DistinctionNo judgement of taste is innocent. In a word, we are all snobs. Pierre Bourdieu brilliantly illuminates this situation of the middle class in the modern world. France's leading sociologist focusses here on the French bourgeoisie, its tastes and preferences. Distinction is at once a vast ethnography of contemporary France and a dissection of the bourgeois mind. In the course of everyday life people constantly choose between what they find aesthetically pleasing and what they consider tacky, merely trendy, or ugly. Bourdieu bases his study on surveys that took into account the multitude of social factors that play a part in a Frenchperson's choice of clothing, furniture, leisure activities, dinner menus for guests, and many other matters of taste. What emerges from his analysis is that social snobbery is everywhere in the bourgeois world. The different aesthetic choices people make are all distinctions-that is, choices made in opposition to those made by other classes. Taste is not pure. Bourdieu finds a world of social meaning in the decision to order bouillabaisse, in our contemporary cult of thinness, in the "California sports" such as jogging and cross-country skiing. The social world, he argues, functions simultaneously as a system of power relations and as a symbolic system in which minute distinctions of taste become the basis for social judgement. The topic of Bourdieu's book is a fascinating one: the strategies of social pretension are always curiously engaging. But the book is more than fascinating. It is a major contribution to current debates on the theory of culture and a challenge to the major theoretical schools in contemporary sociology. |
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User Review - le.vert.galant - LibraryThingIt's dated, overlong, and the prose is convoluted; however, the insights into the social construction of taste are thought provoking. Why do we like what we like? How much of our preferences are due ... Read full review
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User Review - g0ldenboy - LibraryThingWonderful work of obfuscation. Read full review
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aesthetic aesthetic disposition agents Agrégations artistic autodidacts avant-garde baccalauréat beautiful BEPC boulevard theatre bourgeois choices cial class fraction classical classification clerical workers commercial employers competence constituted craftsmen cultural capital defined definition devaluation distinction distribution dominant class dominated fractions economic capital educational capital educational system effect especially ethical example express fact field of production figures films find firms first function grandes écoles groups habitus hierarchy IFOP intellectual investment judgements junior labour legitimate culture less life-style logic manual workers means mode nomic objective occupations one’s opposition painting particular percent petite bourgeoisie political position practices principles professions profits properties proportion qualifications question recognized refusal relation relationship Salvatore Giuliano scholastic scientific secondary senior executives sense shopkeepers social capital social classes social origin social space social world specific strategies structure struggle survey symbolic taste teachers tends theatre things tion trajectory whole women working-class
Bibliographic information
| Title | Distinction |
| Author | Pierre Bourdieu |
| Edition | illustrated |
| Publisher | Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984 |
| Original from | the University of Michigan |
| Digitized | Jul 18, 2011 |
| ISBN | 0674212800, 9780674212800 |
| Length | 613 pages |
| Subjects | › › 1945 Aesthetics, French Civilization France Philosophy / Aesthetics Social Science / Anthropology / Cultural Social Science / Anthropology / General Social classes |
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