Work · Sociology & Social Theory
Distinction
Survey data on French tastes, from music to food, show that judgements of taste mark and reproduce class – “taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier”; its postscript criticises Kant’s aesthetics.
Introduction
La Distinction: critique sociale du jugement – the subtitle plays on Kant’s Critique of Judgement – appeared in 1979 and draws on surveys carried out in France in the 1960s, together with interviews and photographs. Bourdieu maps social space along two axes: the total volume of capital and its composition, economic capital on one side and cultural capital, acquired through family and school, on the other. Each position corresponds to a habitus, a set of durable dispositions that generates tastes and practices, so that preferences in music, food, sport or furnishing form coherent lifestyles. Dominant groups display an aesthetic of distance from necessity, while working-class taste is described as a “taste of necessity”.
Connections
Builds on
- Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture1970 · Pierre Bourdieu
Criticizes
- Critique of Judgment1790 · Immanuel Kant
Taken up in
- Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation2011 · Eva Illouz
Criticized in
- Southern Theory2007 · Raewyn Connell
More works by Pierre Bourdieu
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