Game of Thrones, Season 2, Episode 4

Title: Game of Thrones, Season 2, Episode 4
Tags: Capital, Power, Cultural Capital, Social Capital, Cult, Bourdieu
Authors: Tamara Grasty and Lara Olgiati
Date: March 23, 2015

Watch the clip here from 49:24

Game of Thrones is a television series that is fragmented into various regions of an imaginary world with many opposing rulers. In our analysis, we will focus on a particular region, Dragonstone in which Melisandre, the Red Priestess, and Stannis Baratheon, brother of the late king Robert Baratheon, live. She has recently converted Stannis to a new religion which worships the Lord of Light under the motto: “The night is dark and full of terrors.” Melisandre, the enigmatic Red Priestess appears in the second season as a charismatic religious leader. The audience is given little of her personal background and for much of the second season questions her proclaimed magical abilities. Melisandre was the child of a slave but was chosen by the Lord of Light to become the Red Priestess. In her waxing power she chooses her own followers and promotes them to positions of power which showcase her control of their political hierarchy.

In our episode of focus “Garden of Bones” Stannis and Melisandre try to convince Renly, Stannis’ brother, that he should relinquish his army and control and in reward he will have a position on Stannis’ council. Renly refuses, and Melisandre tells him to “Look to your sins Lord Renly, for the night is dark and full of terrors.” She returns to the sea gates that and gives birth to a shadow child which assassinates him.

Using Bourdieu’s theory of “Forms of Capital” we dissect the types of  capital Melisandre utilizes in her political ascendance. Her cultural capital is easily divided into the subsections of embodied state, objectified state and institutionalized state. Although we know little of her upbring we may presume that she has invested a significant amount of time and energy in learning about her new religion and in becoming a legitimate leader of this new cult. She has the ability to perform blood rituals, foresee the future, give birth to shadow children and is immune to poison. She uses tools, objectified state, such as her fire cauldron which she can use to perform blood magic to see into the future. She is also always appropriately attired to signify to her constituents that she is a legitimate figure in her developing cult. Because her cult is newly established her institutionalized state is in its infancy and therefore has none of the official certificates which Bourdieu cites as an essential legitimization of this subset of cultural capital. She was educated by the Lord of Light himself and is the primary teacher for her new disciples. Her political power is the result of her symbolic power although none of this is directly translatable into economic capital. In fact, their lack of economic capital is a source of their political weakness. Stannis does not have a proper army at his disposal  and at the same time Dragonstone does not have enough money to sustain the expansion of this army. Melisandre, by giving birth to the shadow child, is able to provide Stannis with the destructive force he requires to assassinate his rival Renly Baratheon.

Melisandre increases her social capital which is defined as “actual and potential network of institutionalized relations” (Bourdieu). She has created a cult of which she is the center and is in the process of legitimizing her power through religious intolerance similar to the Spanish Inquisition.  She originates her own practices, places and occasions said to be the markers of a legitimate institution. The Red Priestess’s social capital is best summarized in Bourdieu’s concept of the personality cult: “Everything combines to cause the signifier to take the place of the signified, the spokesmen that of the group he is supposed to express, not least because his distinction, his ‘outstandingness,’ his visibility constitute the essential part, if not the essence, of this power, which, being entirely set within the logic of knowledge and acknowledgment, is fundamentally a symbolic power; but also because the representative, the sign, the emblem, may be, and create, the whole reality of groups which receive effective social existence only in and through representation” (Bourdieu).

Bourdieu’s notion that all forms of capital are reducible to economic capital does not apply well to this character analysis because although Melisandre is powerful, her skills are not economically comparable and so she and her constituents remain relatively poor in that sense.