Beilharz rightly draws our attention to the fact that Smith was well aware of the larger global picture by which the antipodean experience is framed; he points to changing patterns of geographic and social mobility (1994: 102) and to the altered relations within the ‘global system’ which had shifted Australia’s traditional subordination to the UK to a subordination to the US (1997: 101). Yet this theme is not sufficiently developed in Smith; Australia and New Zealand are migrant/settler nations, constituted not just by people moving here from the UK and their relationship with Indigenous peoples, but by much wider and more complicated patterns of movement, especially but not exclusively since the Second World War. Those patterns have been accelerated and transformed by growing forces of globalisation in more recent decades, but also by more complex relations of transnationalism and regionalism. These processes require us to ask whether cultural fields are still – if they ever were – nationally specific, as Bennett, Bustamante and Frow enquire. We might imagine there is still a central connection between here and there (England, the UK, Europe), but Australia and New Zealand are now much more firmly locked into regional relations with China, Korea, India and other parts of East and South Asia, and with the smaller island nations of the Pacific. These relations cannot but dislodge the antipodean orientation of two centuries, of a gaze directed longingly towards Europe. Against a dominant tradition of methodological nationalism, but without necessarily abandoning the influence of the nation-state, Kenway and Koh’s article in this issue works tangentially off this new kind of relation with a closer, but more culturally removed entity, and within the context of the need for global ethnographies.

Culture, of course, ‘does not map neatly onto geography’; it ‘works through cultural traffic’ and therefore emerges not from place but as the negotiation of the entangled relations between places, peoples and cultures (Beilharz, 2009). At the same time as looking outwards to ever more complex forms of such global entanglement, the analysis of cultural fields needs to recognise the greater complexity and differentiation within the nation-state, and how this plays out in cultural production and consumption, as Khan recognises in her article, and indeed, as Morris examines, plays out in the very struggle over what a national culture might be. We need to look, however, at how the analysis of cultural fields and, within these, of practices of cultural consumption, have been re-shaped by recent engagements with Bourdieu in other parts of the world, and to see how, in turn, such analysis has been affected by revisions or refinements of other aspects of Bourdieu’s conceptual apparatus.

Working with Bourdieu around the world

Particularly since the late 1980s, when his work, or rather his name, began being mentioned alongside Foucault, Derrida and others as a variant of ‘French Theory’, Bourdieu engaged in a serious effort to differentiate himself from such thinkers by highlighting to his readers and to his students that he was not primarily a theorist but a social scientist, someone who engages in sociological research, and whose concepts are tools to be used by other researchers rather than truth pronouncements (see Hage, 1994). The difference is sometimes less obvious than it seems, and it is unlikely that Foucault or Derrida did not see their own concepts as tools as well, or that they somehow disliked seeing their concepts used in research, and preferred to see the flourishing of derivative works that consisted in an endless recycling of key venerated quotations selected from their writings. Furthermore, many recent works have convincingly argued that, rather than opposing social research to philosophy and theory, Bourdieu saw empirical research as an alternative, and a better, way of doing both (Lescourret, 2009). This became especially apparent with the publication of Pascalian Meditations (Bourdieu, 2000).

Nonetheless, the idea that Bourdieu’s work, when compared to that of other French thinkers, is particularly there to be used has stuck. One can, as we suggested earlier, confidently say that the great majority of articles and books either ‘about’ or ‘inspired by’ Bourdieu’s approach involve either reflecting on his work and analytical categories as tools of empirical analysis, or deploying and critically transforming these categories in the process of particular empirical research.

In terms of recent works that take Bourdieu’s work specifically as their subject, the most orthodox have predictably been by Bourdieu’s old colleagues in the Centre de Sociologie Européenne and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Of particular importance in showing levels of complexity in Bourdieu’s thought that are often ignored by others are Bourdieu. Théoricien de la pratique (de Fornel and Ogien, 2011) and Lectures de Bourdieu (Lebaron and Mauger, 2012). There is also an updated version of Champagne and Christin’s Bourdieu: Une initiation (2012). In English, Simon Susen and Bryan Turner’s collection, The Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu: Critical Essays (2011) offers, as the title implies, a more critical approach, and is important in connecting Bourdieu’s thought to other thinkers before him. Also of interest in terms of reflecting explicitly on Bourdieu’s categories as sociological tools is Quantifying Theory: Pierre Bourdieu (Robson and Sanders, 2010), where each of the essays attempts to use, and critically and empirically test some element of Bourdieu’s paradigm.

