The discovery of symbolic violence: How toddlers learn to prevail with words

Abstract

Symbolic violence is not just a structural phenomenon, but also a social performance. How do we learn to perform it? The question is most appropriately addressed through an ethnographical study of young children (2–3 years old). Such a study showed that symbolic violence may be especially favored by toddlers as an alternative means of action when physical violence is institutionally relegated. Toddlers who enjoy sufficient symbolic resources—a matter of age, class, and gender—are able to appeal to the authority of adults, with this mediated symbolic violence serving to enhance their power over interactions. The exercise of a more immediate symbolic violence is also socially selective. It notably involves the capacity to recycle the speech in which adults exercise authority in line with one’s own practical goals, namely to actively reproduce a symbolic force that the toddlers had already experienced as passive objects of adult control.