1,721,006 research outputs found
The elite and the everyday in the Australian heritage field
No full textThis chapter examines contemporary engagements with heritage as captured by the Australian Cultural Fields questionnaire and household interviews. Drawing on responses to questions about heritage in our survey instrument, the chapter begins by offering reflections on who knows, likes and visits a range of officially recognised genres of heritage. The chapter reveals that some places of heritage, such as those emblematic of Australian national identity, exhibit an extraordinary ‘pull’ when it comes to gathering people to them; that is, they are noticed by a wide range of people. Other places seem only to service and represent mature-aged Anglo-Australians, positioned within the middle and upper classes. A select few places appear almost invisible, but no less remarkable. Such differences in taste, knowledge and participation are, of course, a function of habitual dispositions that are historically constituted. Using material gathered through the project’s household interviews, the chapter thus turns to consider the socially constituted sensibilities that mediate how people engage with, and are affected by, heritage. While the chapter continues to consider engagements with highly visible forms of heritage, of primary interest here are the sensibilities that sustain engagements with heritage on a smaller scale, such as through family traditions and family life
Class and cultural capital in Australia
No full textThis chapter presents an overview of the findings of the Australian Cultural Fields project regarding the role of class in shaping Australian cultural consumption practices. There are three main stages to the argument. First, the chapter brings together the patterns of class structuration associated with the project’s six cultural fields – art, literary, music, heritage, television and sport – in order to examine how these interact in the Australian ‘space of lifestyles’. This involves a consideration of the relations between economic and cultural capital in the composition of different classes. Second, the chapter examines the respects in which the composition of these classes is ‘infiltrated’ by other aspects of social position: age, education, gender and so on. The chapter then proposes a distinctive methodological innovation by using the Cluster Analysis of the Australian Cultural Fields survey data to consider the light that the relations between the resulting clusters and ‘cultural capital profiles’ throws on the social trajectories and logics of inheritance of different class fractions. These questions are pursued in the context of recent debates concerning the relations between class and culture in Australia and internationally
Aesthetic divisions and intensities in the Australian art field
No full textFocusing on the Australian Cultural Fields survey data and household interviews relating to the Australian art field, this chapter develops four main lines of argument. First, while qualified and complicated by the force of age and gender, the data testifies to the continuing strength of the relations between family background, level of education and class position in determining both the degree and kinds of involvement in the Australian art field. Second, tastes also manifest the strong influence of education and class. They do so at the most general level in differentiating responses to figurative and non-figurative art forms, albeit that this is complicated by the force of age. Third, the degree of intensity invested in involvement in the visual arts is, more often than not, an inherited disposition strongly connected to family background. Finally, we pay particular attention to the distinctive qualities associated with liking Aboriginal art, particularly the respects in which, even in its abstract forms, it is differentiated from other forms of abstract art in view of the respects in which it testifies to politically purposive story telling
Contesting national culture : the sport field
No full textThe sport field is permeable for several reasons: the concept of sport is contested and takes many forms, ranging from professional physical contests to more casual forms of bodily movement. Despite its much-touted connection to healthy activity, sport’s physical practice is heavily outweighed by its spectatorship, while sport is substantially ‘colonised’ by another field – the media, especially television. This chapter demonstrates how sporting taste, participation and knowledge relate in a range of ways to social variables (notably gender), and are highly sensitive to their national context. While it is widely (and, indeed, officially) deemed to characterise ‘Australianness’, engagement with sport is revealed in the Australian Cultural Fields survey and interview data to be highly variable. Some of these findings – for example, the class-inflected complexion of various sports – tend to confirm existing knowledge. But others, such as the ethical expectations regarding sportspeople, are perhaps more surprising. For this reason, the Australian sport field can be said to offer a glimpse of nation, but only insofar as it reveals the tensions and fractures that are both enduring and dynamic constituents of its socio-cultural architecture
Book value : reading the Australian literary field
