Why do we like the things we like? It's a question we rarely stop to consider. In our day-to-day lives, we usually just take our tastes for granted and act on them without much thought. When you're hungry, you don't ponder "Why do I enjoy ratatouille so much?" You simply let your preference for rustic French cuisine guide your dinner decision.
But our tastes influence far more than just our food choices. We have preferences that shape nearly every choice we make about how we spend our time and money - from the clothes we wear to the books we read and everything in between. Our tastes in hairstyles, home decor, hobbies, sports, music, movies, art, and even the personality traits we seek in friends and partners all come together to define much of who we are as individuals. Our tastes determine what we do, what we own, what we want, who we associate with, and how we present ourselves to the world.
So where do these tastes come from? And what do they reveal about us? These are the central questions explored in Pierre Bourdieu's groundbreaking book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Through extensive sociological research, Bourdieu develops a comprehensive theory about the relationship between taste and social class. His findings reveal that our preferences are not as individual or innate as we might assume, but are deeply shaped by our socioeconomic status and upbringing.
Distinction offers a new way of understanding how class divisions are created and maintained in society through the seemingly innocuous realm of personal taste. By unpacking the hidden social meanings behind our likes and dislikes, Bourdieu provides profound insights into how power and inequality are reproduced through culture. His work continues to be hugely influential across sociology, anthropology, cultural studies and beyond.
This summary will explore the key ideas and arguments presented in Distinction, breaking down Bourdieu's complex theory into more digestible concepts. We'll examine how tastes correlate to class positions, how our preferences emerge from our material conditions, and how taste functions as a marker of social distinction. By the end, you'll have a new framework for understanding the sociological significance of something as mundane as your music playlist or your favorite restaurants.
The Relationship Between Taste and Class
We all have intuitive ideas about how taste relates to social class. If you were to imagine two people with very different leisure preferences - say, one who enjoys classical music concerts and art museums versus another who prefers wrestling matches and amusement parks - you would likely assume they belong to quite different social classes.
This reflects how we tend to associate certain tastes with certain class positions. Generally, we divide both tastes and social classes along a scale from low to high:
- At the bottom are the "popular" tastes of the working class
- In the middle are the "middlebrow" tastes of the middle class
- At the top are the "bourgeois" tastes of the upper class and the "legitimate" tastes of the cultural elite
The cultural elite includes the more "refined" members of the upper class as well as taste-making intellectuals and artists. They may not all be wealthy, but they have significant cultural cachet.
Of course, the specific tastes associated with each class vary across cultures and time periods. They can even differ within the same society based on factors like ethnicity, gender, age, and geography. For instance, urban residents often have more "fashionable" tastes than small-town dwellers of the same class.
So while we can't point to universal examples, we all have a general sense of how taste and class align in our own cultural context. You likely have an idea of what music or fashion would be considered "lowbrow" versus "highbrow" where you live.
This common sense provides a starting point for investigating taste, but it's not scientifically rigorous. To develop a more sophisticated understanding, we need to examine how people's ideas about taste and class actively shape the realities of taste and class.
For example, imagine inviting members of the French elite to a circus in 1960s Paris. They would likely react with disgust, viewing it as a "vulgar" activity beneath their station - in part because they associate it with working class tastes. In contrast, they would eagerly accept an invitation to the opera, seeing it as befitting their elite status.
This illustrates how our attraction or aversion to certain activities depends on how we conceive of ourselves and those activities in class terms. The elite's aversion to the circus partly reflects their aversion to things associated with the working class. Their opera preference reinforces their identity as elites.
If you repeated this with working class French people, you'd likely get the opposite reactions. They would embrace the circus as something "for people like us" while rejecting the opera as being "for fancy people."
Thus, people's notions about the relationship between taste and class become self-fulfilling prophecies. Because the elite perceive opera as an elite activity, it actually becomes one - something generally done by elites and avoided by the working class. The same happens in reverse for the circus.
This creates a feedback loop. The more that class-based perceptions shape behavior, the more those behaviors reinforce the perceptions. Opera and circuses become defining features of their respective classes.
So our intuitions about taste and class aren't just passive ideas - they actively construct the social realities of taste and class. As human beings, we don't just experience the social world, we help create it through our actions and the ideas guiding them.
Bourdieu's Hypothesis on Taste and Class
To move beyond common sense notions and gain deeper insight into taste and class, we need empirical data. In the 1960s, Pierre Bourdieu conducted extensive surveys to gather this data. But before creating his surveys, Bourdieu needed a hypothesis to guide his research questions.
