Indigenous Experience of Cultural Capital through Relationships

Cultural capital is arguably a well-known and used concept in sociology that aims to elaborate on the ways in which people build trust, signal group membership, and exercise boundary control. The way in which cultural capital is defined, analyzed, and used, still very much incorporates a western understanding of how we value culture. In many settler nations, there is a push to incorporate non-western knowledge that seeks to decolonize research methods and analysis. Nowhere is this more apparent than in dialogue with Indigenous Peoples. Incorporating data collected from a three-site study of Indigenous social mobility, this talk seeks to start a conversation around how Indigenous ways of knowing (and relating) can extend and enrich our understanding of Bourdieu’s concept.