On the whole, the ‘ethos of usage’ has made Bourdieu’s analytical categories less conducive to mere veneration and more open to be found wanting in one way or another, and in need of being complexified or hybridised with the work of other thinkers. This is so especially as the space for applying Bourdieu’s work has been widening both in terms of disciplines and research objects, coming to encompass works on literature (Martin, 2010), on cognitive psychology (Lizardo, 2004, 2009, 2011, 2012) and even on international relations (Adler-Niessen, 2013). An important body of work that engages directly with Bourdieu has similarly emerged in American historical sociology. The latter follows from the early work of MacHardy on families in Habsburg Austria (1999), and has been recently spearheaded by George Steinmetz’s original work on German colonialism, The Devil’s Handwriting, in which Bourdieu takes an analytical pride of place to be nonetheless hybridised with postcolonial and psychoanalytic theory (Steinmetz, 2007). Philip Gorski’s Bourdieu and Historical Analysis (2013) gives a good overview of the scope of the new literature. Of particular interest in this developing field is the reconsideration of the common idea that Bourdieu can only be useful for the study of historical reproduction rather than historical change.

Another important literature has emerged from the engagement of economic sociologists with Bourdieu’s work. In France this has been almost single-handedly brought about through the excellent effort of Bourdieu’s former student Frederic Lebaron, who makes extensive usage of the notions of field (1997) and belief (2000) to examine the practices of French economists. In the United States, Loïc Wacquant’s work on neoliberalism, the underclass and the criminalisation of poverty can be seen as part of that space (Wacquant, 2009). Concomitant with the rise of the ‘new economic sociology’ is a trend of applying Bourdieu’s concepts to what are otherwise considered strictly economic domains. Among those advocating this application, Richard Swedberg (2007) has been the most forthright. The concept of ‘field’ is omnipresent in those studies and has been critically reworked by many. Fligstein and McAdam’s A Theory of Fields (2012) is exemplary in this regard. Building on Bourdieu’s concept, the authors see themselves as complexifying it, by providing it with an inter-subjective micro-foundation while also making it more capable of accounting for collective action. Their actors, contra Bourdieu’s, are not only ‘responsible to themselves and motivated by a desire to advance their own interests’, but also ‘seek cooperation with others by taking the role of the other and framing lines of action that appeal to others in the field’; this approach ‘views both competition and cooperation as fundamental to field analysis’ (2012: 26). Outside economic sociology, a similar critique can be found in Michelle Lamont’s recent work, in which she seeks to determine what distinguishes judgements of ‘“excellent” and “promising” research from less stellar work’ (2009: 20) by investigating the interpersonal and interdisciplinary negotiation undertaken in committees for fellowship and grant application approval. She proposes that, for Bourdieu, such a negotiation is reduced to self-interested competition, a position which, she argues, fails to take account of the respects in which ‘actors are motivated by not only the opportunity to maximize their position, but also their pragmatic involvement in collective problem solving’ (2009: 20).

Notwithstanding these developments, a large part of the engagement with Bourdieu is still concerned with ‘classically Bourdieusian’ domains such as the sociology of education and the sociology of taste and cultural lifestyles. The latter, in particular, remains the most important site of Bourdieu-inspired scholarship around the world. Here one notes another complexification of Bourdieu’s categories that has become particularly influential; the work of Bernard Lahire and his re-working/critique of the concept of habitus. Lahire (2003, 2011) has been most vocal about what he sees as the limitations deriving from Bourdieu’s specific cognitive-psychological origins: ‘By universalizing the findings of a state (not completely outdated, that goes without saying) of contemporary psychology (that of Piaget), psychological concepts are imported into sociology in a reified manner, undiscussed and unchanged for two decades’ (2011: 196). Lahire objects especially to Bourdieu’s presupposition that the dispositions comprising the habitus are systematically interconnected. Rather, Lahire’s work – still mobilising a broad Bourdieusian paradigm – tries to show that, in fact, humans are ‘plural’ and, furthermore, that their cultural activities do not obey the kind of differential class logic advocated by Bourdieu (1984: 90). Several others have picked up on this point (Bennett, 2007; Frère, 2011).

