Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America

Culture and Competition: Homophily and distancing Explanations for Cultural Niches

“…Aesthetic distancing plays a central role in this process in that the high-status people laying claim to a genre purge it of those elements most appealing to low-status people. Levine's (1988) study of Shakespearean theater in America illustrates this argument. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, high-status people distanced themselves (and Shakespearean theater) from low-status people by eliminating forms of low culture that traditionally accompanied performances of Shakespeare's plays.…”

“…Unfortunately, if this approach is to offer more than post hoc accounts, a theory of cultural forms is needed that could make sense of the richness and diversity within and across genres and predict which cultural forms would be liked by which people. Another shortcoming is that research on the social construction of cultural hierarchy suggests that which niche a cultural form will occupy is malleable and may be determined more by social processes than by the qualities of the cultural form itself (DiMaggio 1982a(DiMaggio , 1982bLevine 1988). For these reasons, and given practical limitations on what can be considered in any single analysis, I do not explore how inherent qualities of cultural forms could help explain why different kinds of people like different kinds of culture.…”

“…Historical changes in social structure are essential to a full understanding of how present patterns of cultural taste have emerged (Beisel 1990;DiMaggio 1982aDiMaggio , 1982bLevine 1988;Peterson and Kern 1996). However, because structural change alone does not tell us how individuals acquire, lose, or reject cultural tastes, it must be combined with other arguments to account for cultural niches.…”

“…Many students of culture argue that people make cultural choices that distinguish themselves from members of other social categories (Bourdieu [1979(Bourdieu [ ] 1984Bryson 1996;DiMaggio 1982aDiMaggio , 1982bGans 1974;Goffman 1951;Levine 1988). According to Bourdieu ([ 1979Bourdieu ([ ] 1984, in a process called aesthetic distancing, people reject cultural forms that are liked by members of other social groups.…”

“…A large body of empirical research shows that different cultural tastes are concentrated within segments of society that differ with respect to a variety of sociodemographic variables including age (Hughes and Peterson 1983;Peterson and DiMaggio 1975;Smith 1994), region (Marsden et al 1982), education (Bourdieu [1979] 1984; Hughes and Peterson 1983;Lynd and Lynd 1929;Marsden et al 1982;Veblen 1899;Warner and Lunt 1941), and race (DiMaggio and Ostrower 1990). Because this pattern is essential to sociological understandings of how culture can reduce social contact between groups (Carley 1991) and perpetuate economic inequality (Bourdieu [1979] 1984; Lamont and Fournier 1992;Levine 1988), a substantial literature attempts to explain this covariation (Bourdieu [1979(Bourdieu [ ] 1984Bryson 1996;DiMaggio 1982aDiMaggio , 1982bDiMaggio , 1987Gans 1974;Peterson and Kern 1996). I develop, formally analyze, and empirically test two answers to this question.…”