How do children perceive social hierarchy? A bibliographical review of Bourdiesian-tradition studies

Abstract

The article presents and analyzes works that use Pierre Bourdieu as a theoretical framework to think childhood. In this bibliographical review, we take Chamboredon’s and Prévot’s writings as a starting point to reach the recent works of Lignier and Pagis. The studies presented contribute to a still inconclusive task: to provide empirical evidence to corroborate or question the theoretical idea of habitus construction in childhood. The critical reception of these works highlights the methodological challenges presented to researchers who aim to understand childhood inequalities, calling attention to the need to consider childhood within an intersectional theoretical framework.

Keywords
habitus; Bourdieu; child socialization; social classification

Resumo

Este artigo apresenta e analisa alguns trabalhos que têm tomado por referência o quadro teórico de Pierre Bourdieu para pensar a infância. Para esta revisão bibliográfica, tomamos como ponto de partida a obra de Chamboredon e Prévot para chegarmos aos recentes trabalhos de Lignier e Pagis. As pesquisas apresentadas contribuem com uma tarefa ainda inconclusa, qual seja, a produção de evidências empíricas que possam corroborar ou tensionar a formulação teórica da construção do habitus na infância. A recepção crítica desses trabalhos evidencia os desafios metodológicos apresentados aos pesquisadores que assumem como objetivo a compreensão das desigualdades na infância, chamando a atenção para a necessidade de se pensar a infância em um quadro teórico interseccional.

Palavras-chave
habitus; Bourdieu; socialização das crianças; classificação social

Resumen

Este artículo presenta y analiza algunos trabajos que han tomado como referencia el marco teórico de Pierre Bourdieu para pensar la infancia. Para ello, tomamos como punto de partida el trabajo de Chamboredon y Prévot para llegar a los trabajos recientes de Lignier y Pagis. La investigación presentada contribuye a una tarea aún inconclusa, a saber, la producción de evidencia empírica que pueda corroborar o tensionar la formulación teórica de la construcción del habitus en la infancia. La recepción crítica de estos trabajos resalta los desafíos metodológicos presentados a los investigadores que apuntan a comprender las desigualdades en la infancia, llamando la atención sobre la necesidad de pensar la infancia brasileña en un marco teórico interseccional.

Palabras clave
habitus; Bourdieu; socialización de los niños; clasificación social

Introduction

This article aims to present recent studies that focus on the issue of social inequalities and childhood, with an emphasis on empirically understanding children's perspectives on social hierarchies. It highlights how this issue has evolved over the last decades and what contributions and challenges researchers in this field face.

To undertake this analysis, we use French-based sociology with Bourdiesian inspiration as a reference framework, due to its establishment as a seminal field in the production of theories and studies about the mechanisms through which social inequalities are reproduced and perpetuated through generations. From Jean-Claude Chamboredon, Jean Prévot, Bernard Zarca, and Bernard Lahire, to the works of a new generation of sociologist, such as Wilfried Lignier and Julie Pagis, this production has emphasized the precocity of social structures in generational maintenance and reproduction of social inequalities. In this theoretical line, inspired by Bourdieu’s sociological theory of habitus, we intend to follow and discuss works that analyze children's perceptions regarding the social world, as well as the socially informed ways in which they classify and hierarchize the surrounding world.

According to Bourdieu, habitus can be defined as a systematic assembly of disposition to act that is conditioned by our social properties, starting with practice and ending in it. Its practical nature shows that our engagement occurs through a repetitive process, implicit and with little consciousness when instilling a given social position in our values, ways of thinking, and our bodies in a process that provides it some stability and durability. As a matrix of dispositions formed by lived experiences in our first years of life, the primary habitus would play such an important role that the dispositions acquired further on in life would not be completely foreign to this first reality. Thus, opposed to the philosophical theories that conceive the human being as radically free and self-determined, it refers to the precocious acquisition of these action schemes as an explanation key for understanding the production and reproduction of educational and social inequalities (Bourdieu, 1997).

In the path of Bourdiesian sociology, in 1973, Jean-Claude Chamboredon and Jean Prévot wrote Le métier d’enfant. Définition sociale de la prime enfance et fonctions différentielles de l’école maternelle, a work that contributed to give visibility to childhood and the role of childhood education in a society that lived the end of the Glorious 30 Years and the disenchantment that climaxed in May 1968. In this context, through the concept of métier d’enfant [children’s work], Chamboredon and Prévot examined the relationship between family and school through social belonging and contributed to questioning the naturalization of the dispositions formed during the socialization process.

In the scope of a structural-functionalist perspective, the aim was to analyze children’s work in the comparison between family and school habitus. Hence, if, on the one hand, Chamboredon’s work contributed to mitigating the epistemological invisibility of childhood in Social Sciences, on the other, the child continues to be reduced to its student role.

In the 1990s, interactionism, phenomenology, and interpretive approaches influenced Social Sciences to shift the focus from macrostructures to social actors. The social-demographic data, which marked the research from previous decades, was no longer sufficient, giving way to ethnographic studies. When presenting the microsocial dimensions, these studies allow for an understanding of a child who is not reduced to a student's role but rather acts based on their interests and capacity to interpret the social world (Sirota, 2001).

Thus, from the 1990s onwards, the conditions for the emergence and consolidation of the Sociology of Childhood are established, a field that understands children as social actors, criticizing an excessively verticalized conception of childhood, as seen in Durkheim and most functionalist authors. However, as the interpretative perspective adopted emphasizes the production of meaning by individuals at the expense of the (re)production of behaviors by social structure, the theoretical problem in the relationship between actors and structures has been announced as intrinsic to the Sociology of Childhood from the beginning (Montandon, 2001).

In this sense, Alan Prout (2010) warns that this field carries traces of its mother field, the broader Sociology, replicating dichotomies such as action and structure, culture and nature, or being and becoming. Aiming to overcome these theoretical impasses, the author suggested considering an excluded third party in these oppositions. This seems to have been William Corsaro’s (2015) attempt when developing the concept of interpretative reproduction¹ to account for the fact that children assimilate and reproduce elements of culture, not automatically but from a generational perspective that includes their interests. Nonetheless, a closer reading of the author’s work shows that, when proposing the abandonment of the socialization concept, understood by him as a term that expresses a unilateral and verticalized process, Corsaro ends up overemphasizing children’s agency.

