No judgement of taste is innocent - we are all snobs. Pierre Bourdieu's Distinct
ion brilliantly illuminates the social pretentions of the middle classes in the
modern world, focusing on the tastes and preferences of the French bourgeoisie.
First published in 1979, the book is at once a vast ethnography of contemporary
France and a dissection of the bourgeois mind.
In the course of everyday life
we constantly choose between what we find aesthetically pleasing, and what we c
onsider tacky, merely trendy, or ugly. Taste is not pure. Bourdieu demonstrates
that our different aesthetic choices are all distinctions - that is, choices mad
e in opposition to those made by other classes.
This fascinating work argues
that the social world functions simultaneously as a system of power relations an
d as a symbolic system in which minute distinctions of taste become the basis fo
r social judgement.
