bservation
shows that cultural needs are the product of upbringing and education....” In other words,
and to repeat the all-important point above: what we take to be the unique and special traits
of an individual—he or she has “taste,” judgment, discernment—is a social product
conveyed to one by one’s class.
The hierarchies we construct in culture (e.g., good and bad art, music, food, travel
destinations, etc.) thus correspond with a significant degree of precision to hierarchies in
society. Therefore, when we interpret something (i.e., talk about the meaning of a piece of
art, a novel, etc.) or discuss some item or issue in culture, we are also at the same time revealing to others our position in the socio-economic class structure. Bourdieu confirms this
point in Distinction:
Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by their
classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the
beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar.... (p. 89)
Underlying the different clusters of cultural capital particular to the classes are deeper
patterns relating these cultural choices to harder economic truths. The attributes of elite
cultural capital—abstraction, overt complexity, the distanced nature of the consumer’s
relationship to the cultural item, and form—are mapped over the elite’s economic position; in
other words, their cultural capital animates and justifies英语论文网 【http://www.51lunwen.org】 their distance from work and
economic necessity. The working class’s opposite attributes—realism, ease of interpretation,
participation in the cultural form, and content—legitimate their far closer and more
dependent relationship to work and necessity. Contrast a high culture item like a Samuel
Beckett play or Wagner’s Ring cycle, a middle class form like a Neil Simon play or a Diana
Krall concert, to a working class phenomenon like “Hockey Night in Canada” or a line-
dancing contest. The tables below discuss the mapping of cultural capital over certain more
profound features of the relationship of class to economic structure in greater detail.
c. the Cheese Shop sketch and table
In other words, cultural distinction equals economic distinction. These two forms of capital
reinforce each other and ensure that the elite and middle classes maintain their economic
privilege without having that wealth or their right to it questioned. So what does this have to
do with the “Cheese Shop” sketch?
Monty Python’s skits are typically either about gender or class. In the “Cheese Shop” sketch,
the upper-class John Cleese character demonstrates his extensive knowledge of cheese
types to the shopkeeper, a character with a distinctly lower-class Yorkshire accent. In an
absurdly comic imitation of a posh Englishman, and making references to exotic vocabulary,
literature and music in passing, Cleese grows dangerously frustrated as his florid requests
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