In the book Enfances de classe (2019), Bernard Lahire makes the following criticism of the Childhood Studies and the French Sociology of Childhood:

Thus, surreptitiously, the researchers reintroduced in the field of childhood the issue of individual "freedom", which had been largely excluded from sociological work on adults. Insisting on the choice or decision capacity of children, in the “active” part they assume in their education, acting as if the studies about childhood socialization had made children an entirely passive being (a soft wax malleable to the adults' will), to emphasize their own power of action, which has been removed by sociologist considered to be overly "deterministic," is to forget all that is imposed over them and about which they cannot prescind: a world with its language, institution, techniques, knowledge, labor division, etc., and its social inequalities

(p.21 –translated from the French)².

In this work, Lahire and a team of 17 collaborators analyze the influence of social origin on the formation of 35 children from diverse social backgrounds, exploring how class inequalities shape children's experiences, opportunities, and life perspectives. The authors highlight the importance of considering social and family contexts when studying socialization in the first years of life, favoring a critical and detailed view of class dynamics in the formation of children's identities and trajectories.

From a contextualist and dispensationalist approach, Lahire emphasizes the social determinants and children's dependencies on adults and, more broadly, the dependence of each human being in the social world. Thus, it can be considered an heir of the Bourdiesian tradition, though its concept of disposition raises differences when compared to Bourdieu’s habitus theory. If, for the latter, as seen, habitus refers to the ensemble of durable and structured dispositions acquired through socialization, to Lahire, the dispositions would be specific manifestations of the habitus in particular situations. They represent the behavioral tendencies or inclinations influenced by the habitus, but they can show themselves in a more conscious or specific way in everyday contexts. The dispositions would be tendencies to act that would mark the individuals' lives more durably; however, the mobilization of these dispositions’ assets (action schemes) would occur depending on a plurality of contexts (that would serve as action triggers).

In Enfances de Classe, however, the author works with the context of updating acquired dispositions, a characteristic of his previous works (Lahire, 1995, 2007)³, focusing more specifically on describing and analyzing the diversity of material and symbolic conditions in which children grew up, and how inequality, precociously experienced, might affect school trajectories and the chances of social mobility. As the author states, children live in the same society but not in the same world.

Despite the undeniable relevance of the work to study childhood inequalities, the methodological choices of Lahire and his team do not include the perspective of the participating children, whose practices are known only through the adults surrounding them. When aiming to understand childhood inequality solely through the perspective of parents and teachers, the research design corroborates a verticalized and unilateral view of socialization (Garnier, 2021). Therefore, the work does not analyze, in a more delineated way, the issue that guides this article, i.e., children’s perspective on social hierarchies and not only how social hierarchies determine their future chances of ascension.

Hence, our interest turns to studies with children, and not only about them, undertaken from a Bourdiesian theory, as those recently conducted by Wilfried Lignier and Julie Pagis (2017), inspired by Bernard Zarca (1999). The critical analysis of these studies can help update and develop the possibilities and limits of the Bourdiesian theoretical framework to understand the several inequalities that permeate childhood, including in Brazil. This objective is more relevant when questioning a frontier already established between two theoretical currents: Childhood Social Studies and Bourdieu's Sociology. Despite encompassing a significant diversity of perspectives, the first is consonant when considering children as actors and childhood as a structural category. On its turn, the second shows itself more critically regarding the participation ideology and is reticent when considering the category generation as a component of social structure⁴ (Salgues, 2018).

In common, the works presented aim to empirically understand how different children's socialization processes occur in socio-institutional contexts, unveiling the processes of resignification of a social work that is inescapably hierarchized and whose structures tend to convert into dispositions and social practices that are re-translated by the children. In other words, they investigate the genesis of the habitus, a theoretical construction that has been considered highly explanatory, though little unveiled (Barthez, 1980).

The relevance of this endeavor had been announced in the book Childhood with Bourdieu, a collection of texts that seeks to demonstrate the pertinence of using the author's concepts in studies with children. In a chapter she wrote, Pascale Garnier (2015) defends the importance of empirical studies on the process of children socialization, as avoiding this work could imply the automatic use of concepts and theories to analyze social practices, leading to an intellectualism denounced by Bourdieu himself (2013). In her opinion, the ethical or methodological difficulties imposed on researchers when working with children (and not only about them) should not be a justification to avoid this project.

The works presented below seek to advance in this direction, not only applying the Bourdiesian conceptual framework but putting it to the test and creating new perspectives from it. Therefore, these works assume ethical and methodological challenges that have been under debate for at least four decades by the researchers of Childhood Social Studies. To fulfill these objectives, the article was divided into four sections. In the first, we present Bernard Zarca’s work, published in the late 1990s, in which the sociologist aims to understand how children build their perceptions of the social world, what he calls social sense. In the second section, we present the work by Wilfried Lignier and Julie Pagis, in which the authors revisit Zarca’s work almost 20 years after the publication of his article Les sens social des enfants. The authors demonstrate that children socially classify, recycling internalized social judgments in the social spaces with which they are more familiar. In the third section, we present and discuss the reception of these studies by French researchers in the broader Sociology and in the Sociology of Childhood and show how Brazilian studies can contribute to this debate. Finally, we end the article by raising some remarks about the ongoing debate.

Bernard Zarca’s social sense

In the article Le sens social des enfants, Bernard Zarca (1999) seeks to advance the empirical demonstration of habitus formation, which, as previously stated, is an ongoing work. When the article was published in the journal Sociétés Contemporaines, the field of the Sociology of Education already existed and was starting to be institutionalized in Europe. However, although most works on the theme were interested in children’s culture and their agency, Zarca proposed an empirical investigation of the social gaps emerged in the socialization processes.

The concept of social sense⁵ is a result of this attempt. According to the author, it refers to the different ways of behaving depending on the social characteristics regarding the social properties of those we interact with, but it also refers to the capacity to identify the most socially valued characteristics and perceive the multiple differences, oppositions, and hierarchies that connect the social agents.

Therefore, apprehending the social space would be necessarily limited and would involve one’s own projection in this hierarchy and the possibility of imagining, even if vaguely, the social destinies available or excluded for the individuals in the same social position. The social sense, as conceived by Zarca, is not restricted to the sense of self and otherness, nor the abilities demanded in the interactions in general but would be the capacity of identifying in the relationships the symmetries or asymmetries, parities or dominations, as they are crystalized in society and that each of us experience from an early age⁶.

