Cultural capital in the elite subfield of Swedish highereducation

International audienceThe idea of a strong tie between culture and education, advocated by Bourdieu and hiscolleagues from the 1960s, is in this article explored in detail by investigating culturalcapital in both its embodied state, expressed in tastes and cultural practices amongstudents in the elite subfield of Swedish higher education, and its institutionalised state,through an analysis of the same students’ enrolment patterns. By applying Specific MCA toa questionnaire answered by 1152 students at 20 socially and scholarly selectiveprogrammes we identify three main dimensions in the space of lifestyles. Thefirstdimension separates advanced and legitimate cultural practices and tastes frommainstream ones. In a second dimension, elaborate and often costly body-orientedpractices in training or clothing are distinguished from a more ascetic lifestyle. The thirddimension opposes a pole of establishment from a pole of non-establishment. The studyprogrammes are well dispersed in the space of lifestyles, which suggests a close relationbetween embodied and institutionalised states of cultural capital. Wefinally argue that thepursuit offield-specific capital best explains this dispersion: the future trajectories intospecific regions of thefield of power tend to correspond to distinct lifestyles of variouscategories of elite students.ã 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CCBY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)