Building on and refining our intuitive understanding, Bourdieu hypothesized that taste and class could be understood in terms of a three-dimensional social space rather than a simple high-low hierarchy. The three key dimensions he identified were:
- Volume of capital
- Composition of capital
- Social trajectory
Capital refers to any assets that enable power, possessions, status, or advancement in society. Bourdieu focused on two main types:
Economic capital: Money and other economic assets like property or stocks
Cultural capital: Non-economic assets that confer status, including education, cultural knowledge, social connections, manners of speech/dress, etc.
Your overall volume of capital is the sum total of your economic and cultural capital. This can be high, low, or somewhere in between compared to the average.
The composition of your capital refers to how it's divided between economic and cultural forms. You might have more of one type than the other.
Finally, your social trajectory is how your capital has changed over time - whether you're on an upward or downward path socially.
Bourdieu hypothesized that people's tastes would correlate to their position within this three-dimensional social space. To visualize this, imagine an X-Y graph:
- The vertical Y-axis represents volume of capital (higher = more total capital)
- The horizontal X-axis represents composition of capital (left side = more cultural capital, right side = more economic capital)
Different tastes should cluster in different quadrants of this graph. For instance, university lecturers and artists would fall close together in the upper-left quadrant - above average total capital, but more cultural than economic. Their tastes should be similar.
Meanwhile, executives and shopkeepers might cluster in the upper-right - also above average capital, but more economic than cultural. Their tastes would differ from the lecturers/artists.
The third dimension of social trajectory adds further nuance. Two people could occupy similar positions on the graph but have different trajectories - one rising from a lower class background, one falling from a higher class background. This could lead to some taste differences despite their similar current positions.
To test this hypothesis, Bourdieu conducted two major surveys in 1960s France, gathering data on people's class backgrounds, current socioeconomic positions, and tastes across many domains. The results largely confirmed his theory - people's tastes did tend to cluster based on their position in the three-dimensional social space he had conceptualized.
How Tastes Emerge from Material Conditions
So why do certain tastes correspond to certain class positions? Bourdieu argued that people's preferences ultimately emerge from and reflect the material conditions of their lives.
We can see this clearly in something as basic as food preferences. There are obvious economic factors - if you're poor, you can only afford cheap meals; if you're wealthy, you can splurge on gourmet cuisine. But other material conditions also shape tastes in subtle ways.
For instance, in 1960s France, working class men placed high value on physical strength due to their manual labor jobs. This led them to prefer hearty, filling meals that could fuel their physical work - not dainty portions of haute cuisine. They developed a taste for cheap, nourishing food that reflected their economic constraints and physical needs.
The same dynamic applied to clothing preferences. Working class people gravitated toward affordable, durable garments that could withstand manual labor - again reflecting their income levels and work requirements.
Notice how working class tastes in both food and clothing emerge from similar material conditions: low income and physically demanding jobs. This illustrates how particular tastes for different things often cluster around the same class position due to shared underlying conditions.
If we look at all of someone's dispositions toward the various realms of taste - food, clothing, furniture, art, music, hobbies, etc. - the result is what Bourdieu calls their habitus. Your habitus is essentially your overall set of dispositions that guides your lifestyle choices. It's the underlying logic beneath how you live your life.
For the working class, we can see an emphasis on utility and substance over aesthetics and form across many domains. They want filling food and sturdy clothing rather than fancy meals or chic outfits. They prefer straightforward, entertaining movies over avant-garde cinema. This reflects how their material conditions force them to prioritize survival and practical concerns over more rarefied pleasures.
In contrast, the habitus of the affluent cultural elite shows the reverse pattern. Their wealth frees them from focusing on mere utility, allowing them to emphasize formal and aesthetic qualities instead. They can treat food as a gourmet experience, clothing as artistic expression, and so on. Their tastes reflect how their privileged material conditions allow them to act as if they are "above" mundane practical concerns.
Importantly, developing and exercising "refined" tastes requires significant cultural capital. To appreciate the formal elements that make a painting "good" Impressionism, you need extensive knowledge of art history and aesthetic theory. This requires major investments of time and resources in cultivating your cultural knowledge from a young age - museum visits, art classes, exposure to "high culture" at home, advanced education, etc.
Without this cultural capital, you can't even identify the features of art you're supposed to have opinions about. So by developing "refined" tastes, elites are not just distinguishing between artists or styles - they're distinguishing themselves as the type of people who can make those distinctions. Their tastes become a marker of their elite status.
How Taste Creates Social Distinction
This brings us to one of Bourdieu's key insights: taste provides a means of making class distinctions. Our preferences allow us to classify ourselves and others into different social categories.