The process of building the social sense in children would happen while they are shapping their own identity, learning how to situate themselves in the social space and, intuitively, evaluating their chances of occupying certain positions in this environment presented to them from an early age, which is structured by domination relationships. The author understands social sense as a sense in action, in which the implications of social properties in the interaction context are identified and analyzed, properties that the child apprehends with the body but memorizes through language. Listening to judgments about the people surrounding them, they acquire, still in a diffuse and incomplete way, partial representations of the social space, often implicit and even contradictory.

From the judgments they witness, the child would build a perspective of the social sphere while certainly using their own intellectual tools and mobilizing their values and interests. This process would be analogous to what the philosophy of mind calls propositional attitude (see, for instance, Russell [1992]), i.e., it refers to the relationship between a specific child and a given proposition, so as to build a representation of the social world that is far from being purely cognitive but, first, informed by fears, wishes, self-projections, and power relations.

To understand this construction, Zarca conducted a field study in three schools in the Parisian metropolitan region that attended families from widely different socioeconomic backgrounds. Using the clinical method introduced by Piaget for studying children's cognitive development, the author asked students between seven and ten years old to classify 12 cards with images of well-known professions, either using their earnings as the criterion or the idea of reputation. Furthermore, children were asked to explain the reasons for this classification⁷, using as data not only what was said but also the silences, constraints, or desolation when faced by a professional occupation considered less interesting. There were frequently different expressions of moral imperative – “there is no bad work!” –, interpreted by Zarca as a participants’ defense regarding a thought that they fell morally prevented from saying. Thus, according to the author, the choice of a clinical method could allow the interpretation of nuances when considering the pre-intentional reactions that follow every communication and that can say more than a long discourse.

In the interaction with children, Zarca observed that the classifications observed in a research situation are never neutral but refer to children’s social position with the researcher. For example, he described a scene in which a child of the last year of CM2, corresponding to the end of Elementary school, is sorry for demoting the teacher card that the boy associated with the research. The reaction unfolded a dialogue between the child (son of a senior manager in an export business and an assistant manager) and the researcher:

– You shook your head when placing the teacher at the end, why?

(The boy blushes, fearing that he had offended me)

– I don’t know… because it might not be… it might not be cool, but…it can be a bit worthwhile

(Zarca, 1999, p.80).

Despite Zarca’s justification for chosing the clinical method, we should consider that the import of a methodological instrument from psychology reflects the inexistence in the late 1990s of sociological tools to work with children, a problem that has been overcome due to the effort of researchers from Childhood Studies to create several ways to capture children’s perspective, respecting the specificities of this age group.

However, regarding the results, the study showed that the images children create in the social space portray a relative understanding of the level of exhaustion and the number of years required for each profession. However, if children show evidence of a relatively formed social sense, Zarca shows that the capacity of understanding social hierarchies and situate oneself in them is not universal but varies depending on social origin and, moreover and mainly, regarding the sex⁸.

Hence, girls participating in the research were normally willing to accept what the future held for them, indicating a precocious interiorization of the probable. They placed intermediate professions over higher ones and used social usefulness as a justification. In their turn, boys used the remuneration criterion more frequently in their classifications. Even the youngest ones showed less interest in professions socially attributed to women and those demanding altruistic dispositions, commonly mobilized in women’s socialization. Regarding social origin, privileged children established more realistic hierarchies, mainly regarding remuneration, when adopting positive attitudes towards more socially reputable occupations. Contrariwise, this correspondence was not perceived among underprivileged children.

The author concluded that the representation of social space does not mean building an impartial image but rather is necessarily connected to a projection of self in this same space, which is why the construction of a social reality also implies the construction of one's own identity.

Finally, Zarca recognizes the limitations of this work resulting from an incipient effort, mainly the use of the clinical method centered on language and its limits to understand the incorporation processes. He also highlights the need for studies with younger children, a project that would demand the use of methodological tools that could capture and analyze other types of language.

The sociogenesis of social order perception: Lignier and Pagis’s work

Openly inspired by Bernard Zarca’s article, the book L’Enfance de l’ordre is published in 2017 written by Julie Pagis and Wilfried Lignier⁹. The authors describe an ethnographic study conducted in two French public schools between 2010 and 2012, which aimed to show how children perceive the social world. The author demonstrates how the sociogenesis¹⁰, from the children’s perspective of the social order, occurs from what they called symbolic recycling, that is, the reutilization of practical schemes of distinction and hierarchization to which children are daily exposed. In other words, this recycling would be the displacement of hierarchization schemes imposed to children in the practical contexts they participate in more directly, mainly family and school, to farther contexts in which they are less engaged. This second life offered to the symbolic resources acquired through the repetitive educational injunction would allow children to understand the social space, classify others and, simultaneously, classify themselves.

To conduct this project, Lignier and Pagis heard the judgments made by children regarding three dimensions of social life. First, they sought to understand the perception of this age group about the work world from the values mobilized to understand professional hierarchy. After, they captured the judgments that supported higher or lower affinity between children, as well as the values that guided their positions regarding the political universe.

Considering the perceptions of professional hierarchies, the authors started from a methodological tool similar to Zarca’s: a game to classify jobs. The difference, however, was that this new study proposed an activity in groups, justifying that classification is never lonely, but a result of interactions¹¹. Lignier and Pagis (2017) highlight that they were more guided by their interest to know how children classify others (and themselves) than by the result of the classifications.

They conducted a series of collective sessions with around 12 children, in which they were asked to order nine cards with images of professions: three associated with higher social levels (architect, factory owner, and teacher), three associated with middle classes (nurse, butcher, and florist), and three to lower classes (mason, seller in a toy shop, and cleaner).

In the first session, children were asked to choose the profession they believed was at the top of the scale and the lowest of all without pre-establishing a criterion because the aim was to perceive the criteria and values evoked by children for this classification. In a second session they were asked to group professions into two categories: rich and poor.

Lignier and Pagis observe that listing is a typical element of written cultures, so children that already know how to read are generally more familiar with this thought ability, as other sessions with even younger children would confirm¹². However, coinciding with the results found by Zarca, Lignier and Pagis’s research data show that age is not the only nor the main variable factor on how to classify, as the social classification ability was also informed by other social properties, such as social class, “migration origin”¹³, and sex.

