Bourdieu's Theory of taste Flashcards
What did early lawns represent?
- non-productive and expensive to maintain
- combined the leisure and the consumption principles –> symbolized “ignoble” labor that the owner didn’t need to engage in
- served as a physical, material expression of wealth and power given the labor and wasteful expense their maintenance required
What did Andrew Downing want for lawns?
- Downing wanted ordinary people to imitate the wealthy
- production of mechanized then later motorized lawn mowers made that possible
How did the meaning of lawns change over time?
- as they became more associated with middle-class homes
- By 40s Abraham Levitt (built first planned suburb outside NY) showed lawns as signs of good citizenship
- Upkeep of lawn = good personal values + trustworthiness
What are 3 aspects of contemporary lawns?
- revealed how consumption can be interpreted in moral terms
- lawns became massified & enforced by municipal regulations
- lawns involve corporations and big profits
How did lawns reveal how consumption can be interpreted in moral terms?
well-kempt/neglected lawns can distinguish the “worthy” from the “unworthy,” and the good neighbor from the bad one
How did lawns become massified?
- enforced by municipal regulations
- Comes to symbolise domesticity, family, comfort
- Turned into a mechanism for enforcing social control and reinforcing the important place of property rights
How did lawns involve corporations and big profits?
- Environmental issues related to chemical and water use
- counter-discourses that criticize lawns and view them as an example of excessive consumerism
What does the controversy of the lawn symbolise?
show shift in cultural meaning of lawn: elite privilege –> middle class obligation
Why does Bourdieu believe that taste and consumption are an expression of your social position?
- Through socialization, education, and experience, people internalize the cultural values associated with their class
- internalized values (habitus) guide our consumption practices
- People often have distaste for cultural practices of other groups
How does taste vary within the middle class?
- more educated layers of the middle class preferring more “abstract” forms of art
- less educated layers of the middle class prefer more traditional, literal forms of art
How does cultural capital get translated into cultural and economic power?
- more privileged groups are more likely to control key social and political institutions –> their cultural values are usually recognized as “better”
- These groups don’t have more culture but more “cultural capital”; their tastes may even be rewarded
- elite consumption practices can be a source of social legitimacy and social status
How is inequality reproduced through both economic power and cultural power?
- Valued cultural knowledge could be seen as a kind of ‘capital’ like economic resources
- Cultural capital is acquired through education and social upbringing + important source of social status
How does Bourdieu differ from Veblen’s theory?
culture can operate as semi-autonomous from economy and provide an alternative source of status
How does the relationship between economic capital (income, wealth), cultural capital (education), and consumer tastes produce distinct consumption patterns within a class?
- different combinations of cultural and economic capital all produce distinctive consumption patterns
Eg. relatively higher cultural capital but lower economic capital vs. higher economic capital but lower cultural capital
What are some critiques of Bourdieu?
- drew his conclusions based on his study of French society in the 60s-70s: how generalizable?
- placing a very strong emphasis on mechanisms of social reproduction > less to say about social mobility
- Doesn’t tackle questions of immigration; instead about a national context that could be imagined as culturally unified