It can also be said that this preoccupation with a critical re-working of questions of culture and class is nonetheless more prevalent in the UK than it is in the United States or France. Here, the work of Tony Bennett, Mike Savage, Elizabeth Silva, Alan Warde. Modesto Gayo-Cal and David Wright on culture, class and distinction in Britain (Bennett et al., 2009) remains the most empirically and theoretically ambitious critical engagement with Bourdieu’s conceptualisation of the relation between culture and class in Distinction. More recently, Silva and Warde (2010) have edited a broader collection that gives a good sense of the scope of the scholarship in the field. It also classifies various scholars according to the degree to which they are seen to be ‘defenders’ or ‘repudiators’ of Bourdieu. We should also note here, though, that the domains which highlight questions of ‘class’ and ‘cultural capital’ have been more prevalent in sociologically oriented works. Anthropologically oriented works have tended to be more interested in the phenomenological dimensions of Bourdieu’s writings (see Throop and Murphy, 2002; see also Hage, 2013). There is also, in anthropology, a more substantive interest in his Algerian work. Bourdieu’s earliest writings on Algeria were edited and republished in 2008 by his colleague Tassadit Yacine under the title Esquisses algériennes (Bourdieu, 2008). About the same time, a collection entitled Bourdieu in Algeria, edited by the anthropologists Jane Goodman and Paul Silverstein (2009), turned a particularly critical gaze onto Bourdieu’s early fieldwork, which it had until then escaped.

Bourdieu ‘downunder’

The uptake of Bourdieu’s work in Australia has not only, as we have noted, been surprisingly slow and partial, its disciplinary orientations have also been distinctive. The areas in which it has had most resonance have not been his own disciplines of sociology and anthropology, but rather those of education and cultural studies; even here, it is only in recent years that his work has had more than a sporadic impact. Moreover, Bourdieu’s work has not counted as part of the mainstream in any of the areas in which his work has been taken up.

The reasons for this might have to do in part with the lack of interest displayed by Australian cultural studies in the kind of empirical research that Bourdieu characteristically undertakes, and, conversely, by the hostility of Australian sociology to the philosophically dense theoretical frameworks that Bourdieu constructs to ground and to make sense of his empirical data. Together these disciplines form the axes of a field defined by the polarity of the social sciences and the humanities, with a particular point of intensity at their intersection, and this field-specific conflict has led to a particular distortion in the reception of Bourdieu (one that is more generally characteristic of the English-speaking world). Ghassan Hage – perhaps the only Australian anthropologist to have made extensive use of Bourdieu’s work – has emphasised the extent to which, outside of France, there has been a radical neglect of the empirical dimension of Bourdieu’s oeuvre and of the methodological innovations that have accompanied his constant theoretical reflection on the practice of the sociologist (Hage, 1994). What has survived in translation has been a handful of concepts – habitus, field, cultural capital and so on – which have suffered by being detached from their theoretical and practical context.

