In this article, Bourdieu sets his aim as attempting to extract the general principles of an economy of
symbolic goods. He
mainly argues that several economic worlds made up the economic universe creating the “objective conditions for social agents to have an interest in ‘disinterestedness’”(1998: 93) which in turn brings the repression or the cencorship of economic interests that economy of
symbolic goods rests. Comparing symbolic
exchange with economic economy, he claims that the economy of symbolic goods remains ambiguous based on a taboo of making things explicit, which in turn made the process two-sided and contradictory. The antimony between objectivism and subjectivism is Bourdieu’s concern in attempting to construct a dialectical relationship which is defined as a two-way relationship between the objective structures of social fields and the incorporated structures of the habitus, leading to a focus on practice as the outcome of the structure-agency relationship. In order to do this he conceptualizes the notions of
habitus, field, and
capital. Besides economic capital, he also adds other forms of capital as cultural, social, and symbolic capital. Bourdieu defines symbolic alchemy as a capital of recognition that permits one to exert symbolic effects that also finds itself in symbolic capital, which answers the collective expectations. Thus, symbolic capital set the basis for legitimacy of the social world and its divisions.Kabylia became Bourdieu’s explicit focus in analyzing the classic “gift exchange” experience that Mauss and Levi-Strauss analyzed. In societies where monetary system or price as an exchange value is not dominant, gift exchanges secure services and goods together with the social relations. Bourdieu pays attention to the determinant role of the temporal interval between gift and countergift, resolving the contradiction between Mauss’ idea of good will to form social relations and Strauss’ idea of self-interest due to the expectation of reciprocity in gift exchange. According to him the gift given in return is always delayed, so that gift giving can be regarded as free. He refers to a distinction between an ‘economy in itself’ like the peasent agriculture of precapitalist Kabylia, and an ‘economy in and for itself’, as in the colonising, capitalist society of France (1977: 172-3). Bourdieu’s analysis of Kabylia economy demonstrates that the economic logic that underlies gift exchanges is the logic of symbolic rather than financial capital.