The GENERAL CONTEXT of such use is:
misrecognition: (a) The agents involved in a given field share a 'misrecognition' of the true relations between the structure of that field and the structures of economic and political power; in the religious field, for example, this misrecognition, shared by all participants, is the foundation of what is known as belief, a concept amenable to transfer into the analysis of any other field, as to what constitutes misrecognition. As a further example, in the educational institute, the way in which teacher's judgements on their pupils transmute, or translate, social classifications (of the pupils) into school (and societal) classifications. The analyses of misrecognition may further be extrapolated unto the institutional and social positions of the various categories of teachers, which predispose them toward specific ideologies and practices in their pedagogic actions.
(b) The process whereby power relations are perceived not for what they objectively are but in a form which renders them legitimate in the eyes of the beholder.
(c) In any given social formation, the dominant educational system is able to set up the dominant pedagogical work as the work of that schooling, without either those who exercise it or those who undergo it, ever ceasing to misrecognize its dependence on the power relations making up the social formation in which it is carried on, because (1) by the means proper to the institution, it produces and reproduces the necessary conditions for the exercise of its internal function of inculcating, which are at the same time the sufficient conditions for the fulfillment of its external function of reproducing the legitimate culture and for its correlative contribution towards reproducing the power relations; and because (2) by the mere fact of existing and persisting as an institution, it implies the institutional conditions for misrecognition of the symbolic violence it exerts, i.e. because the institutional means available to it, as a relatively autonomous institution monopolizing the legitimate use of symbolic violence, are predisposed to serve additionally, hence under the guise of neutrality, the groups or classes whose cultural arbitrary it reproduces (dependence through independence).