Bourdieu, gli onnivori, i post-moderni e le pratiche culturali

Abstract

Both “highbrow omnivorousness” hypothesis and “postmodern” thesis claim that Bourdieu’s homology theory fails to predict the relationship between social position and lifestyle. In first part of the paper I argue that these theoretical and empirical challenges to Bourdieu’s vision is often the result of a misreading of Bourdieu. I claim that habitus, capital cultural and distinction remain fundamental concepts to understand the process of cultural stratification. In the second part of the essay, I use an exploratory methodology based on latent class models to examine the stratification of three cultural product consumption: literary, music and film genres. In particular, I apply poLCA, a software package for the estimation of latent class regression models for polytomous outcome variables, implemented in R. Latent class regression model generalizes the basic latent class model by permitting the inclusion of covariates to predict individuals’ latent class membership. I find that consumer’s classes are influenced by education, gender and age. The highbrow class has the highest level of education, is older than omnivore class and contains just as many women as men. Contrary to highbrow omnivorousness and postmodern prediction, I show that clustering of behavioural patterns tends to be strongly associated with traditional social categories and that these findings are consistent with Bourdieu’s arguments.