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Changing representation of status through taste displays: An introduction
POETICS ELSEVIER
Poetics 25 (1997) 71-73
Changing representation of status through taste displays: An introduction Richard A. P e t e r s o n * Department of Sociology, Vanderbilt University, P.O. Box 1635 Station B, Nashville, TN 37235, USA
In the early years of the twentieth century Max Weber tried to save the idea of stratification from the pure economism of Karl Marx. Weber distinguished between the concept of social class based in its relation to the means of economic reproduction and what he called 'status honor' based in its relation to the means of cultural reproduction (Weber, 1946). But not since the work of Lloyd Warner and his associates in the 1930s has the cultural component of stratification received so much serious attention among social scientists as it has since the seminal work of Pierre Bourdieu and his associates beginning in the 1960s (cf. Bourdieu, 1984) and the revitalization of interest in culture more generally. One of the recurrent questions has been the degree of fit between social class and status honor. For most of the twentieth century, status honor was based in discriminating taste, that is knowing what goods are to be consumed (and which shunned) as well as knowing the bases on which they are appreciated (or condemned) (Veblen, 1899; Simmel, 1904: Weber, 1946; Riesman, 1950; Warner, 1953; Gans, 1974; Bourdieu, 1984). One of the recurrent questions has been to assess the fit between social class and status honor, but for social scientists - as for people generally - the continually vexing question has been the best specific markers of good taste and the underlying bases of appreciation. Markers of taste are manifold. They include such material things as the fashionable cut of clothes, proper home fumishings, au courant etiquette, appropriate ways of speaking, as well as the correct political and social attitudes and values to espouse. Finding stable markers is made even more difficult because it is not just that the objects of appreciation change over time, but, as Holt, Buchmann and Eisner, and I argue in the articles that follow, the principles on which taste is based change over time as well. Many social scientists argue that the markers of social class are quite stable over time, and, in practice, the markers of status honor may change more rapidly, but the bases on which social classes form are not unchanging (Goffman, 1951; Stone and Form, 1953), and should not be taken for granted even though they are 'naturalized' in the contemporary social science research enterprise. 1 Social scientists tend to use measures of annual income, education, and profession to represent economic class, measures that elevate the apparent standing of their class fraction over others whose wealth comes from entrepreneurial effort and long-term capital assets. 0378-2166/97/$17.00 © 1997 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved PH S 0 3 0 4 - 4 2 2 X ( 9 7 ) 0 0 0 1 2 - 0
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R.A. Peterson / Poetics 25 (1997) 71-73
The six articles in this issue of P o e t i c s are devoted to understanding the changing representation of status through taste displays, and their common goal is the quest for more stable measures of status honor. Introducing the articles
While recognizing his pioneering effort, a number of researchers have faulted Bourdieu for the particular measures of status that he used. Taking these critics to task, Douglas B. Holt in recovering Bourdieu's theory of taste, shows, using his own focused interview data, that, while the appropriate measures may change, the differentiation of two contrasting bases on which taste is formed, formulated in the 1960s by Bourdieu, has great value for current research. Holt's empirical research is based on the data he collected from focused interviews with middle and working class families in one community. This method, also used by Michele Lamont (1992), David Halle (1993), and Bonnie Erikson (1996) among others, has the great advantage of providing richly nuanced understandings of status formation and the patterns of cultural choice, insights that are difficult to tease-out of the data found in large sample surveys. Such surveys are essential however in suggesting the range of relevant topics and in contextualizing the ethnographic data. The next two articles, those by Michael Relish and Bethany Bryson, develop original ideas that help to more accurately specify measures relating to questions of cultural class found in large sample surveys. Years of education has consistently been found to be the best single predictor of status honor. As Relish suggests, years of formal schooling is a rather blunt - if readily measurable - indicator of a number of other specific factors that can be identified. He shows the importance of social network links and geographic mobility in predicting what he terms cultural competency. Studies of taste tend to focus disproportionately on the upper end of the status hierarchy. Using the ingenious question in the Culture Module of the 1993 General Social Survey that asks respondents not only about their 'likes' but also about their 'dislikes', Bryson shows that persons with little education are most likely to have the narrow range of taste choices just as predicted in the research of Peterson and Simkus (1992). Bryson shows that their tastes are not just narrow but follow the lines of ethnic status prejudices, with the sorts of music emanating from white rural working class experience being most discriminated against. Whether surveys or focused interviews, most research is based in measures that are operationalized by researchers and are based in conventional academic wisdom. The articles in this issue by Marlis Buchmann and Manuel Eisner and by Roger M. Kern are founded on quite a different sort of measure of taste. In the data they employ, assertions of taste are those used by people in the normal course of activities of great importance to them - what in the United States are called 'personal advertisements'. Such ads conventionally consist of three parts. In the first, the author states his/her salient attributes, in the second, the desired activity, and in the third the desired attributes of the preferred partner. Both articles focus on the sorts of categories of status that are used in describing the author and the desired partner.