The classification variation of the profession 'cleaner,' considered here as a prototypical job, illustrates this idea well. Considering age, for instance, the researchers reported that some younger children did not understand the concept of job and considered indistinctively the cleaning of one's own house and cleaning as a profession. Therefore, younger children and those from socially privileged families tended to place the cleaner card in a higher position than the older ones from the same social strata. Regarding social class, children from underprivileged families placed cleaner in a middle position, while children from higher fractions placed those in the last place among the professions to be ranked. Finally, regarding gender, the authors observed that some boys undervalued the cleaner profession, justifying it was a “girl’s job”.

Despite these variations, connected to children’s several social belongings, the authors also observed some recurrences attributed to the sociogenesis of social classifications. This is because, in this process, children are subjected to a certain number of values that, though socially changing, can also be considered relatively stable, as the symbolic domination to which subjects are submitted is relatively stable. In Wester urban societies, for example, children are expected to learn the duty of caring for themselves, of diligently carrying out schoolwork, respecting rules and adults, answer gender injunctions, etc.

Thus, the judgment criteria used in the domestic space, frequently connected to hygiene and health, as well as those evoked by school culture, normally related to intelligence and discipline, and the peer-group judgments, more associated with conformity to gender norms, are internalized by children and mobilized by them to designate people and social relations from other contexts. Hence, when classifying the professions, some children can even use adult criteria, such as remuneration, prestige, or social usefulness, but the judgements are more likely grounded on other values, such as the professions’ cleanness and beauty. The two dialogues below, with children in the French CM1- Brazilian Year 3, portray this perspective:

Dialogue 1:

Houria: I don’t like archeology because it’s filthy!

Wilfried: Why?

Houria: I don’t know…

Naima: I got my face dirty so… I don't really like dust: I dug once and it didn't work out… I made a very big hole with the land

(Lignier & Pagis, 2017, p.123).

Dialogue 2:

Researcher: Why did you place “war” in the list of professions you don’t want?

Léonce: Because there are weapons, dead people…It’s not pretty. […]

Willem: I like the circus because we can give somersaults...I also like it because it’s very very beautiful… When they do those beautiful acrobatics. […]

Marielle: I’d like to be a dancer… Because I like when we do beautiful things. […]

(Lignier & Pagis, 2017, p.128).

This hygienic and aesthetic perspective of the professional world is interpreted by the authors as an indirect and unexpected consequence of primary socialization, mainly the family sphere, establishing a childhood way of perceiving the world. The authors also observed the use of adjectives frequently employed to designate school activities, such as "boring" or "tiring," when qualifying professions. The following dialogues, held with children from CP and CM, respectively corresponding to Brazilian Childhood Education and Elementary School, show this idea:

Dialogue 1 (with Childhood Education children):

Researcher: Why did you place cleaning last?

Alexandre: Because this work takes a long time…

Researcher: And what did you put on top?

Alexandre: Architect. (Why?) Because I like it… (Why?) Because it doesn’t take long. […]

Kevin: Because it’s tiring… (Why?) Because… an hour of cleaning is not very interesting …

Dialogue 2 (With elementary school children):

Tess: It’s good to clean one day, but everyday, it’s probably a bit stressful.

Ramzi: I'd like to be an architect, because I could build things… It's for nerds… And to be a salesperson in a toyshop is boring … […].

Asma: Cleaning is not my thing, [being] a high school teacher is very hard and butcher…. meat is disgusting!

(Lignier & Pagis, 2017, p.133).

As Asma's father works in a company and the mother is a babysitter, the researchers hypothesize if the idea that being a high school teacher is “very hard” would not be the manifestation of a feeling of precocious illegitimacy or the expression, in the childhood universe, of a type of hidden exclusion (cens caché), a concept by the political scientist Daniel Gaxie (1978) which seeks to explain the less explicit forms of exclusion from the political participation in democratic societies.

Hence, Lignier and Pagis’s main contribution is demonstrating that, though children’s criteria and classifications can seem an inadaptation, as they do not always coincide with adults, it is, in fact, a work of progressive transpositions that are part of the continuous process of understanding the social world.

Furthermore, the authors also call attention to the fact that symbolic recycling is not reduced to a mere acquisition of the social world, but a deeply personal process loaded with affections. Thus, a child may have the intellectual and informational means to classify according to established social hierarchies but not the will or interest to do so, as, when operating with the same dominant criteria, they would endorse the situation of social degradation of their families and, consequently, themselves.

Assuming that any classification practice engages the classifier, we can then conclude that children whose families are relegated to the lowest strata of the social hierarchy tend to be more interested in producing alternative rankings. This explanation would help understand why part of the children from low-income families want to become police officers to “arrest people”, or want to become a boss “to fire many people”. Instead of considering those expressions naive or misinformed, the authors call attention to the subtle effort of self-preservation, which allows children to imagine a position of power or even a temporary revenge for themselves, ensuring a protection against the symbolic violence of classification.

Lignier and Pagis acknowledge that classifying figures with images of professions can be a very abstract activity for children, as the distance between childhood universe and the professional market presupposes adult mediation, be it the mother, father, uncle, neighbor, doorman, maid, or teachers. That is why the methodological tool of profession classification does not consider the moral problems that children face everyday and that raise broad and immediate consequences in their lives. In school, during the school break, or on the street, it is not only classifying anonymous images but also citing names, judging people they socialize with, being judged by them, and regulating real interactions in a more or less explicitly and lasting form.

Faced with the methodological limitation of the profession cards to access social hierarchies expressed in children’s everyday interactions, interviews were conducted with them to answer who their friends were, what classmates they liked, and why. Summing up, the aim was to understand the proximities and objective social distances that correspond to the judgements derived from the classification schemes recycled by children, considering the relationship between subjective affinities and the objective social distance.

The authors observed that answers to these questions frequently had a low level of symbolic elaboration and assumed an almost pleonastic form, when children affirmed they did not like a certain classmate “because he was not nice”. Another time, they argued using a single episode, with no intention of generalization. In this case, the animosity was justified by a localized conflict: “I don’t like him because he hit me during the break” (Lignier & Pagis, 2017, p.156). However, in many cases, social classifications emerged from everyday interactions and social and personal needs.

