11/19 Bourdieu

  Pierre Bourdieu provides fascinating research and hypotheses in his 1984 essay titled, The Aristocracy of Culture. The science or sense of culture and how it develops is an interesting concept because we can understand that culture is something that is divided between the mainstream and the vast array of subcultures. Bourdieu infers that culture is broken up into “class.” This is and will always be inherently true due to the different tastes and preferences of a variety of different consumers. As Bourdieu says, “To the socially recognized hierarchy of the arts, and within each of them, of genres, schools or periods, corresponds a social hierarchy of the consumers. This predisposes tastes to function as markers of ‘class’” (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 250). This will always be true because different classes have different luxuries and availability of time to embrace and recognize the caste system of cultural trends and tastes. 

It seems that from Bordieu’s concepts this is one of the founding points that we see as cultural appropriation. This is the concept of adopting from other cultures, and often times are seen as insensitive. Cultures develop based on the mere fact that those apart of a specific culture were born into it. Within the caste system, we see the lower class, middle, and upper. There are subclasses within those big three that are purely based on the level of income and the life you are able to live. 

In Bordieu’s second essay of this section titled, On Television, he denotes that the news is the unifying entity of culture. Television and more specifically, the news is meant to be unbiased and to not harm or offend anybody. This is an extremely difficult job to do given the sensitivity of culture.