In an important article, Woodward and Emmison have investigated Bourdieu’s problematic reception in Australia, from ‘an initial weak and patchy uptake’ to ‘an eventual realisation of his significance’ (2009: 1). Their article maps two distinct routes by which his work enters Australia: one through sociology, the other through cultural studies. On the face of it, the relative neglect of Bourdieu by Australian sociology is surprising, given ‘its long standing interest in matters such as social stratification, class and inequality, and social disadvantage – all areas in which Bourdieu’s influence has been productively felt in many other countries’ (2009: 3). Part of the explanation, they argue, lies in the bifurcation of stratification research into a historically oriented Marxist tradition represented by Bob Connell and others on the left (Connell, 1977, 1983; Connell and Irving, 1980), and a quantitative tradition making use of broadly based surveys and statistical methodologies at the expense of theoretical reflection (Broom et al., 1980; Graetz and McAllister, 1988; Jones, 1986). A third tradition, which developed in the late 1980s and was associated with Erik Olin Wright’s comparative international project on class analysis (cf. Baxter et al., 1991) drew both on Wright’s quantitative Marxist model and on the neo-Weberian work of the UK sociologist John Goldthorpe, and it left little scope for Bourdieu’s theoretical concerns. The final section of Woodward and Emmison’s article undertakes a content analysis both of references to and of the significant absence of references to Bourdieu’s work in the sole national sociological journal, the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology, which was founded in 1965 and relaunched after 1997 as the Australian-based, internationally published Journal of Sociology. What is most interesting about this analysis is the extent to which it makes salient Bourdieu’s invisibility in places – education theory, class analysis, the sociology of culture – where he might have been expected to figure prominently. The journal did publish an extended discussion of Bourdieu by Bourdieu’s sometime collaborator Loïc Wacquant in 1987, although the authors speculate that it might have been rejected elsewhere (Wacquant, 1987). It is only in the mid 1990s, however, that significant uses of Bourdieu’s work start to become more prevalent, at the same time as citation of or engagement with it by Australian researchers proliferate across a range of research fields in other, non-sociological journals.

The most sustained engagement with Bourdieu’s work in Australia took place in the Australian Everyday Cultures project, which ran from the early 1990s through to the publication in 1999 of Accounting for Tastes: Australian Everyday Cultures (Bennett et al., 1999). The project, which made critical but respectful use of Bourdieu’s analysis in Distinction (Bourdieu, 1984) of the role played in social stratification by cultural tastes, brought together a cultural theorist, a sociologist, and a literary scholar, all of whom worked at the boundary between the humanities and the social sciences. The project was built around a large survey (N = 2756) covering a wide range of cultural practices and preferences, ranging from taste in housing, furniture and cars to sport, food, gambling, holidays, the choice of children’s schools, and practices and preferences in reading, in film and television, and in music. Critical of the contradictory class models used by Bourdieu, it sought to develop an alternative model, drawing both on Wright’s Marxist schema and Goldthorpe’s Weberian model of social status, and it sought to validate this model empirically in such a way as to incorporate the analysis of cultural practices and preferences into the structure of social class itself.

The Australian Everyday Cultures project was in part intended as a provocation to the discipline of cultural studies, with which both Bennett and Frow were associated and which they felt was impoverished by its lack of interest in empirical research and statistical methodologies. (For a genealogy of Australian cultural studies and an account of its institutional underpinnings, see Frow, 2007). With this exception, however (and that of several articles in this issue), Bourdieu’s work has had little influence on antipodean cultural studies or on the related fields of cultural policy studies and creative industries studies. Webb et al. (2002) is a good introductory textbook by Australian cultural studies scholars, but operates solely at a theoretical level. It is perhaps in another closely related field, that of museum studies, that Bourdieu’s influence can most clearly be detected; in addition to Bennett (1995) we can cite the work of the New Zealand scholar Conal McCarthy (2007).

