Chapter 3: Bourdieu in the Classroom

Bourdieu begins his 1964 publication Les Héritiers with a quotation from Margaret Mead’s Continuities in Cultural Education. In it she describes the practice amongst North American Indians of using visions as a social rite de passage. A vision conferred on the visionary the right to start a business, to hunt and fight in war. In the case of the Omaha Indians, all young men had the potential for visions. They would go out alone into the desert, fast and return to tell stories of the visions they had experienced. The elders of the village would then explain to some of them why theirs were not a real vision. Mead noted that this designation of authenticity acted as a form of social selection: “genuine” visions were most common amongst the sons of the ruling, elite families. In other words, membership of the groups nominating the chiefs, tribe doctors and army generals was controlled in order to preserve the privileged inheritance of certain families.