R.A. Peterson / Poetics 25 (1997) 71-73
73
For over one hundred years, middle-class Swiss people have regularly used the major newspapers of the country to advertise themselves to potential marriagepartners. Using a time series of this information dating back to 1900, Buchmann and Eisner show the ebb and flow of various self-attributions. Their findings show the shifts predicted by David Riesman and Ronald Inglehart from economic to interpersonal concerns, but they show that the timing of the changes as well as the class and gender differences, is not what Inglehart had predicted. Personal ads can now be found in the U.S. media ranging from tabloid newspapers to the Harvard Alumni magazine. In order to get a reading of the taste indicators used by upper middle class intellectuals, Kern examines a sample of personal ads from the New York Review of" Books. From the evidence it is quite clear that the corresponding readership uses cultural and social capital every bit as much as they use economic capital, and that, contrary to what one might expect from the findings of Lamont (1992), moral capital is not an important coinage of the relationship game. In the essay that opens this issue of Poetics, I focus on the transitory nature of systems of status honor. Focusing narrowly on the U.S. case, 1 suggest when and why taste became the prime coin of status honor by reviewing the criteria of status that preceded the era of taste. Evidence is presented to suggest why each of these prior systems failed and to show why highbrow snobbery is now giving way to status markers founded in cosmopolitan omnivorousness.
References Bourdieu, Pierre, 1984 [1979]. Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Erikson, Bonnie, 1996. Culture, class, and connections. American Journal of Sociology 102, 217 251. Gans, Herbert J., 1974. Popular culture and high culture: An analysis and evaluation of taste. New York: Basic Books. Goffman, Erving, 1951. Symbols of class status. British Journal of Sociology 2, 294-304. Halle, David, 1993. Inside culture: Art and class in the American home. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lamont, Michele, 1992. Money, morals, and manners: The culture of the French and the American upper-middle class. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Peterson, Richard A. and Albert Simkus, 1992. How musical taste groups mark occupational status groups. In: Michele Lamont and Marcel Fournier (eds.), Cultivating differences: Symbolic boundaries and the making of inequality, 152-168. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Riesman, David, 1950. The lonely crowd. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Simmel, Georg, 1904. Fashion. American Journal of Sociology 9, 541-558. Stone, Gregory P. and William H. Form, 1953. Instabilities in S status: The problem of hierarchy in the community study of social arrangements. American Sociological Review 18, 150-160. Veblen, Thorstein, 1899. The theory of the leisure class. New York: MacMillan. Warner, W. Lloyd, 1953, American life: Dream and reality. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Weber, Max, 1946. Class, status, party. In: Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in sociology, 180-195. New York: Oxford University Press.
Poetics 25 (1997) 71-73
Changing representation of status through taste displays: An introduction Richard A. P e t e r s o n * Department of Sociology, Vanderbilt University, P.O. Box 1635 Station B, Nashville, TN 37235, USA
In the early years of the twentieth century Max Weber tried to save the idea of stratification from the pure economism of Karl Marx. Weber distinguished between the concept of social class based in its relation to the means of economic reproduction and what he called 'status honor' based in its relation to the means of cultural reproduction (Weber, 1946). But not since the work of Lloyd Warner and his associates in the 1930s has the cultural component of stratification received so much serious attention among social scientists as it has since the seminal work of Pierre Bourdieu and his associates beginning in the 1960s (cf. Bourdieu, 1984) and the revitalization of interest in culture more generally. One of the recurrent questions has been the degree of fit between social class and status honor. For most of the twentieth century, status honor was based in discriminating taste, that is knowing what goods are to be consumed (and which shunned) as well as knowing the bases on which they are appreciated (or condemned) (Veblen, 1899; Simmel, 1904: Weber, 1946; Riesman, 1950; Warner, 1953; Gans, 1974; Bourdieu, 1984). One of the recurrent questions has been to assess the fit between social class and status honor, but for social scientists - as for people generally - the continually vexing question has been the best specific markers of good taste and the underlying bases of appreciation. Markers of taste are manifold. They include such material things as the fashionable cut of clothes, proper home fumishings, au courant etiquette, appropriate ways of speaking, as well as the correct political and social attitudes and values to espouse. Finding stable markers is made even more difficult because it is not just that the objects of appreciation change over time, but, as Holt, Buchmann and Eisner, and I argue in the articles that follow, the principles on which taste is based change over time as well. Many social scientists argue that the markers of social class are quite stable over time, and, in practice, the markers of status honor may change more rapidly, but the bases on which social classes form are not unchanging (Goffman, 1951; Stone and Form, 1953), and should not be taken for granted even though they are 'naturalized' in the contemporary social science research enterprise. 1 Social scientists tend to use measures of annual income, education, and profession to represent economic class, measures that elevate the apparent standing of their class fraction over others whose wealth comes from entrepreneurial effort and long-term capital assets. 0378-2166/97/$17.00 © 1997 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved PH S 0 3 0 4 - 4 2 2 X ( 9 7 ) 0 0 0 1 2 - 0
72
R.A. Peterson / Poetics 25 (1997) 71-73
The six articles in this issue of P o e t i c s are devoted to understanding the changing representation of status through taste displays, and their common goal is the quest for more stable measures of status honor. Introducing the articles
