Pierre Bourdieu brilliantly illuminates this situation of the middle class in the modern world. To scientifically understand people’s tastes, we must take into account their ordinary ways of thinking about them.No judgment of taste is innocent. We don’t want to offend anyone by calling their favorite artist “middle-brow,” so you fill in the blanks here. In your society today, what would you consider popular, middle-brow, and legitimate tastes in music? For instance, back then, “The Blue Danube” was an example of popular French taste in music, while “Hungarian Rhapsody” was middle-brow, and “Concerto for the Left Hand” was “legitimate.” Nowadays, many people wouldn’t even be familiar with any of these pieces of music.īut Bourdieu invites us to apply his ideas to our own cultural contexts, so let’s take him up on that invitation for a moment.
The ones that author Pierre Bourdieu focuses on are drawn from 1960s France, so many of them will seem dated or culturally specific to us now. It’s, therefore, impossible to give any timeless, universal examples here. For instance, residents of trendy and happening cities tend to have more “fashionable” tastes than people in small, sleepy towns – even if they’re members of the same class. They can even differ within the same society during the same time period based on factors beyond class, such as ethnicity, gender, age, and place of residence. They also change from one era to the next. Now, the details of all these tastes vary from culture to culture.
They may not be affluent, but they do have a lot of cultural cachet, so their tastes carry a lot of weight. The cultural elite includes the more “refined” members of the upper class but also thought-leaders and taste-makers like intellectuals and artists. And at the highest end, there are the “bourgeois” tastes of the upper class, along with what sociologists call the “legitimate” tastes of the cultural elite.
Next up, there are the “middle-brow” tastes of the middle class. At the bottom of the scale, there are the “popular” tastes of the working class. Generally speaking, we tend to divide both tastes and classes along a scale that goes from low to high. The key message here is: We associate different tastes with different social classes. And that’s because all of us have intuitions about taste that are strongly tied up with our ideas about class. Now, if you had to guess, to which social class would you say each person probably belongs?Ĭhances are, you’d say the first person probably belongs to a much “higher” class than the second one. The first person likes to attend classical music concerts and visit art museums, while the second prefers to watch wrestling matches and go to amusement parks. Imagine two people with very different tastes in leisure activities.
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