ABSTRACT
It has long been assumed that cultural tastes are used to perpetuate and secure hierarchies of social difference. Those with power, disposable wealth, and leisure time have distinguished themselves from the poor and laboring classes by claiming to have more sensitive and superior tastes, or sometimes just by asserting that they simply have taste while those others do not. Within consumer societies such distinctions have been materialized through the acquisition and consumption of commodities: by eating luxurious foods; wearing elaborate and delicate clothing; and by decorating houses with expensive furnishings and exotic devices. In 1899 the economist Thorstein Veblen claimed that a leisured class distinguished itself through a display of “conspicuous consumption” that emerges from “conspicuous leisure [that] grows gradually into a laborious drill in deportment and an education in taste and discrimination as to what articles of consumption are decorous and what are the decorous methods of consuming them” ( Veblen 1994 [1899]: 32 ). The well-to-do learn how to acquire the most tasteful items and to have the most tasteful commerce with them (to eat slowly or to walk languidly, for instance). The dominant classes, then, display their superiority through their material culture and through a set of associated cultural practices. The dominated classes, who do not have the economic, social, and cultural resources to compete, are refused access to this world of taste. (This is of course over-simplifying Veblen’s thesis. Since Veblen’s time the social scientist who has done most to explore the relationship between power, status, and taste is undoubtedly the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, whose landmark publication Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1986), was fi rst published in France in 1979, though it was based on research undertaken throughout the 1960s.) .
