Cultural Sociology: Week 2 Readings

Summarizing Bourdieu’s theories and ideas, and Nakajima’s Bourdieuan analysis of Chinese contemporary cinematic field, with images from the Korean movie Parasite because I can’t help myself.

Artistic Fields

Social Construction of Ideas

Autonomous Pole

A self-closed field, without outside influences.

Heteronymous Pole

Interpenetration of fields; open to influence from other fields.

Lowbrow vs. Highbrow

Lowbrow = mass culture (low class)

Highbrow = elite culture (high class)

Economic Capital

Property, assets that have fiscal value

Cultural Capital

The level of cultural competence one has

Social Capital

Dependent on the size (and quality) of one's social network/relationships

Social Stratification

Three-dimensional social hierarchy, defined by the contents of and interplay between volumes and composition of capital.

Symbolic Capital

The resources available to an individual on the basis of honor, prestige or recognition, and serves as value that one holds within a culture.

Institutional Field

Specialized domains of institutional behavior in society.

Social Mobility

Ability to go up and down the socioeconomic ladder.

Families as Cultural Competence Cornerstone

• Language and Vocabulary

• Views on education

• Transmission of ideas and habitus

Schools’ Reproduction of Inequalities

• Objectively: credentializing, classifying, dividing, and labelling

• Subjectively: its environment/teachings mold the ways people see and interface with the world

Habitus

The everyday tastes and dispositions we actively and literally (though unconsciously) embody, the relatively enduring schemes of perception, appreciation, and appropriation of the world that we enact.

Food and Class

• Working class: food as fuel, filling, and nutritious

• Upper Class: Meal as social ceremony, small portions of light food

• Also a gendered aspect. Men need to gulp down hearty food, women need dainty foods (or develop disordered eating).

Woman and Cultural Competency

In a time when women were forced to be homemakers, they were the ones in charge of cultivating the symbolic and cultural capital of the home as the men cultivated the economic capital.

Culture Game

The game of correctly conducting one’s self in relationships and social situations, bound by the rules of the different capitals/fields.

Upper Class Taste

Ease, highbrow culture, form over function, excess, and rejection of the underclass.

Lower Class Taste

Practicality, necessity, affordability, versatility, and the yearning or rejection of the overclass.

Role Distance

Refers to the detachment of the performer from the role he or she is performing (Goffman).

Main Melody Films

Leitmotiv films. Cultural political films backed by the state. Low viewership before, slowly moving towards blockbuster.

Commercial films

Blockbusters. High budget domestic films intended for a large viewership. Economically motivated, lowbrow.

International Chinese Films

Academy Award nominees. Slightly counterpolitical films, foreign funded. Artsy and culturally relevant. Small audience. Moving towards mainstream and social acceptability.

Independent Films

Subversive films. Counter-political to the extreme, difficult to produce or distribute in China, creators often punished. Little to no local audience. Moving towards social acceptability.