The analysis of affinities in network showed that children tend to establish bonds with classmates from the same sex and age but are also informed by social proximity and “migration origin”¹⁴, indicating that children’s sociability is strongly determined by social properties. During the interviews, when children could explain their animosities, they recurrently mobilized judgements related to the lack of hygiene, school results, indiscipline, as well as inadequacies regarding gender injunctions.

The final case study, which sought to focus on children’s political socialization and their perceptions regarding the current scenario, showed that children frequently appropriate, through symbolic recycling, the ideological preferences of the family and school universes. However, the conversation with children pointed out that what was apprehended was not always understood, for instance, regarding the opposition between right and left. Here, once again, the classification criteria were reused, applied to the political universe, and the internalized judgments of school culture, mainly those connected to the evaluation of effort and performance, as well as the punishment or reward as a direct consequence of this evaluation: Potou “is a zero”, “he only has 3%”, Macron “copied” Mélenchon by making a YouTube channel, Marine Le Pen “says too many swearwords”, “doesn’t act as a woman”.

If, on one hand, the empirical study of the sociogenesis of habitus, conducted by Lignier and Pagis (2017), is openly an heir of the Bourdiesian approach, we should stress that it distinguishes from it when displacing the attention from the processes of incorporating social hierarchies to the processes of signification, understanding that language is, itself, a practice. Summing up, the point was to demonstrate how children's contexts inform their perceptions from formative and semantic perspectives, allowing them to guide themselves in the social and political world despite the distance that separates them from the public sphere. On the other hand, this perspective is also different from other approaches of North American and European Sociology of Childhood, which are anchored on the notions of agency and childhood culture, considering children as social actors with individual or collective autonomy in relation to other subjects and institutions.

Here, we should seek an approximation between the concept of symbolic recycling from Lignier and Pagis (2017) and the concept of interpretative reproduction by Willian Corsaro (2015). This approximation is even more pertinent because, as previously stated, Corsaro himself recognizes he took the term “reproduction” from Bourdieu’s work. However, though analyzing not only friendship and cooperation relations but also conflict and social differentiation in peer cultures, the North American sociologist of childhood only does so to reaffirm that children operate with process of differentiation by gender, race-ethnicity, and social status (terms used by the author), not explaining how children internalize and re-signify social hierarchies, which is the main contribution of Lignier and Pagis’s work. Moreover, Corsaro’s perspective, differently from Bourdieu’s, abdicates from a relational position, assuming, therefore, a substantialist perspective that considers the “properties associated to the agents – occupation, age, sex, formation – as independent forces of the relationships within which they act” (Bourdieu, 2007, p.22). Thus, despite the similarities between both formulations, they are two divergent concepts.

Critical perspectives about these works

The originality of the works presented above enables a fruitful ethical-methodological and theoretical debate. In this section, we focus the discussion on Pascale Garnier and Camille Salgues about the relationship between Childhood Studies and the Bourdiesian theory, as well as the potential contribution of the studies conducted by Brazilian researchers to the debate.

Sociology of Childhood ethical-methodological criticisms

Garnier (2020) calls attention to the fact that, in different studies about childhood inequalities, including Lignier and Pagis, children’s social position derives from a statistical objectification that deduces the relationship between childhood practices and their parents’ social properties, though not concluding that it is a causal relationship. Although this methodological operation brings evident advantages, it could conceal the fact that its interpretative efficiency is due to the sense readers of sociological works attribute to professions (Amossé et al. 2018), while the meaning of the research participants themselves would be less evident.

According to Garnier (2020), if, on the one hand, when relating childhood and social inequalities, Lignier and Pagis abandon a romantic view that would consider children as fair and innocent little beings in the path to being corrupted by oppressive social system, on the other hand, when attributing to the children the social properties of the parents, assuming the logic of intergenerational reproduction of social properties, which would deprive new generations of any agency. Moreover, the author alleges that the starting point of these studies would be a child taken as a typical representant of a given social class, which would be incoherent to the aim of identifying the meanings children, themselves, give to social properties.

Regarding the use of interviews as a methodological tool, Garnier (2020) warns that children are led to talk about issues that are distant from their universe. Referring to Michelle Poretti (2018), she considers that nowadays children’s works have become not only a right but also a duty as can be seen in the marketing actions and other participative devices, including academic studies. Therefore Garnier (2020) interprets the complacent answers to the researchers’ questions as an effect of the asymmetry between adults and children and, inspired by Spyrou (2011), takes silence as an eloquent resistance to attempt of making them talk. Another problem would be the higher or lower affinity of the terms used by children and the objective social relations, which, implicitly, presupposes that children would progressively tend to converge in adults’ classifications.

Moreover, these interviews would reify inequalities because, as the authors recognize, some children do not have the linguistic and informational resources demanded to express a perspective on the social world and, above all, to approach themes such as politics, relatively distant from the context of childhood culture. Hence, the questions proposed to the children by Lignier and Pagis would seem forced and would “artificially [produce] artifact they believe to be recording” (Bourdieu, 1990, p.917). When presupposing a use of speech that seeks to represent the world, rather than immediately acting upon it, a typical school approach, these studies would convert sociocultural inequalities into what could perhaps be a variation on the ways children express themselves.

According to Garnier (2020), a more adequate methodology would be the one used in the well-known ethnographical work conducted by Annette Lareau (2002), in which the author showed that children attribute social properties to other people and regulate their actions through the relationship between their own social position and the position of those with whom they relate. Following families in several medical appointments, the author observed, for example, that the way children behave with the pediatrician depends on the distance between their social positions. While a boy, whose mother was a businesswoman and the father a lawyer, did not hesitate to make questions, interrupt, and even disagree with the physician. Another boy, the son of a divorced mother who depended on social assistance benefits and a mechanic father, was intimidated, spoke in a low voice, and answer monosyllabically the questions made.

The analysis of materiality and the several childhood languages would also contribute to the analysis, as well as the multiplication of scene, as defended by Lahire (1995), broadening the research locus beyond the space of school space. This proposal would imply an approximation with the everyday life of children's families, which would certainly result in a significantly more difficult work than indicating parents' professions and social origins.