Bourdieu’s work has had a limited but significant influence on two other disciplines in Australia and New Zealand. In anthropology, Ghassan Hage’s work on racism, nationalism and multiculturalism has consistently applied Bourdieusian principles to the detailed ethnography of complex societies (Hage, 2000, 2003, 2005). And in education, the work of Bob Lingard on education policy (Lingard, 2010; MacClennan and Lingard, 1983; Rawolle and Lingard, 2008), Kevin Marjoribanks (2002) and Roy Nash (1999, 2002) on educational practice and Allan Luke on critical literacy (2000; Albright and Luke, 2008) have contributed importantly to applying Bourdieu’s work on reproduction and symbolic violence to the study of pedagogic systems, while the work of Greg Noble and his collaborators (Noble, 2005; Noble and Watkins, 2003) has explored central concepts in the work of Bourdieu as part of an analysis of multiculturalism and the schooling system. In literary studies, the work of Ken Gelder (e.g. 2010), David Carter (e.g. 2009, 2010) and Katherine Bode (2012) has fruitfully taken up Bourdieu’s work to explore the field of publishing and, more generally, of Australian intellectual life. In the visual arts, Bourdieu’s influence has been somewhat less than it might have been given the key role played by Bernard Smith’s work in providing a rallying point for a significant tradition of Australian art theory that has broadened the scope of the traditional art-historical disciplines. Bourdieu has, however, informed critical approaches to the role of Australian art institutions and arts policy apparatuses (Hawkins, 1993; Rowse, 1985; Sanders, 2010), sometimes alongside Howard Becker’s art worlds approach (Van den Bosch, 2005). His work has perhaps most distinctively informed analyses of the tensions within different forms of Aboriginal art practice, between its ‘traditional’ and ‘contemporary’ forms, and between these and the national and international art fields (Fisher, 2012; Myers, 2002).

Antipodean fields

In what ways, then, do the articles in this issue extend the forms of engagement with Bourdieu’s work on the part of Australian and New Zealand scholars? In what ways do they suggest that antipodean fields possess distinctive qualities whose analysis might require significant revisions of Bourdieu’s categories? And in what respects can they be engaged with in ways that either confirm the salience of those categories or require only minor adjustments?

The issue opens with a set of articles engaging with what is perhaps the most sharply distinguishing property of antipodean fields; the increasing presence of Indigenous culture within different cultural fields and, indeed, the development of connections between Indigenous cultural practices across these fields to an extent which suggests the emergence of autonomous Indigenous cultural fields with their own properties, agents and regimes of value that traverse, and trouble, mainstream fields in a number of ways.

Fred Myers draws on the work of Anna Tsing to probe the varied ‘frictions’ between Aboriginal, national and international regimes of value that have accompanied the late 20th and early 21st century canonisation of acrylic dot painting produced by its circulation through a new set of relations of sale, exhibition and commissioning at the junction of the national and international – particularly American – art fields. While Myers draws on Bourdieu in his earlier discussions of the national and international migrations of Papunya painting (Myers, 2002), he is more concerned here to assess the limitations of Bourdieu’s interpretation and analysis of cultural fields. There are two main aspects to his argument. The first revolves around the limitations of a purely national conception of cultural fields, given clear evidence of the degree to which the transnational reception of Papunya art has so profoundly altered its position within Australian aesthetic hierarchies. Second, Myers also contends that Papunya art challenges those hierarchies. Arguing that taking the art out of the bush does not take the bush out of the art, he shows how Papunya paintings operate simultaneously in two quite different registers: although they have come to be perceived within a framework of comparability with other ‘art’, they are also the carriers of another regime of value that stands outside of and, precisely through its lack of engagement with them, challenges conventional artistic hierarchies. As a practice that cannot be narrated within the terms of Bourdieu’s essentially modernist account of the historical dynamics of Western art fields, the forms of ‘bush capital’ that inform Aboriginal regimes of value remain to one side of such fields, a point of alterity that critiques them from without.

McCarthy shares a similar set of concerns when he asks: ‘Do the “rules of art” apply to the recent success of Māori art or do Māori artists play by their own rules?’ However, he approaches them from a different angle, one which confirms the importance of, while also qualifying, Bourdieu’s assessment of the significance of the ‘pure gaze’ of the modernist art gallery. Tracing the processes, similar to those in Australia, but with a longer history, through which Māori art – both traditional and modern – has come to be accorded significance within New Zealand’s museums and art institutions, McCarthy is more concerned with the tensions this has generated on the part of museum and art gallery visitors. The central tension he is concerned with is that between Māori reactions to such processes and the reactions of the (mainly) middle-class Pakeha consumers of Māori art. The evidence on which he draws shows a significant increase in Māori participation in such key institutions as Te Papa, particularly when Māori artefacts are exhibited in testimony to the value of Māori worlds, but with a distancing from those exhibition formats which aestheticise and consecrate Māori culture as art. For most Pakeha visitors, the reverse is true, testifying to the ways in which the ‘rules of art’ operate across the complex intersections of the bi-cultural and class divisions of contemporary New Zealand society.