Think about how class membership works in practice. You belong to a certain class if other people view and treat you as belonging to that class. But for this to happen, there need to be recognizable criteria for class belonging. Middle class people need to look and act in certain ways that others can identify as distinctly middle class.
Taste enables this process of classification. On one hand, a person's middle class tastes lead them to adopt a middle class lifestyle - wearing certain clothes, eating certain foods, pursuing certain hobbies, etc. On the other hand, other people's sense of taste allows them to recognize those choices as markers of middle class status.
So taste allows us to distinguish both ourselves and others in terms of class. It provides the basis for making fine-grained social distinctions.
This is especially powerful for elites, as their "refined" tastes in art, food, fashion etc. provide exclusionary ways of demonstrating their status. Only those with the proper cultural capital can fully participate in elite taste cultures. This creates clear boundaries between insiders and outsiders.
Bourdieu argues that taste distinctions help reproduce class structures by naturalizing social differences. When we attribute someone's tastes to their innate sensibilities rather than their class position, we obscure how social inequality shapes cultural preferences. This makes class divisions seem more legitimate and harder to challenge.
So while our tastes may feel highly personal, they are deeply social phenomena that play a key role in how class hierarchies are created and maintained. By unpacking the links between taste and class, Bourdieu reveals how power operates through culture in subtle but important ways.
Conclusion
Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction offers a revolutionary framework for understanding the sociological significance of our seemingly mundane preferences and lifestyle choices. By revealing how our tastes emerge from and reflect our class positions, Bourdieu demonstrates that aesthetic judgments are never purely individual or innocent. Instead, taste functions as a form of "cultural capital" that plays a key role in reproducing social hierarchies and inequalities.
Some key takeaways from Bourdieu's theory:
Our tastes correlate strongly with our position in social space, as defined by our volume of capital, composition of capital, and social trajectory.
Our preferences ultimately stem from the material conditions of our lives, reflecting our economic constraints, occupational demands, and cultural resources.
Taste provides a means of making fine-grained social distinctions, allowing us to classify ourselves and others into different class fractions.
"Refined" tastes require significant cultural capital to develop and exercise, making them powerful markers of elite status.
By naturalizing social differences, taste distinctions help reproduce class structures and inequalities.
While the specific tastes Bourdieu analyzed in 1960s France may now seem dated, his broader theoretical framework remains immensely valuable. His work invites us to critically examine our own preferences and cultural hierarchies, considering how they might reflect and reinforce social divides.
Distinction also opens up new ways of thinking about how power operates through culture. By showing how something as personal as our tastes can be shaped by larger social forces, Bourdieu reveals the deep interconnections between our inner lives and broader structures of inequality.
Ultimately, Bourdieu's insights challenge us to look beyond surface-level cultural differences and consider the underlying social conditions that produce them. In doing so, he offers a powerful tool for understanding - and potentially changing - how class hierarchies are upheld through our everyday choices and judgments.
So the next time you're deciding what to eat, watch, wear, or hang on your walls, consider how your preferences might be shaped by your social position. Our tastes may feel natural and individual, but they are inevitably products of our place in society. By becoming more aware of these dynamics, we can start to see - and perhaps reshape - how culture and inequality intertwine in our lives.
Key Concepts and Terms
To fully grasp Bourdieu's theory, it's helpful to review some of the key concepts and terms he uses:
Capital: Any assets that enable power, possessions, status, or advancement in society. Bourdieu focuses on two main types:
- Economic capital: Money and other economic assets (property, stocks, etc.)
- Cultural capital: Non-economic assets that confer status (education, cultural knowledge, manners, etc.)
Volume of capital: The total amount of economic and cultural capital a person possesses.
Composition of capital: How a person's capital is divided between economic and cultural forms.
Social trajectory: How a person's volume and composition of capital has changed over time.
Social space: The three-dimensional space created by volume of capital, composition of capital, and social trajectory. People's position in this space correlates to their tastes.
Class fraction: A group of people who occupy a similar position in social space, often clustering around certain occupations.
Habitus: A person's overall set of dispositions that guides their lifestyle choices. The underlying logic of how they live their life.
Cultural elite: Taste-making intellectuals and artists who may not be wealthy but have high cultural capital.
Legitimate taste: The most socially valued forms of cultural preference, requiring significant cultural capital to develop and exercise.
Distinction: The process of using taste to make fine-grained social classifications and reinforce class boundaries.
Misrecognition: Attributing taste differences to innate sensibilities rather than class position, obscuring how social inequality shapes preferences.