Finally, regarding the ethical dimension, the main point raised by Garnier (2020) refers to the fact that the research tool employed by Lignier and Pagis (2017) to analyze the effect of children's social properties in the higher or lesser affinity among them would incite mutual depreciation, aggravating differences, and leading to disputes.

Although the points raised significantly contributed to the discussion, we should remember that, as previously said, these limitations do not escape the authors but, on the contrary, were largely anticipated and discussed by them, which favors the development of new studies about the sociogenesis of the perception of the social order. In the next section, we discuss Camille Salgues' criticisms of the centrality of formation in studies with children, in their various terms and senses.

A sociologist questions theme reduction in the Sociology of Childhood

When discussing the contributions of the Bourdiesian perspective to understand childhood and the establishment of the field of Childhood Studies, the recent works from Camille Salgues¹⁵ (2018, 2024) can also help the debate at stake. According to the author, Childhood Studies had a central role in considering children as actors and childhood as a social construction, as well as the criticism, operated by the Sociology of Education, of reducing the child to the student’s work/pupilhood. However, the author raises two main criticisms towards Sociology of Childhood.

First, he calls attention to the fact that liberal grammar, which supports the notion of children’s agency, does not differ from the biologizing perspectives of childhood, as it equally constitutes an essentialist approach. Furthermore, though broadening the investigation of socialization to other spaces beyond school, Childhood Studies replicated the adultocentric perspective, whose criticism justified the establishment of the field, when keeping the focus in the process of children formation.

One of the reasons that support this thematic reduction is due to the fact that in France, as is in Brazil, Schools of Education concentrate most studies dedicated to study children and childhood. This observation allows Salgues to question the constitution of an independent field for the development of studies with and about children, advocating that generational questions, as well as those regarding other social markers, should cross all studies and not establish a separate field.

From this statement, Salgues discusses the inequalities in childhood within Social Sciences. In research about children from rural areas that migrated to Shanghai, China, the author (2024) observes how these age group appropriate the urban space and conclude that children’s activities cannot be only thought through a Bourdiesian logic of distinction. On the contrary, the reasons through which children enact an activity and not another would be mainly material and not symbolic, so that the distinction logics that would affect childhood dynamics would be secondary, as they derive from parental choices. The analysis of these practices, which establish a study object consolidated in the French studies, would end up reifying the veiling of children’s perspective when emphasizing a social dynamic that the author considers to be adult.

Therefore, although assuming a relational approach to the social universe as a way to overcome essentialist views, Salgues contradicts the Bourdiesian perspective when including generational relations as a structural component. This operation results in a greater approximation of children’s perspective over the social world and the possibility of perceiving on it the collaboration relationships beyond the domination systems that characterize the adult social universe.

Undoubtedly, in this point, Salgues distances from Lignier and Pagis, for whom children are socially interested actors, whose practices are situated in a social universe precociously hierarchized, and, because of that, becomes a space of disputes. Moreover, Lignier takes the Bourdiesian indissociability between the material and the symbolic to the extreme, questioning even the preference for accessing the social through practice rather than through discourse. To Lignier and Pagis (2017), language itself is a practice. Thus, though it seems necessary to investigate if, how, and to what extent children operate in a logic of distinction, can we consider Salgues’s (2024) postulate that they act motivated solely by material interests, supposedly dissociated from symbolic aspects, as a new facet of the same essentialism the author tries to combat?

The lack of a childhood intersectional approach in French studies

Finally, we also call attention to how the racial issue was approached in the works of Zarca, Lignier, as Pagis. As a large part of the sociology produced in France, in the studies presented in this article the concept of race, developed in the North American context, is not mentioned and is, at most, substituted by the term “migration origin” or “skin color”.

For Brun and Cosquer (2022), this gap in French studies is due, on the one hand, to a caution regarding the concept of race itself (Guillaumin, 1972; Fassin & Fassin, 2006; Simon, 2008) and, on the other, the concern that adopting it would imply a form of cultural imperialism or, more specifically, an academic one (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 2002) when promoting the automatic import of concepts emerged in North American studies to think other realities.

However, although this is a relevant warning, Bessone (2018) observes that reducing race to an untranslatable concept pertinent only to extremely specific context also represents a form of ethnocentrism, as the migration processes in France are not exempt from crossings derived from colonial or post-colonial relationships (Brun & Cosquer, 2022).

In this direction, in his most recent work, La societé est en nous, Lignier (2023) abandons the term “migration origin” and starts an attempt to correct the silence of French sociology about the racialized formation of the habitus and the dispositional consequences of the precocious experience of racism¹⁶. Lignier’s (2023) effort, though still germinal, seems promising. The author proposes a discussion about the racial issue through the articulation between what he calls weak and strong times, metaphors to explain the different moments in which socialization acts with more or less intensive over the individuals.

The “strong times" would be characterized by a high density of interactions and through a strong influence of socialization agents so that the habitus on them would tend to be more strongly consolidated by social structures. The “weak times”, on their hand, would involve a lesser

The “strong times” would be characterized by a high density of interaction and a strongly influence of socialization agents so that, during these times, the habitus would tend to be more strongly consolidated by social structures. On their turn, the “weak times” would involve a lower intensity of social interactions, marked by periods in which socialization is less explicit but still present in a diffuse and continuous way, resulting in higher flexibility, fluidity, reinterpretation possibilities, adaptability to changes and influences. This model can help understand how the interiorization of norms and social practices take place in an adaptative and contextual manner.

To demonstrate the relationship between racialization and these two temporal modalities, Lignier refers to a field observation in a Parisian daycare with babies under one year old. The author observed that the families of black babies, children of immigrants from the West of African, tended to sit their children on the floor from an early age so that they could progressively feel able to remain seated. However, even though these children tended to have a better motor development, the white school personnel acted differently and opted to lay down all children, white and black.

What is seen is that the ways of thinking and acting from the majority ethnic-racial group impose themselves over the minority, producing a precocious dispositional difference enacted in weak time: the corporal posture of black children is tendentially disqualified, while white ones is legitimized, black children experience inadequacy from an early age, while white ones experience adjustment (Lignier, 2023, p.118)¹⁷. Thus, Lignier intends to clarify how the sociogenetic approach can contribute to demonstrate that racism acts not only by producing stereotypes and ways of thinking but also is precociously incorporated, producing racialized dispositions.

