What is ethnic capital? A theoretical proposal about ethnicity/race, culture, and social reproduction

• In Event: 4367 - Section on Asia and Asian America Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: 1. Culture and Identity

Abstract

In this theoretical proposal, I attempt to advance a concept of ethnic capital for the sociology of education and ethnicity/race. Ethnic capital refers to the set of social resources peculiar to an ethnic-minority community. Recently, the concept of ethnic capital has been used to analyze Bourdieusian capital and dispositions toward educational attainment and upward socioeconomic mobility (“success”) within local-level coethnic communities (J. Lee and Zhou 2015, see also Bourdieu 2002) -- iconically, certain Asian American communities characterized by the intersection of high educational selectivity (Feliciano 2005; Portes and Rumbaut 2001; Sakamoto, Goyette, and C. Kim 2009) and by racialized representation as a “model minority” (Hsu 2015, S. S. Lee 2009, Ngai 2004, Osajima 2005, Tuan 1999, Wu 2015). In this paper, I review the explicit concepts of ethnic capital articulated mainly by sociologist of Asian America Min Zhou, and then argue for general common features of ethnic capital by drawing on scholarship of Asian Americans in school. I draw on this scholarship, in addition to sociological theory on culture and agency, to propose a concept of ethnic capital that defines it not as a set of static resources accessible only (or primarily) to a coethnic minority group, but as local-level cultural projects that produce tandem, partnered meanings about ethnicity/race and anticipated class trajectories. More specifically, I propose conceptualizing ethnic capital as a set of local-level “cultural workshops” where coethnic communities creatively attempt social reproduction by iteratively making and contesting meanings about ethnicity/race.

Author

• David Song, Stanford University