Week 19: Intersections with Class, Taste and Embodied Distinction

Pierre Bourdieu: Class and cultural capital

• Legitimating social differences and determining of class via ‘distinction

• Relationship between cultural value and class differentiation

• ‘Field’ structured of hierarchical relationships created by struggle for different forms of ‘capital’:

  • Economic, cultural, social.

• ‘Habitus’ - ‘feel for the game’/socially constituted disposition

• Culture is a market

Pierre Bourdieu: Distinction: A social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979)

• Distinction constructs self-limiting senses of subjectivity, collective belonging and ‘moral’ judgement

• Choices perpetuating class difference not personal, or imposed, but determined by ‘habitus’ (social space constituted by resources to which people have access)

• Three forms of capital contribute to ‘lifestyle’

  • Economic capital (financial resources)

  • Social capital (resources based on group membership, relationships, and network of influence and support)

  • Cultural capital (forms of knowledge and skills e.g: educational resources)

Distinction is embedded and embodied:

• Taste is a construct which is socially determined

• ‘Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier […] oppositions similar in structure to those found in cultural practises also appear in eating habits’

• Taste = class culture turned into nature

Food ‘taste’ is not a choice, and is psychologically embedded:

• Dominant - rich in economic and cultural capital; vs dominated - poor in economic and cultural capital

• Choice are determined by relationship to necessity (taste of luxury vs taste of necessity)

• With food main opposition income BUT masks opposition of luxury (taste of freedom) vs necessity (expression of necessity)

• Dominated (working-class) subjects unquestioningly make choices constrained by necessity

• Dominant (middle-class) subjects unthinkingly exercise luxury of choice (i.e: self-imposed restraint)

• Dominant: spend less on food; choose light, ascetic, lean choices VS

  Dominated: greater proportionate expenditure copious, calorie- dense foods

• Food choices come to be perceived as moral issues (e.g: unjustified laxity; body shapes); ‘class racism’

Joshua Freedman and Dan Jurafsky

• Food and language = markers of group identity

‘Hi-falutin’/complexity of language:

• Expensive - more words than inexpensive

• Inexpensive - fewer, shorter more common words

• Expensive - uncommon words e.g. fresh, light, basic, extra

• Inexpensive - common words e.g: fresh, light, basic, extra