No full textThe focus of this chapter is on the organisation of ‘book culture’ and the nature of readers’ engagement with books and reading in contemporary Australia. The chapter first describes the literary field in Australia through the framework of Bourdieu’s concept of the field of cultural production but taking into account distinctive features produced by the particular history of publishing and policy in Australia, its situation within an international Anglophone publishing sphere and developments over recent decades, especially through the impact of digital technologies and transformations in the value accorded to literary genres. Against this background, the chapter analyses responses to survey questions concerning the reading of and taste for different kinds of books and a selection of Australian and international authors, and participation in a range of book-related activities and book ownership. Interviews with readers indicate different profiles that are part of an Australian ‘reading class’, strongly associated with respondents in professional and intermediate occupations and with post-secondary education, engaged with a range of popular and canonical books, and demonstrating high levels of esteem for books and reading generally. The cultural capital associated with the field is attached to the social value of books and reading, rather than literary value in a restricted sense
Television : the dynamics of a field in transition
No full textFocusing on the Australian Cultural Fields survey data and household interviews relating to the Australian television field, this chapter looks first at the key changes which have characterised the dynamics of the Australian television field in recent decades. It then reviews the debates concerning the place of television within field theory: the role of technological actors as active agents in the disposition of field relations, and the role of ‘quality television’ and of television’s personality system in televisual regimes of distinction. These preliminary concerns set the scene for the presentation of the most significant distinguishing features of television consumption practices in contemporary Australia. The pronounced significance of age in distinguishing both viewing practices and tastes is especially noteworthy. This is particularly true of its role in distinguishing the extent to which a range of platforms and devices has displaced the role of free-to-air television in the viewing practices of younger age groups
The mark of time : temporality and the dynamics of distinction in the music field
No full textFocusing on the Australian Cultural Fields survey data and household interviews relating to the Australian music field, this chapter develops three main lines of argument. First, we consider the light thrown on the historical dynamics of cultural capital formation by the relations between age, education and class, on the one hand, and the temporal coding of the survey items relating to the music field (particularly musical works, composers and performers) on the other. Second, we show how looking at the relations between genre preferences and indicators of varying degrees of participation in different kinds of musical events lends a sharper edge to the relations between musical preferences and practices of distinction than is allowed for by the cultural omnivore and cultural eclecticism theses. Third, we consider the respects in which the evidence of our interviews with survey participants reveals not a singular form of eclecticism but a diversity of eclectic tastes shaped by the position that the interviewees occupy in relation to different musical times
The Australian space of lifestyles
No full textThis chapter presents an overview of the relative significance of level of education, occupational class, gender and age in accounting for the differentiations of cultural tastes and practices across the six cultural fields – art, literature, music, heritage, television and sport – encompassed by the Australian Cultural Fields project. It does so by means of a Multiple Correspondence Analysis of the Australian ‘space of lifestyles’ complemented by a Cluster Analysis. These are accompanied by vignettes of interviewees who illustrate both differences and points of convergence between the clusters. Two main lines of argument are pursued. The first concerns the strong role that practices and tastes linked to the art and literary fields and, albeit to a lesser extent, music field play in marking distinctions within the professional and managerial classes as well as between those classes and other classes relative to the stronger role that heritage, sport and television play in marking distinctions between the classes occupying the centre of the space of lifestyles and lower class positions. The second concerns the significance of the role played by practices representing different times within the space of lifestyles, operating at the intersections of class and age, in influencing the cultural orientations which differentiate the clusters produced by the Cluster Analysis
Conclusion : 'distinction' after Distinction
No full textIt has been 40 years since Distinction was published: the world has changed enormously over the intervening period, yet Bourdieu’s work continues to hold its place as a major contribution to social theory generally as well as to cultural sociology in particular. Many works since then have testified to Distinction’s continuing capacity to inspire rich empirical work that has been methodologically and theoretically innovative in refining Bourdieu’s approach to accommodate the changes that have taken place over that period
Introduction
No full textFields, capitals, habitus: these are undoubtedly the three key concepts of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology, shaping his analyses of cultural, scientific, economic and political fields, and of the relations between them. While drawing on their more general currency, our concerns in this study focus on the roles these concepts have played in Bourdieu’s cultural sociology. Even here, there are two main aspects to each of these concepts depending on whether it is their application to the analysis of cultural consumption or that of cultural production that is at issue
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