Pierre Bourdieu: 'Distinction and the Aristocracy of Culture'

Bourdieu talks about the values of cultural goods and their consumers. He talks about how consumers 'tastes' for the goods that they consume are produced to convey general meanings of culture and that to fully understand 'culture' it needs to be refined.

He argues that 'legitimate culture' and the scientific observations it brings show certain cultural needs and based on the consumers upbringing determines their understanding. Bourdieu's point is over complicated, but in a nutshell he believes that an individual's understanding of culture and its art is very dependent on the consumers education, upbringing and often their social position and class.

One of Bourdieu's method's of explaining consumers understanding of culture and cultural goods are to compare consumers' tastes to that of food and that refining their taste will somehow help them to understand the culture they consume better and widen the variety of culture they consume.

I don't think I really agree with his conclusions because, if I use myself as an easy example, I'm from an average background and have an interest in high, middlebrow and low culture and understand them for what they are, particularly low culture, I tend to take it at face value and not read too much into its products. I don't feel people's tastes necessarily need to be 'refined' to better their understanding of cultural goods or culture itself because culture is different to everyone. We don't and can't all think the same, we're too opinionated and thats one of the ways we learn, we simply create our own definitions of culture and I don't think that's a bad thing.

Useful Quote....

'[but] one cannot fully understand cultural practices unless 'culture', in the restricted, normative sense of ordinary usage, is brought back into 'culture' in the anthropological sense, and the elaborated taste for the most refined objects is reconnected with the elementary taste for the flavours of food'. - Useful because it sums up the beginning of his justification that to understand culture we need to consider social roles and backgrounds and 'refine our taste'.