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Summary: Bourdieu, 1979 – Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

Those with the greatest cultural capital (non-economic social assets, such as education and others that allow social mobility in broader terms than mere income) are those who determine what constitutes good taste in a society.

  • Those with less general capital accept this taste and accept the difference between high and low culture (classical and popular) as something legitimate and natural.
  • Consequently they also accept the restrictions on the existing equivalences between types of capital (economic, social, cultural).

The inability of some to describe or understand a classic work of art, a product of of their Habitus.

  • The habitus is dispositions, patterns of action or perception that the individual acquires through his social experience.
  • By his socialization, then through their social trajectory, each individual slowly incorporates a set of ways of thinking, feeling and acting, which prove to be lasting

The habitus is not a habit that one performs mechanically. Indeed, these provisions are more like the grammar of his mother tongue.

  • Thanks to this grammar acquired by socialization, the individual can, in fact, create an infinity of sentences to deal with all situations. He does not repeat the same sentence over and over again.

The dispositions of the habitus are of the same type: they are patterns of perception and action that allow the individual to produce a set of new practices adapted to the social world in which he finds himself.

  • The habitus is “powerfully generative”.

Working class objects are functional while high class objects are aesthetic.

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