Chris Haynes is also concerned with the relations between different forms of cultural capital articulated across the relations between white and Aboriginal Australia. He explores these questions through the tensions that are produced when white Australian and Aboriginal knowledge practices are brought together in the management of a cultural facility. Drawing on his own experience as park manager in Kakadu National Park, and on his subsequent research into similar co-management programs, Haynes examines some of the key points of contradiction and disagreement between the Park’s traditional Aboriginal owners and the procedures of the state’s hierarchically ordered bureaucracy that erupted during the early years of the Park’s management. Resisting any simple bi-polar opposition – many officers within the state’s bureaucracy were also traditional Aboriginal owners – Haynes argues that the potential for such dissension is a constitutive property of joint management as simultaneously a single field, produced by legislative instruments and administrative protocols, and two separate fields arising from the different habitus and capitals which that field yokes together.Carolyn Morris’s article, ‘Kai or Kiwi? Māori and “Kiwi” Cookbooks, and the Struggle for the Field of New Zealand Cuisine’, addresses the field of New Zealand cuisine and its relation to the field of national power. Her starting point is the almost-simultaneous publication of four Māori cookbooks, and her aim is to understand the symbolic significance of these publications insofar as they partake in the Māori-Pakeha struggle for symbolic dominance within the national field. Morris traces the history of the classification of Māori food within the nation, from being totally devalorised to being valorised as a type of community food. Through a detailed analysis of the content of the cookbooks that are of concern to her, the way they have been published and marketed and the way their authors are portrayed, Morris shows how these cookbooks no longer constitute a mere attempt at highlighting the existence of Māori food but an attempt at defining the very field of national cuisine and what constitutes national capital. As she argues, the field of cookbooks might seem trivial, but, in fact, ‘the ability to codify your food as the national cuisine may also signal the ability to make yourself the national subject, and in turn make the nation yours’.

A central issue in Bourdieu’s work has been the relationship between social institutions, cultural fields and relations of power. While Distinction foregrounded the role of class and education in relation to cultural taste and politics, Bourdieu has grappled with other dimensions of power and inequality, such as gender and race/ethnicity, in works such as Masculine Domination (2001) and The Weight of the World (1999). A number of articles in this volume take up these different aspects in the Australian context; particularly significant because dominant accounts of Australia’s national identity rest both on a myth of egalitarianism and a masculine ethos of mateship (White, 1981).

Tony Bennett, Mauricio Bustamante and John Frow, in their article on Australian space of lifestyles, begin by asking; to what extent are cultural fields in a globalised world nationally specific? Framed by the very specific national focus of Bourdieu’s original work for Distinction, and by a number of nation-based studies following Bourdieu, their discussion of two large Australian and British data sets displays a number of significant comparisons in taste and cultural participation between the two national contexts. Drawing upon a multi-correspondence analysis of these data sets, they find significant similarities and contrasts relating to divisions of class, education and gender, and to the peculiarities of distinct fields, particularly the music, literary and media fields, between the Australian and British spaces of lifestyles. In cautioning the limitations of cross-cultural comparisons, the article also foregrounds pressing methodological issues involved in comparing data sets on different national cultural practices.

Pini and Previtte explore key aspects of the relation between class and culture through an analysis of the ‘cashed-up Bogan’, an emergent fraction of the working class which is at once relatively economically affluent and poor in cultural capital. Responding to the suggestion by Bev Skeggs that Bourdieusian class analysis is less applicable in a place like Australia than in England, they argue that Bourdieu’s concepts can and should be applied in a more complex and dynamic way than hitherto deployed. They therefore draw out some of the implications for our understanding of class structures not just in Australia but elsewhere. They explore the way an analysis of cashed-up Bogans – and their representation – points to an understanding of the struggles not just over the ‘old’ forms of cultural capital that Bourdieu focuses on, but newer forms they identify as spiritual and environmental capital, which are key to emerging social hierarchies, cultural resources and systems of taste.

