Tourism and distinction in globalization: cultural capital beyond cosmopolitanism

Abstract

The article analyzes the transformations of the Bourdiesian concept of cultural capital in the context of globalization through an empirical study on luxury and “affordable” tourism. It is argued that, although the thesis of cosmopolitan cultural capital has, more recently, sought to apprehend those transformations, it loses sight of the spatial reconfiguration advanced by globalization. It is so because this thesis keeps the nation as the main referent of spatial representation. The analysis of the tourism offers shows that what is at stake is not the opposition between national and foreign, nor the overcoming of national referents, but the possibility, for certain class fractions, of creating new distinctive compositions between various geosymbolic scales. Symbolic borders are redrawn to reflect the distinctive handling of social