dc.description.abstract | English summary
This thesis is about how different people perceive, construct and
communicate social differences. By way of qualitative interviews, home
visits and photo elicitation, I explore variations in cultural preferences,
boundary drawings between own taste and other people’s tastes, and
perceptions of social hierarchies. I also discuss possible social implications
of people’s divergent perceptions of differences.
The study is based on 39 in-depth interviews in a dispersed sample,
consisting of both women and men, from two age cohorts (b. 1945-50 and
1975-80), everyone from the city of Stavanger, Norway.
Referring to Pierre Bourdieu’s and Michèle Lamont’s theoretical
frameworks – notably the concepts of social space, capital volume and
composition, forms of capital, and symbolic boundaries – I describe and
analyze the interviewees manners of appropriation and their relation to four
aesthetic fields: architecture, home interior, literature and visual art.
Thereafter, I discuss their perceptions of social hierarchies. A recurring
theme in the thesis is diversity. The diversity applies to appropriation of
visual art, relations to home interior, architecture and literature, perceptions
of education and affluence, and to perceptions of social hierarchies in
general. Concluding from the material, cultural preferences and perceptions
of inequality clearly vary with social position, or class if you like, and to
some extent with age and gender. This is in line with Bourdieu’s claim that
taste is intimately tied to positions in the social space (1984).
As regards visual art, I detect various manners of appropriation:
‘emotional-spontaneous’, ‘knowledge-based’, and ‘art as ownership’. Level
of knowledge about art emerge as pivotal. Knowledge is essential both to
the experience of art and to understand differences between manners of
appropriation. In home interior, there is in addition an age difference in the
sense that people in the youngest generation interviewed (b. 1975-80), to a
much larger degree relate to home interior in aesthetic manners. This is one
of the reasons why I conclude that an aesthetic rationale has acquired a
hegemonic position within the field of home interior in Norway.
Within literature, I discuss the concept of literary quality. If we
portray the interviewees’ perceptions of good literature on a continuum, we
find at one end views about good literature as something that is
“democratically” individually defined (Gujord & Vassenden, 2015)
(everyone is entitled to define what good literature is). At the other end,
there is the idea that literary quality is defined by distinct criteria, as
something near objective. The “democratic” individual notion is the most
widespread among the interviewees. In Bourdieu’s terminology: I find it in
all the quadrants of the social space. Only 3-4 individuals share the idea that
literary quality is something distinct, near objective. It is worth noticing that
these individuals also relate their own literary opinions to the widespread
“democratic” notion. The latter gives reason to question whose viewpoints
that enjoy legitimacy.
Within architecture, I detect both socioeconomic, moral and
cultural boundary drawing (cf. Lamont, 1992). Socioeconomic references
point to different conditions that render architectural spending
(im)possible, i.e. income level, work position, inheritance, age and phase of
life. In terms of moral boundaries, these are drawn on the basis of
condemnations of «conspicuous architecture» and of what is considered
proper behavior. People’s cultural boundary drawing within architecture
engage with aspects of taste and preferences, such as style epochs and
various architectural expressions, and with architecture as one of several
ways of communicating identity. Added up: all interviewees consider that
residential architecture and people’s choice of residence are influenced by
socioeconomic aspects, some interviewees – both with and without higher
education – relate architecture to moral aspects, and interviewees with high
cultural and/or economic capital, view architecture in addition to the above
mentioned as related to lifestyle elements, taste and identity.
This pattern resembles the pattern of boundary drawing related to
perceptions of social hierarchies in general. All interviewees refer to work
life and pecuniary success as defining of people’s positions. However,
interviewees with low capital volume are more inclined to emphasize moral
aspects, while their high capital counterparts are more likely to value
cultural and aesthetic aspects in questions of inequality and hierarchy.
When synthesizing these findings, and elaborating on their possible
social consequences, I introduce the concept of a discursive gap. The
discursive gap indicates a cleavage in perceptions of what differences
between various social groups that ‘make a difference’. The discursive gap
also points to a cleft in the way different social groups communicate these
differences. I detect a discursive tension related to the communication of
differences, i.e. to the divergent perceptions of cultural objects, practices
and phenomenon. Noteworthy, this tension is not equally relevant to all
social groups. The inclination to attach social meaning to «the small
distinctions» (cf. Gronow & Warde, 2001) (small variations of lifestyle and
cultural differences), and to consider differences in taste preferences and
practices as a potential problem, varies with localization in the social space.
Interviewees with low capital volume do not seem to find it problematic to
draw boundaries towards other people’s taste and towards taste differences.
They are indifferent to or do not know about the cultural capital and
cultural boundaries that are important to both the cultural fraction and parts
of the economic fraction. These interviewees show few signs of explicit or
implicit recognition of, or deference towards, what is considered legitimate
cultural preferences and practices (cf. a Bourdieusian framework). In
addition, they point out that they feel socially comfortable with people that
are similar to themselves. Interviewees with high capital volume, on the
other hand, ascribe symbolic and social significance to education, navigate
and read the social geography with reference to markers of lifestyle, and
relate to – and for the most aspire to – acknowledged cultural practices.
They too state that they feel socially comfortable with people that are
similar to themselves.
Thus, the findings presented in the thesis give ample reason to claim
that, in the Norwegian context, there is not a common logic of distinction,
but the logic of distinction is nevertheless present and important. Following
this, I make the argument that cultural capital is not legitimate in the sense
that Bourdieu found it to be. By this, I do not simply mean that the concept
of legitimate culture has a different content in Norway compared to the
French context, or that traditional forms of highbrow culture experience a
general decline in interest (see f.i. Gripsrud, et al., 2011; Prieur & Savage,
2013). Rather, my study, unlike Bourdieu’s analysis, indicates that cultural
capital does not appear to be legitimate in the way that everyone is
constrained to define their own practices in relation to the dominating ones.
On the contrary, I find little deference, aspiration or feelings of inferiority
among people in the lower ends of the social space. This challenges
Bourdieu’s understanding of dominance, his portrayal of people in the
lower ends of the social space, and his concept of legitimacy, - and instead
supports recent findings in two major contributions on inequality, class and
cultural capital, namely Bennett et al. from Britain and Faber et al. from
Denmark (Bennett, et al., 2009; Faber, et al., 2012).
At the end, I discuss some theoretical implications on the concepts
of cultural capital and sense of place, and possible social consequences of
the discursive gap. These consequences refer, inter alia, to group formation
and thus to mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. Systematic variations
in symbolic boundary drawing in different parts of the social space are likely
to set footprints in people’s social relations and their interaction in the local
social world of Stavanger. Since all interviewees emphasize the importance
of sameness (as in being of the same kind) when they talk of likes and
dislikes in other people, and of what they value in social relations and
friendship, it is highly likely that the perceptions of hierarchies and cultural
valuations that have emerged in this study, are used as points of social
orientation and as criteria of selection when social groups and networks are
constructed and sustained. Knowing that power is concentrated in social
environments in the upper parts of the social space, and that there is little
interaction between groups with high and low volume (see f.i. Faber, et al.,
2012), together with the fact that cultural capital works through social
capital, these differences have social significance. Then, it is not necessarily
unproblematic that social groups with a low level of education and relatively
speaking low income, do not know of or care about the dominating or
intermediate groups’ disparagement of their preferences and practices,
because these are claimed to gain entry into these social groups. Therefore,
although people with low capital volume do not express deference,
acceptance, critique or feelings of inferiority towards the dominating or
intermediate groups, the material indicates that mechanisms of exclusion
are still active. | nb_NO |