Bourdieu's “cultural capital” is generally understood as high culture. However, from such a viewpoint, we cannot see how particular cultures achieve high prestige. This paper explains how some cultures become capital by referring to Bergson's “Matter and Memory” where Bourdieu found important factors of the logic of practice.
The body, a fundamental factor of cultural capital, is the basis for presenting the past. As mastery of the specific habitus takes much time, the capital value of habitus is dependent on when its acquisition begins. Moreover, the “fields”, ordered by the presence of the pasts, legitimize the governing classes and their cultures by historical order. Therefore, cultural capital is the past utilized in the present, and its values are determined according to the logic of earliness.
