Culture, class, distinction

Abstract

funded project, Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion: A Critical Investigation, which commenced in 2003.The project aimed to revisit the methodological and theoretical relevance of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's conception of cultural capital' for understanding the relations between cultural taste and consumption and social class in contemporary Britain.The study examined aspects of consumption and participation in the cultural fields of music, reading, visual art, television, film and sport in order to find out: 1. whether it is possible to detect cultural capital and, if so, what form it takes; 2. whether there are homologous sets of distinctions between different cultural fields (if you like opera are you more likely to eat French food, for instance); and, 3. to what extent particular classes are advantaged by the organisation of cultural resources and how do similar processes operate on the relations between gender and ethnic groupings (2009,(12)(13)(14).The study identified cultural engagement, as manifested in 1. particular kinds and frequency of cultural participation, 2. particular tastes, and, 3. particular kinds of cultural knowledge (ibid, 38), through a questionnaire which was administered to 1791 of the UK population aged 18+ (a random sample of 1564 and an ethnic boost of 227 targeted at Britain's 3 major ethnic groups: Indian, Pakistani and black Caribbean).A further 25 focus groups and semi-structured interviews in 30 households (44 persons) were conducted with survey respondents who agreed to a follow-up interview. 1 The project aimed to replicate Bourdieu's study, reported in Distinction (1984), while also extending and qualifying it to take account of its shortcomings and contemporary social and political historical contexts.In particular, Bennett, Savage, Silva, Warde, Gayo-Cal and Wright add contemporary theorizations of gender and ethnicity to Bourdieu's conception of habitus as rooted in class disposition.Bennett et al. discuss cultural capital in relation to a conception of habitus which understands person formation as bound up with a range of complex interactions between class, gender, age and ethnicity.This analysis of gender, age and ethnicity and class, and the interactions between them also allows the decoupling of Bourdieu's conception of cultural capital and class, with its limitation that cultural capital functions only or primarily in relation to class differentiation.Rather Bennett et al's analysis attempts to shine light on the variety of ways in which cultural resources are deployed in a variety of social relations (ibid).In common with other contemporary studies of cultural taste (for example, Chan andGoldthorpe, 2007 andBunting, Chan, Goldthorpe, Keaney andOskala, 2008) Bennett et al find a cultural omnivorousness (the appreciation of different cultural genres regardless of their high' or low' classification) among certain social groupings, which challenges the high and low culture distinction used by Bourdieu.In other words, rather than a divide between high and