Understanding these concepts provides a toolkit for applying Bourdieu's insights to our own cultural contexts. While the specific tastes he analyzed may be outdated, his theoretical framework remains powerful for unpacking how our preferences relate to social structures.
Critiques and Limitations of Bourdieu's Theory
While Distinction has been hugely influential, it's also faced various criticisms that are worth considering:
Determinism: Some argue Bourdieu's theory is overly deterministic, not allowing enough room for individual agency in developing tastes. Critics say people can and do develop preferences that diverge from what their class position would predict.
Historical specificity: Bourdieu's data comes from 1960s France, leading some to question how applicable his findings are to other times and places. Cultural hierarchies and class structures vary significantly across societies.
Neglect of other factors: The focus on class may obscure other important influences on taste like gender, race, ethnicity, age, etc. These can intersect with class in complex ways.
Elitism: Some see Bourdieu as reinscribing elitist notions of "high" and "low" culture, even as he critiques how these distinctions function socially.
Lack of attention to mass/popular culture: Bourdieu is criticized for focusing too much on "legitimate" culture and not enough on mass media and popular cultural forms.
Overgeneralization: The theory may smooth over individual variations and subcultures that don't fit neatly into class-based taste patterns.
These critiques highlight some limitations of Bourdieu's work. However, many scholars have built on his ideas to address these issues, applying his framework to new contexts and integrating other social factors beyond class.
Even with its limitations, Distinction remains a landmark text that fundamentally reshaped how we think about the relationship between culture and social structure. Its core insights about how taste relates to power and inequality continue to be highly relevant for understanding contemporary societies.
Applying Bourdieu's Ideas Today
While Bourdieu's specific examples may be dated, his theoretical framework can still yield valuable insights when applied to contemporary culture. Here are some ways we might use his ideas to analyze current taste patterns:
Music preferences: How do tastes in genres like hip-hop, EDM, indie rock, or country music correlate to class positions today? What cultural capital is needed to appreciate certain artists or subgenres?
Food culture: How do trends like farm-to-table dining, veganism, or molecular gastronomy reflect the tastes of particular class fractions? What do fast food preferences signify?
Fashion: What do brand choices communicate about social position? How does "high fashion" function as a marker of elite taste?
Technology: How do preferences for certain devices, platforms, or apps relate to cultural and economic capital? What distinguishes "tech-savvy" tastes?
Travel: How do vacation preferences - backpacking, all-inclusive resorts, ecotourism, etc. - reflect class-based dispositions?
Education: How do school choices relate to class fractions? What cultural capital is needed to navigate college admissions?
Fitness/wellness: How do different health and exercise regimens reflect class-based habitus? What do preferences for yoga, CrossFit, or team sports signify?
Home decor: How do interior design choices communicate social position? What distinguishes "tasteful" from "tacky" decor?
By examining these realms through Bourdieu's lens, we can unpack how contemporary taste distinctions relate to social hierarchies. This can reveal how cultural preferences continue to play a role in reproducing inequality, even as the specific markers of "high" and "low" taste evolve.
Of course, we should be cautious about overgeneralizing - individual tastes don't always align neatly with class position. But Bourdieu's framework still provides a valuable tool for critically examining how our cultural choices relate to broader social structures.
The Legacy and Influence of Distinction
Since its publication in 1979, Distinction has had an enormous impact across the social sciences and humanities. Its influence extends far beyond sociology into fields like anthropology, cultural studies, education, and even marketing.
Some key areas where Bourdieu's ideas have been particularly influential include:
Cultural sociology: Distinction helped establish culture as a central focus in sociological research, spurring new ways of studying how symbolic boundaries relate to social inequalities.
Education research: Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital has been widely applied to understanding how class backgrounds shape educational outcomes and experiences.
Consumer behavior: Marketing researchers have used Bourdieu's framework to analyze how consumption patterns relate to social identities and status-seeking.
Art and literary studies: The book reshaped how scholars think about artistic canons and processes of cultural legitimation.
Media studies: Bourdieu's ideas have informed research on how media consumption relates to class formation and social distinction.
Social theory: Distinction advanced influential concepts like habitus that have been taken up across the social sciences.
Political sociology: The book's insights have been applied to understanding political attitudes, participation, and polarization.
Urban studies: Researchers have used Bourdieu's framework to analyze gentrification and spatial segregation in cities.
While some of Bourdieu's specific claims have been challenged or revised, his overall approach continues to inspire new research and theoretical developments. Many scholars have built on his work to develop more nuanced understandings of how culture intersects with class, gender, race, and other social factors.
