engleski

Rural (Farm) Women's Access to Different Forms of Capital in Slavonia, Croatia

In this paper, I outline rural (farm) women’ s access to different forms of capital (as defined by Bourdieu) in Slavonia, Croatia to illustrate their marginal position. According to Bourdieu (1986), who was particularly interested in the reproduction of inequalities, an individual’ s position in a social space is defined not by class, but by the amounts of capital they have access to. He distinguished four different forms of capital that are all interconnected, context-specific and together constitute advantage and disadvantage in society: i) economic – wealth inherited or generated from interactions between the individual and the economy ; ii) cultural – represents the collection of non-economic forces such as family background, social class, varying investments in and commitments to education, and different resources which influence academic success ; iii) social -- consists of all actual or potential resources linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalised relationships of mutual acquaintance or recognition ; and iv) symbolic -- defined as any ability or asset that is considered by a group of people as being valuable. Findings from this qualitative study with over eighty inhabitants in a number of rural villages in the eastern part of Croatia show that rural (farm) women have only meagre resources and less access to these different forms of capital compared to men. As a concluding note, as a rural development strategy, it is unquestionably important to improve rural women’ s access to all forms of capital (economic, cultural, social and symbolic) to rectify long-standing rural inequalities in Slavonia, Croatia.

rural women; economic/cultural/social/symbolic capital

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