If we turn our eyes to Brazilian reality and the production of studies about the racial issue in Brazil, we can say that, despite various theoretical perspectives, Brazil has contributed to understanding the process of racialization in childhood since the 1950s in Brazil. A paradigmatic example is the research from the sociologist and psychoanalyst Virgínia Bicudo (1955). Entitled “Atitudes dos alunos dos grupos escolares em relação com a cor de seus colegas” [Attitudes from students at school groups regarding their classmates’ color], the work sought to analyze the feelings, attitudes, and defense mechanisms related to racial identity in children and teenagers between 5 and 19 years old, who studied in schools in the city of São Paulo. Besides interviewing around 30 parents, the researchers applied, to more than 4,000 students, a eight-question questionnaire¹⁸ asking, for instance, who they liked to sit near and what company they would rather avoid. The results show that, alongside sexual differentiation, these choices were also determined by racial issues (Bicudo & Maio, 2010).

More recently, countless studies have tried to denaturalize the mechanisms through which racism operates in childhood education institutions (Martins & Melo, 2010; Oliveira & Abramowicz, 2010; Santiago, 2020). Many of these works aim at an intersectional analysis between race, gender, social class, and age, avoiding a merely accumulative model among markers (Rosemberg, 1996). Undoubtedly, the French studies that seek to analyze in an articulate way childhood and social inequalities could benefit from the studies conducted in Brazil. On the other hand, French sociology provided a theoretical framework for analyzing socialization that became unavoidable due to its capacity to synthesize micro and macro sociological dimensions and its undeniable influence on Brazilian sociology.

Final remarks

With no intention of finishing the ongoing debate, this article presented works that contributed to the inconclusive task of providing empirical evidence that can corroborate or, on the contrary, challenge the theoretical formulation of building class habitus in childhood. The relevance of these works lies in the fact that, without empiricism, Bourdieu’s theory about socialization, broadly used in Sociology could lead to an intellectualism that the author himself rebukes.

Openly heirs of the Bourdiesian approach, the works from Zarca, Lignier, and Pagis should not be understood as a mere application of the habitus theory in a given empirical universe. First, they seem to attempt to continue the understanding on howe dispositions are precociously built and, moreover, how children perceive social hierarchy, locate themselves on it, and act, with interest, from this interpretation. Therefore, these are studies with, beyond, and against Bourdieu. From them, concepts such as children’s social sense or the symbolic recycling of social hierarchy emerge, as well as theoretical formulations that can be meaningful in a scientific field extremely productive from an empirical perspective, but that do not always rely on concepts and theories that answer their challenges.

From an ethical-methodological viewpoint, the studies presented have limitations, largely acknowledged by the authors themselves and discussed by other researchers. The resume of this dialogue allows us to think of ways to investigate the different socialization processes that occur during childhood and the inequalities resulting from this process without incurring in symbolic violences concerning the researchers’ social and generational position. How can one approach the social disputes that cross the relationships between children without fomenting them? How does one take children’s socioeconomic position beyond their parents’ occupation and income? Would it be possible to approach the construction of children’s racial identity without adults’ heterodetermination?

Regarding the attribution of categories by researchers to children, this posture does not seem adult-centric but rather a specificity of sociological practice, which involves taking social markers as factual data, primarily in Western capitalist societies, despite any conscious awareness or explicit enunciation from social actors regarding the domination systems. However, the use of predetermined categories does not mean disregarding children as a social action but is anchored in an understanding that every agency takes place within a structural and symbolic universe that is also predetermined. This operation does not replace the possibility and the importance of perceiving the meaning attributed by children to this predetermined world. On the contrary, it means understanding what is symbolically produced from reproduction.

Therefore, the recent works about different socialization present themselves as a possibility to reiterate the overcome of the dichotomy between agent and structure because, in them, children are understood as social actors that, similar to the adults act, even if unconsciously, in favor of their group interests (social, sexual, racial, and age), tending to classify with their own and against others, because the interests of their social group are, to some extent, their own interests. However, understanding the precocity of the symbolic fight through the meaning of the world does not imply a lack of cooperation relationships, in fact, Lignier and Pagis are also interested in friendship bonds. Nevertheless, it considers affinity relationships as expressions of affection socially situated and necessarily permeated by social markers.

The debate presented also allows us to observe that most studies that seek to understand childhood from a Bourdiesian perspective are centered on the habitus of class and analyzed gender relations, but, only recently, started to consider the process of racial domination and resistance. The tendency to expand the analysis for other social markers can also be observed in works developed by a younger generation of Bourdiesians, such as Édouard Louis (2018) and Didier Eribon (2008, 2020), the later is, in fact, interested in an approximation between Bourdieu’s perspective and the writings from Fanon (2008), Baldwin (2020), Chamoiseau (1997). In this sense, we insist that Brazilian Social Sciences have, from its constitutions, given a significant contribution to intersectionally understand precocious experiences of subalternization.

Thus, we understand that the debate about the different approximations of social hierarchy undertaken by children not only adds new elements for sociological and educational studies but also broadens the understanding of the reproduction of intergenerational inequalities, as they demonstrate that the building of habitus during childhood is a complex process, influenced by several social markers and socialization agents, as well different times. Understanding these processes seem key to analyze how reproduction and the transformation of social structures take place, as they influence the way children perceive the world, behave, and interact with each other, in the present and throughout their lives.

