‘Like a “fish in water”’: swim club membership and the construction of the upper-middle-class family habitus
Cultural theorist Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus has been widely operationalised in relation to sport, yet there has been little scholarship considering the notion of family habitus. Through ethnographic methods, this research offers an empirically based analysis delineating the way in which the Valley View Swim and Tennis Club is a constitutive element of members’ upper-middle-class family habitus. Specifically, I argue that swim club membership is anchored in a distinct family tradition and offers members an important cultural field facilitating their experience of family time. However, members’ routine trips to the pool are naturalised, taken-for-granted elements of their summer lifestyles emblematic of their class privilege, and thus club membership operates as a valuable, yet subtle technique to reproduce their upper-middle-class family habitus.