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Taste and Domination

The author of Distinction (first published in France in 1979), Pierre Bourdieu, calls it an ethnography of French taste. It is based on two large sample surveys conducted by Bourdieu's research group and supplemented by data from several other French surveys. Respondents were questioned on their knowledge, tastes, opinions, and practices regarding such matters as painting, music, film, reading, food, photography, clothing, sports, home furnishing, and theatergoing. But Distinction is no mere report of a survey or synthesis of reports of several surveys. Bourdieu respects quantitative data, but he is no positivist. Having been trained to think epistemologically, he distances himself somewhat from the numbers. He knows that the meaning of what people say to interviewers is seldom self-evident; he knows that a solicited opinion is one that may not have existed previously and is therefore a reified artifact of the question or interview situation; he knows that the determining property of an "independent" variable (and the determined property of a "dependent" variable) is often mysterious or ambiguous; and he knows that questions about the meanings of survey data are often begged by the commonsensical, taken-for-granted assumptions underlying the codes that classify such data. Bourdieu seldom falls into the narrative bog of trying to make readable prose out of distributive statistics, and when he does it is usually in the form of long discursive notes. He reproduces plenty of tables for those interested in studying the numbers closely, but the main text is less concerned with citing data (which, in any case, contain few surprises for specialists in the sociology of culture) than with using them in behalf of his argument about the relationship of class and status phenomena. What is the argument? Where Weber opposed the realm of class (life chances in economic markets) to the realm of status (quantum of honor embedded in a style of life), Bourdieu's entire oeuvre (but especially Distinction) is an effort o link the two realms by conceiving both as markets