• Support and Funding:
  We acknowledge the support of Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)- process 311496/2023-7.
• Research ethics:
  Does not apply. The study does not present empirical data, thus, not demanding an evaluation from the Research Ethics Committee.
• Copy Editing services:
  Portuguese version – Copy editing and standardization of citations and bibliographical references (7th. Edition APA): Júlia Alves <[e-mail]>
  English Version: Viviane Ramos- [e-mail]
• 19
  Despite Prout’s (2010) warning, the dichotomy between agent and structure had been faced by Bourdieu, in the scope of general sociology, and before the establishment of the Sociology of Childhood. Corsaro himself recognizes the influence of the French sociologist in the term interpretative reproduction.
• 20
  Original text: Les chercheurs ont ainsi réintroduit subrepticement sur le terrain de l’enfance la question de la « liberté » individuelle qui avait été largement écartée des travaux sociologiques portant sur les adultes. Insister sur la capacité de choix ou de décision de l’enfant, sur la part « active » qu’il prend dans son éducation, en faisant comme si les études sur la socialisation enfantine avaient fait de l’enfant un être entièrement passif (une cire molle malléable à volonté par les adultes), mettre l’accent sur sa puissance d’agir propre que lui auraient ôtée les sociologues jugés trop « déterministes », c’est oublier tout ce qui s’impose à lui et sur lequel il n’a guère de prise : un monde avec sa langue, ses institutions, ses techniques, ses savoirs, sa division du travail, etc., et ses inégalités sociales.
• 21
  In the books Tableaux de familles (1995) and Portraits Sociologiques (2007) Bernard Lahire explores nuances that broaden the understanding of the role of cultural capital transmission. Through a micro sociological approach (family configurations in the first case and individual biographies in the second), the author explores the idea that individuals are not unidimensional and have varied dispositions shaped by different socialization contexts. Hence, contradictions and conflicts can also shape subjects’ experiences, as every individual is, in a way, the depository of dispositions of thought, feeling, and action produced in multiple socializing experience, more or less lasting and intense, occurred in different groups and forms of social relations. These experiences show the force and the counterforce to which individuals are submitted since birth.
• 22
  See, for example, the texts, “L'opinion publique n'existe pas” (pp.233-245) and “La jeunesse n'est qu'un mot” (pp.112-121), both published in Bourdieu, P. (1983). Questões de sociologia. Editora Fim de Século.
• 23
  Bernard Zarca uses the expression le sens social des enfants [children social sense], as the title of the article referred here (1999). We translate the expression as "social sense" but believe it could also be translated as "social meaning". The expression reflects children's capacity to conceive, order, and classify the social world from a practical situation lived in interaction with other children and in different social situations.
• 24
  We should note that, before sociology, developmental psychology, in the Piagetian or in the culturalist branches, gave an important contribution to understand the relations between children and society. However, although this contribution is undeniable, traditionally, works developed in this field tended to adopt a universalist approach and not prioritize extra-cognitive factors. Thus, even if we sought to understand the social relations, considering them as conflicting or cooperative, developmental psychologists rarely use in their analyses the actors’ social positions in different domination structures. A criticism of the reduction of the social sphere to interindividual relationships and a perspective of socialization overly independent of social structure in studies about childhood can be seen in the work of Marxist author David Ingelby (1974).
• 25
  Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot (1983) had already used a classification game with profession cards to understand how adults represent the social space.
• 26
  During the first half of the 20^th century, studies tended to treat childhood as a homogeneous category, ignoring differences based on sex or gender. With the advancement of feminism and critical theories, the central role of gender in children's socialization is recognized, overcoming a perspective that considers the child a universal subject. From the 1980s onwards, the different socialization processes according to sex/gender variables gain visibility in the studies about and with children. Zarca’s research is known for making a notable contribution to this field.
• 27
  Julie Pagis and Wilfried Lignier graduated at École Normale Supérieure (ENS) and are researchers at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). Pagis works at Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Social Issues (IRIS) and Lignier at Centre Européen de Sociologie et de Science Politique (CESSP).
• 28
  Inspired by the sociological tradition of Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu, Lignier and Pagis use the sociogenesis concept to describe the process through which practices, categories, or forms of human perception develop and consolidate as the result of social and historical dynamics. Used as a competing term to ontogenesis, the concept reinforce that social phenomena do not emerge spontaneously or naturally but are products of interactions.
• 29
  In a seminar given on July 24, 2018 at ENS, a year after the publication of L’Enfance de l’ordre (Lignier & Pagis, 2017), with the participation of Lignier, Pagis and Zarca, the latter defended that conducting individual interviews do not presuppose that that the work of building social hierarchies are not collective. Available at: <http://ses.ens-lyon.fr/articles/les-perceptions-enfantines-de-lordre-social>.
• 30
  In these sections, the researchers checked three characteristics of children’s judgement: (i) the young children in the group researched mobilized, simultaneously, several criteria when enacting the same classification (what the authors called the multidimensionality of classifications); (ii) would tend to recontextualize classification to an individual scale (anecdotical thought); and (iii) not rarely, use humorous and fictitious narratives.
• 31
  We opted to keep the term used by the authors and discuss it at the end of the article.
• 32
  We opted to keep the term used by the authors and discuss them at the end of the article.
• 33
  As Lignier and Pagis, Salgues studied social sciences at École Normale Supérieure (ENS Paris). After, he developed research under Didier Fassin at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS).
• 34
  In Pascalian Meditations, Bourdieu (2001, p. 206) touches on the racial issue. When talking about the symbolic power, he discusses how the symbolic violence can be (re)lived as a body emotion (shame, anxiety, or guilty), an expression of domination relationships experienced in childhood. To do so, he uses an excerpt from the work by James Baldwin (2020), in which a black child is led to perceive the cruelty of racial hierarchy. The scared tone of the child’s parents when warning her on the risks imposed by the violence of racism shows the child a social hierarchy that transcends the family. Though we find here a clue of what would be a racialized habitus, we find no deeper analyses on Bourdieu’s work about the theme.
• 35
  Bourdieu describes the experience of inadequacy through the image of a fish out of water and the confluence between the agent's habitus and a given social field as a fish that does not feel the weight of water. Regarding this passage, in My body, myself: how does black woman do sociology?, Felly Nkweto Simmonds (1997, pp.226-227) affirms that, in this white world, she feels as a river fish swimming in the ocean. A fish that feels the weight of the water in the body.
• 36
  The questionnaire applied to the students had eight questions: 1- Who would you like to sit close to?; 2 – Why would you like to sit close to this classmate?; 3 – Name another classmate you would like to sit close to; 4- Why would you like sit close to this other classmate?; 5 – Who would you not want to sit next to?; 6 – Why would you not like to sit close to this classmate?; 7 – Name another classmate that you would not like to sit close to; 8) Why would you not like to sit close to this other classmate? (Bicudo, 1955, p. 228).

Research data availability:

The contents underlying the research text are included in the manuscript.

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Edited by

• Responsible editors:
  Associate Editor: Alice Sarcinelli https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1074-2417>
  Editor-in-Chief: Chantal Victória Medaets https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7834-3834>

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  08 Aug 2025
• Date of issue
  2025

History

• Received
  02 May 2024
• Reviewed
  15 Mar 2025
• Accepted
  30 Apr 2025