Class

To what extent is class cultural

Partially cultural because people in the same class are in the same positions in the field, tend to resemble and therefore reinforce one another

• reinforce and resemble one another (Bourdieu)

• visible across the UK e.g. clothing (Burberyy vs Tom’s Trunks) accents, slang, music, leisure activities

• different culturla enjoyments become symbolic boundaries (Lamont)

• partially manifested by habitus and can even seem like an active choice of individuals

cultural dimension of class is also strongly structurally informed, is a porduct of inequality and hierarchy

• what is valued is what is culturally positioned as upper class

• work of the state, education and cultural critics (Savage)

• opposition between upper and lower class between cultural value and vulgarity (Lamont)

• can be seen throughout history e.g. Mill’s higher or lower pleasures

• Burberry being seen as tacky or even ‘chavvy’

• groups are not just differentiated but positioned in a hierarchy

slightly harder to apply in the modern day

• savage; Bourdieu’s conepts of high and cultural capital no longer apply, even rejected by people like Reckwitz

• emergence of cultural omnivores (Lamont)

• rap music, roadman slang, styles of dressing

• is it creating cultural hierarchies in the same way

but still very much is, cultural omnivore based on a privilege

• get to pick and choose as they like

• cultural appropriation

• can even be seen on a more global scale, items not removed from their context of inequality and hierarchy but rather appropriated

• access is entirely determined by class

• inverse with black middle class trying to engage n white culture - Meghdji

• have to decode certain spaces as white whereas white middle class children never really have to do this work

how does it relate to economic inequality

• can help clarify/further hierarchize economic inequality e.g. technical middle class vs upper middle class (Savage), old money vs new money

• can also help explain why someone who wins the lottery doesn’t change class status overnight

• but also need to see cultural capital as deeply informed by economic capital

• Bourdieu saw economic capital as the fundamental basis; shapes where you live, what you have access to

• also important to think of it in a cumulative form e.g. rights over the future

Do you agree with Bourdieu that social classes ‘exist twice’

exist twice = they exist objectively and subjectively. they are real world structures defined by individual’s positions in a social space (based on access to economic, cultural adn social capital) but also exist in how people perceive themselves and others, their tastes, preferences and behaviours,

methodological relationism to grasp the intertwined nature of objective and subjective experiences

agents actively produce social relaity through their mundane activities of sense-making, but they do so based on the positions that they occupy in an objective space of constraints and facilitiations based on that space [Wacquant]

analytics and empirics of class are intertwined