While recognizing his pioneering effort, a number of researchers have faulted Bourdieu for the particular measures of status that he used. Taking these critics to task, Douglas B. Holt in recovering Bourdieu's theory of taste, shows, using his own focused interview data, that, while the appropriate measures may change, the differentiation of two contrasting bases on which taste is formed, formulated in the 1960s by Bourdieu, has great value for current research. Holt's empirical research is based on the data he collected from focused interviews with middle and working class families in one community. This method, also used by Michele Lamont (1992), David Halle (1993), and Bonnie Erikson (1996) among others, has the great advantage of providing richly nuanced understandings of status formation and the patterns of cultural choice, insights that are difficult to tease-out of the data found in large sample surveys. Such surveys are essential however in suggesting the range of relevant topics and in contextualizing the ethnographic data. The next two articles, those by Michael Relish and Bethany Bryson, develop original ideas that help to more accurately specify measures relating to questions of cultural class found in large sample surveys. Years of education has consistently been found to be the best single predictor of status honor. As Relish suggests, years of formal schooling is a rather blunt - if readily measurable - indicator of a number of other specific factors that can be identified. He shows the importance of social network links and geographic mobility in predicting what he terms cultural competency. Studies of taste tend to focus disproportionately on the upper end of the status hierarchy. Using the ingenious question in the Culture Module of the 1993 General Social Survey that asks respondents not only about their 'likes' but also about their 'dislikes', Bryson shows that persons with little education are most likely to have the narrow range of taste choices just as predicted in the research of Peterson and Simkus (1992). Bryson shows that their tastes are not just narrow but follow the lines of ethnic status prejudices, with the sorts of music emanating from white rural working class experience being most discriminated against. Whether surveys or focused interviews, most research is based in measures that are operationalized by researchers and are based in conventional academic wisdom. The articles in this issue by Marlis Buchmann and Manuel Eisner and by Roger M. Kern are founded on quite a different sort of measure of taste. In the data they employ, assertions of taste are those used by people in the normal course of activities of great importance to them - what in the United States are called 'personal advertisements'. Such ads conventionally consist of three parts. In the first, the author states his/her salient attributes, in the second, the desired activity, and in the third the desired attributes of the preferred partner. Both articles focus on the sorts of categories of status that are used in describing the author and the desired partner.
R.A. Peterson / Poetics 25 (1997) 71-73
73
For over one hundred years, middle-class Swiss people have regularly used the major newspapers of the country to advertise themselves to potential marriagepartners. Using a time series of this information dating back to 1900, Buchmann and Eisner show the ebb and flow of various self-attributions. Their findings show the shifts predicted by David Riesman and Ronald Inglehart from economic to interpersonal concerns, but they show that the timing of the changes as well as the class and gender differences, is not what Inglehart had predicted. Personal ads can now be found in the U.S. media ranging from tabloid newspapers to the Harvard Alumni magazine. In order to get a reading of the taste indicators used by upper middle class intellectuals, Kern examines a sample of personal ads from the New York Review of" Books. From the evidence it is quite clear that the corresponding readership uses cultural and social capital every bit as much as they use economic capital, and that, contrary to what one might expect from the findings of Lamont (1992), moral capital is not an important coinage of the relationship game. In the essay that opens this issue of Poetics, I focus on the transitory nature of systems of status honor. Focusing narrowly on the U.S. case, 1 suggest when and why taste became the prime coin of status honor by reviewing the criteria of status that preceded the era of taste. Evidence is presented to suggest why each of these prior systems failed and to show why highbrow snobbery is now giving way to status markers founded in cosmopolitan omnivorousness.
References Bourdieu, Pierre, 1984 [1979]. Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Erikson, Bonnie, 1996. Culture, class, and connections. American Journal of Sociology 102, 217 251. Gans, Herbert J., 1974. Popular culture and high culture: An analysis and evaluation of taste. New York: Basic Books. Goffman, Erving, 1951. Symbols of class status. British Journal of Sociology 2, 294-304. Halle, David, 1993. Inside culture: Art and class in the American home. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lamont, Michele, 1992. Money, morals, and manners: The culture of the French and the American upper-middle class. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Peterson, Richard A. and Albert Simkus, 1992. How musical taste groups mark occupational status groups. In: Michele Lamont and Marcel Fournier (eds.), Cultivating differences: Symbolic boundaries and the making of inequality, 152-168. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Riesman, David, 1950. The lonely crowd. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Simmel, Georg, 1904. Fashion. American Journal of Sociology 9, 541-558. Stone, Gregory P. and William H. Form, 1953. Instabilities in S status: The problem of hierarchy in the community study of social arrangements. American Sociological Review 18, 150-160. Veblen, Thorstein, 1899. The theory of the leisure class. New York: MacMillan. Warner, W. Lloyd, 1953, American life: Dream and reality. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Weber, Max, 1946. Class, status, party. In: Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in sociology, 180-195. New York: Oxford University Press.