Educational systems have always been central to Bourdieu’s analysis of processes of social reproduction, but typically framed by a methodological nationalism. Jane Kenway and Aaron Koh use a case study of an elite Singaporean school with close connections to the Australian schooling system in order to think critically about Bourdieu’s analysis of the ‘aristocracy of credentials’. As part of a larger project on elite schools, they ask whether Bourdieu’s conceptual model travels well in an increasingly globalised and transnational world. Drawing on some of Bourdieu’s less well-known ideas articulated in The State Nobility (1998 [1989]), they explore how this particular elite school carefully grooms the future state nobility for Singapore’s field of power partly through the development of students’ transnational capitals. Yet they also demonstrate the limits of a Bourdieusian approach, pointing towards the ways in which his framework can be critiqued and extended. Such a focus also asks us to modify the long-standing perception of what constitutes the ‘antipodes’.

While class and education have played key roles in Bourdieu’s research, gender has been a much less prominent theme, despite his foray into this area in Masculine Domination (2001). Huppatz and Goodwin bring together feminist research that reworks Bourdieu by appropriating his notion of ‘capital’ to explore the role of gender in enforcing occupational segregation and in its intersection with social class. They argue that capitals are not just gendered, but that there is something they call ‘gender capital’ at play in workplace and industry organisation. They suggest that male, masculine and feminine embodiments operate as capitals which can be accumulated and transacted, reproducing both horizontal and vertical gender segregation in the workforce and occupational structures.

Scott Brook also draws on an innovative approach to Bourdieu to explore the phenomenon of the ‘creative class’ in contemporary economic systems. He shows how, by deploying Bourdieu’s notion of social inertia to analyse the trajectory of those aspiring to succeed in the creative field, one can end up with a significantly different profile of ‘the creative class’ to that currently imagined by policy and commentators. From the standpoint of cultural sociology, economists’ attempts to explain the motivations of creative workers have been unsatisfactory, oscillating between versions of rational actor theory and Romantic notions of the intrinsic rewards of creativity. Brook suggests that the notion of social inertia – or the delay in the process of converting educational capital into careers – provides creative labour research with a productive framework for understanding the social trajectories of these workers. Drawing on a survey of student demand for creative writing courses in universities, he argues that the cultural field may appear as an attractive option for those confronted with a delay in redeeming their investments in higher education. Provocatively, Brook’s account returns the concepts of vocation and social status to the centre of an explanatory framework.The focus of Peter Howland’s article on wine connoisseurship examines the performance of wine appreciation in the New Zealand ‘boutique wine village’ of Martinborough, where the tourist experience of the local vineyards is doubled by the display and reinforcement of social and cultural capital on the part of visitors, who are classified in that very process of display. While these tourists are self-consciously not elitist, their experience is structured by an ‘open’ hierarchy of taste which retains the mechanisms and effects of elite distinction. Their practice of personal autonomy thus reaffirms a model of reflexive individuality that meshes directly both with the hierarchies of connoisseurship and with the profit motives of the industry.

As we have noted, a key aspect of the critical engagement with Bourdieu’s work in Australia has been the extent to which his key categories and empirical procedures stand in need of revision if they are to engage adequately with the socio-cultural dynamics of societies with significant multicultural populations. Greg Noble’s ‘It Is Home but It Is Not Home’ begins with the description of a Lebanese-Australian intellectual speaking to a mixed Lebanese- and Anglo-Australian audience. Noble takes as his analytic starting point the difference he registers between the linguistic and bodily awkwardness of the speaker while addressing the Anglo-Australian audience in English and the transformation of his body into a body far more at ease with itself when speaking in Arabic. Through an interview-based reconstruction of his migratory and settlement history, Noble questions a notion of migrant habitus that assumes a linear and gradual process of becoming at home in a new country. Instead, he offers a more complex habitus which internalises not only difference but also ‘the difference of difference’, a move which, unlike in Bourdieu, naturalises a lack of complicity between habitus and field rather than the opposite. Noble shows that this also entails a reconsideration of the homogeneity and boundedness of the notion of field itself.

