Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
Loading... Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979)by Pierre Bourdieu
Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. no reviews | add a review
Belongs to Publisher Series
No judgement of taste is innocent - we are all snobs. Pierre Bourdieu¿s Distinction brilliantly illuminates the social pretentions of the middle classes in the modern world, focusing on the tastes and preferences of the French bourgeoisie. First published in 1979, the book is at once a vast ethnography of contemporary France and a dissection of the bourgeois mind. In the course of everyday life we constantly choose between what we find aesthetically pleasing, and what we consider tacky, merely trendy, or ugly. Taste is not pure. Bourdieu demonstrates that our different aesthetic choices are all distinctions - that is, choices made in opposition to those made by other classes. This fascinating work argues that the social world 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. No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)306.0944Social sciences Social Sciences; Sociology and anthropology Culture and Institutions Biography And History Europe France And MonacoLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |
The final chapter, on Kant's Critique of Judgment, shows how even so-called pure aesthetics is "grounded in an empirical social relation," how pleasure itself becomes part of the way "dominant groups...ride roughshod over difference, flouts distinction, [and] reduces the distinctive pleasures of the soul to the common satisfactions of food and sex."
Bourdieu also makes prescient comments on the tendencies of statisticians and sociologists to create artificial dichotomies and ends up suggesting that intellectuals may not be best placed to comment on bourgeois and working class taste. ( )