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Bourdieus theory of taste

According to Bour- dieu, different social classes distinguish themselves from each other through displays of cultural capital or taste.

For Bourdieu, the social world consists of various, semi-autonomous fields (such as the field of politics, arts, education or religion) in which actors draw on a range of resources as a way of competing for status (symbolic capital). These resources may be economic, social or cultural. Habitus is defined as:
. . . systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organise practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them. (Bourdieu, 1990a: 53)

Moreover, he uses the concept of ‘practice’ as a way of injecting notions of accomplishment, strategy and skill into objective structural assumptions about power and class.

In his discussion of cultural lifestyle and taste, Bourdieu set out implicitly to repudiate the Kantian approach to aesthetics which suggested that high cultural objects had some kind of intrinsic quality and worth and that aesthetic judgement was somehow ‘disinterested’.

Rather, he wanted to show that cultural taste was socially structured and reflected an individual’s position in the social hierarchy.

Cultural capital may be used in any social field; however, it is most overtly enacted in the field of consumption and used to define taste (Holt, 1998: 4).

Taste, for Bourdieu, is expressed through the ‘habitus’ or lifestyle of the cultural

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