Distinction's enduring legacy is its compelling demonstration of how seemingly personal matters of taste are deeply intertwined with larger social structures. By revealing the hidden ways that culture can reproduce inequality, Bourdieu's work continues to offer valuable tools for critically examining our social world.
Practical Implications: Becoming More Aware of Taste and Class
Understanding Bourdieu's ideas can change how we think about our own tastes and cultural choices. Here are some ways we might apply these insights in our daily lives:
Reflect on your preferences: Consider how your tastes in food, music, art, fashion etc. might relate to your class background and current social position. What aspects of your habitus feel "natural" but may actually reflect your socialization?
Examine your judgments: When you find yourself looking down on certain tastes as "lowbrow" or "tacky," consider how those judgments might reflect class-based distinctions rather than inherent quality.
Expand your cultural horizons: Try engaging with cultural forms outside your usual preferences. This can help denaturalize your tastes and build appreciation for diverse aesthetic traditions.
Consider others' perspectives: When encountering people with very different tastes, try to understand how their preferences might reflect their social position and life experiences rather than judging them.
Recognize cultural capital: Be aware of how certain cultural knowledge and dispositions function as valuable "capital" in different social contexts. Consider who has access to acquiring this capital.
Question hierarchies: Challenge assumptions about what counts as "sophisticated" or "legitimate" culture. Consider how these hierarchies might reinforce social inequalities.
Analyze media/marketing: Notice how ads and media content often appeal to class-based dispositions and aspirations. Consider how this shapes consumer behavior.
Examine institutions: Consider how schools, museums, and other cultural institutions may cater to and reproduce the tastes of particular class fractions.
By cultivating this kind of reflexive awareness, we can start to see the social forces shaping our preferences more clearly. This doesn't mean we need to abandon our tastes, but it allows us to engage with culture more critically and empathetically.
Understanding these dynamics can also empower us to navigate different social contexts more skillfully. We might code-switch our cultural presentations strategically or work to acquire valuable forms of cultural capital.
Ultimately, Bourdieu's insights invite us to think more deeply about how our individual choices connect to larger social patterns. By seeing taste as a social phenomenon rather than just a personal matter, we open up new possibilities for understanding - and perhaps changing - how culture relates to power and inequality in our lives.
Final Thoughts: The Ongoing Relevance of Bourdieu's Work
Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction offers a powerful framework for understanding how our seemingly personal preferences are shaped by and reinforce larger social structures. By revealing the hidden connections between taste and class, Bourdieu challenges us to think more critically about culture's role in reproducing inequality.
While the specific taste distinctions Bourdieu analyzed in 1960s France may now seem dated, his broader theoretical approach remains highly relevant. In our current era of stark inequality and cultural polarization, understanding how aesthetic judgments relate to social divides is perhaps more important than ever.
Bourdieu's work invites us to:
- Examine how our own tastes reflect our social position and upbringing
- Consider how cultural preferences can function as a form of "capital"
- Recognize how institutions and media shape and reinforce taste hierarchies
- Question assumptions about what counts as "legitimate" or valuable culture
- Understand how fine-grained cultural distinctions can maintain class boundaries
By cultivating this kind of reflexive awareness, we can engage more critically and empathetically with culture. We might work to expand our own cultural horizons, challenge exclusionary taste hierarchies, or use our understanding strategically to navigate different social contexts.
Of course, Bourdieu's theory has limitations and critiques that are important to consider. We should be cautious about overgeneralizing or reducing all cultural choices to class position. Other factors like gender, race, age, and individual agency also shape our tastes in complex ways.
But even with these caveats, Distinction's core insight about the deep connections between our inner lives and larger social structures remains profound. By revealing how something as personal as our tastes can reflect and reinforce inequality, Bourdieu offers a powerful tool for understanding - and potentially changing - how culture and class intersect.
In our current moment of cultural fragmentation and "culture wars," Bourdieu's framework can help us unpack the social meanings behind aesthetic and lifestyle divides. It invites us to look beyond surface-level cultural differences to consider the underlying conditions that produce them.
Ultimately, Distinction challenges us to think more deeply about how power operates through culture in both obvious and subtle ways. By becoming more aware of these dynamics, we open up new possibilities for engaging with culture more intentionally and working towards a more equitable society.
So the next time you're deciding what to watch, wear, or put on your playlist, consider how your choices might connect to larger social patterns. Our tastes may feel natural and individual, but they are inevitably shaped by our place in society. Recognizing this can be the first step towards consciously shaping the role culture plays in our lives and communities.