Rimi Khan’s article examines the fields of ‘multicultural’ and ‘community’ arts in relation to a perceived ‘mainstream’. She does so by foregrounding the case study of a young Ethiopian artist, Bekefir, and the organisation that has supported him, Multicultural Arts Victoria (MAV). She situates MAV within the broader history of community-based arts and the emergence of a field of ‘multicultural arts’ as a distinct policy category closely related to the field’s perception by the state as marginal. She then looks more closely at the experience of Bekefir himself to see what multicultural arts organisations such as MAV impart to their participants in the face of such presumed marginality, and how this can be understood in relation to Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital. Khan shows how articulating a critical and relational notion of cultural capital – and one that can accommodate the knowledges and competences that are relevant to the contemporary Australian context – can contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the role such arts organisations have in redefining or contesting the hierarchies of value that inform the art field.

Nick Herd’s review of the Australian literature on the economics of art and culture brings the issue to a close by examining the relations between Bourdieu’s field theory and the concept of the art world in order to make possible a more rigorous account of the art market and the art employment market. Noting some weaknesses in Bourdieu’s theoretical framework, he proposes (following Van Maanen 2010) a synthesis of the concepts of field and art world in order to be able to account more adequately for the field effects of institutions; he then applies this model to the market for ticketed live entertainment events, noting in particular the relations between the major performing arts companies, the service companies that support them, and the role of government in underpinning the commercial activities of both kinds of organisation.

Conclusion

On the basis of the work presented in this issue we would tentatively suggest three areas in which the antipodean uptake of Bourdieu’s sociological framework has modified the focus and at times the conceptual force of his work. The first two have thematic commonalities with European and American reinterpretations, whereas the third is perhaps more distinctively antipodean.

The first and most conventional of these reworkings has to do with the way the structural variables of class, gender and ethnicity are deployed. While in much of Bourdieu’s work – although he modifies this analytic model somewhat in the later books – class positions and class trajectories are conceived in terms of a relatively fixed social hierarchy and a relatively clear distinction between dominant and dominated groups, with power extended homologously across multiple fields, the models of class envisaged in the Australian and New Zealand analyses tend to be somewhat more fluid and to give a greater weight to the possibility of social mobility, as well as to develop a more field-specific account of social power and prestige. Similarly, despite Bourdieu’s late analysis of gender (Bourdieu, 2001), the antipodean work – perhaps simply because it is more recent in time than most of Bourdieu’s oeuvre – tends to engage more fully with questions of gender; and ethnicity is a consistent preoccupation of many of the articles in this issue, whereas, again, this is a theme that emerges only rather late in Bourdieu’s output (cf. in particular Bourdieu et al., 1999).

The second area of divergence is the one that we flagged at the beginning of this introduction; the prominence given here, as in much of the revisionist European and American literature, to questioning the nation-state as the ‘natural’ border of cultural fields. This shift of emphasis has to do in part with the effects of globalisation in rendering the nation a less powerful cultural unit, and in part with the difference between a metropolitan culture, strongly assertive of its homogeneity, and a provincial culture which derives many of its inputs from elsewhere and which defines itself more strongly in terms of difference rather than sameness. That sense of cultural homogeneity which is so strong in a work such as Distinction, but which also, in a different way, informs Bourdieu’s early analyses of Kabyle culture, becomes less sharp, however, in the later work, which deals more directly with a France transformed on the one hand by immigration and on the other by its participation in the European super-state.

The third area of divergence has to do with the thematic salience of Indigeneity in the articles presented here, but more particularly with the way Indigeneity is seen to transform the ‘mainstream’ culture and thereby to challenge many of the conventional ways of thinking about such things as cultural artefacts, cultural markets and the ‘rules of art’. Indigeneity is at the heart of the understanding of the political order in these articles, in a way that would equally be true of other settler societies such as Canada but that, for complex historical reasons, has not taken hold in the United States. Bourdieu’s engagement with Indigenous people takes place through the prism of the ethnographic study of a society other than his own; for the articles in this issue, questions of Indigeneity are at the heart of the study of our own social world.