The Multidimensional Structure of Taste

Abstract

The notion of cultural legitimacy has had many incarnations and been subject to many criticisms over the years. However, few studies have set out to construct it empirically and quantify it at the national level and over several cultural practices. In spite of the intense theoretical debates, one question remains particularly neglected – given that the scale of cultural legitimacy is defined by the homology between the ordering of tastes and the ordering of social groups, which social space does it actually refer to? Here we propose an empirical approach to statistically account for the intersection of social power relations which many ethnographic studies have observed at the level of individuals and social groups. The goal is to analyse the relations between variables related to social status; education, age, and gender are the ones we look at here. We avoid the unfruitful trap of simply constructing hierarchies of effects, and instead consider the interactions between them. We therefore observe that, at the macro level where our analysis is situated, the scale of cultural legitimacy is simultaneously associated with the three social relations studied, opposing bourgeois (intellectual) culture to popular culture, feminine culture to masculine culture, and established culture to new emerging culture. Ultimately, the scale of cultural legitimacy is made up of three main echelons, associated with three configurations of social characteristics: intellectual, feminine, and established at the “top” of the legitimacy scale, intellectual, masculine, and emerging at the “middle” and, finally, popular, feminine, and established, at the “bottom”. A sociological interpretation allows us to distinguish two variations of legitimate culture that are more or less well established, feminine, and intellectual, and three variations of illegitimate culture depending on gender and age variables (a taste for “outdated” or “sentimental” working class genres, a preference for “mass public” products that are widely available on radio, television, or in magazines, and a taste for emerging “virile” genres [science-fiction, rap, hard rock, etc.], that are sometimes constituted as juvenile subcultures subject to processes of legitimation). Beyond this nascent typology, we seek above all to establish the existence of these interactions, to propose certain statistical tools that are useful for studying them and to demonstrate the benefit of analysing the distribution of cultural practices in intersectional terms.