Field Tripping: The Power of Inherit the Wind

Focusing on the example of Inherit the Wind, this essay explores the porous border between the artistic and the legal fields, highlighting the power of a popular cultural product to rewrite history. The play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee fits Pierre Bourdieu’s conception of the field of cultural production almost perfectly, explicating the play’s trajectory and position, especially with regards to value and popularity. At the same time, precisely because of its popularity, Inherit the Wind also transcends the role that bourdieu assigns to works of art. like a ghost moving through walls, the piece has entered new spaces, one of which is the legal universe. the article investigates the phantasmal energy with which symbols migrate from one field to another, undermining their separateness and distinctness. in so doing, it questions schemas of power—like bourdieu’s—in which so-called popular culture is relegated to a dominated position.