The Habitus of Mackenzie King
The Habitus of Mackenzie King: Canadian Artists, Cultural Capital and the Struggle for Power Anton Reinhold Wagner A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Theatre and Performance Studies York University Toronto, Ontario, Canada September, 2014 © Anton Reinhold Wagner, 2014 Abstract This dissertation analyzes the struggle between William Lyon Mackenzie King, Canada’s longest-serving Prime Minister (1922-1930, 1935-1948), and Canadian artists to define and determine the nature and distribution of arts and culture in Canada prior to the 1949 Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of habitus, “fields” of knowledge and power, and religious, social and cultural capital, the dissertation analyzes the central paradox of why—despite his decades-long involvement in half-a-dozen artistic disciplines—King failed to implement cultural policies as Prime Minister that would have benefited Canadian artists and the arts and culture in Canada. The dissertation applies Pierre Bourdieu’s model of social change in which “priests” with conservation strategies and charismatic “prophets” with subversion strategies compete among the “laity” for consumers of their respective symbolic goods to document how artists organized locally and nationally to accumulate social, cultural and political capital in their attempt to compel the federal government to implement their cultural objectives—state support for the arts. The dissertation posits that Mackenzie King’s inability to control his sexual impulses led him to espouse a conception of art whose primary function was to project Christian character and ideals.
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