Ethnicity and cultural consumption in Australia

Abstract

This paper explores the consequences of increasing ethnic diversity for practices of cultural consumption and the distribution of taste in Australia. Changing migration patterns and generational changes have produced a diversification of goods, sites and audiences, and an increasing transnationalization of practices and relations over several decades. Drawing on survey data from the Australian Cultural Fields project examining knowledge, taste and participation within a national sample and across several ethnically defined samples, the paper provides cautious insights into the complex relations between ethnicity and cultural consumption: around the distribution of ‘national’ cultural capital, attachment to the Western canon, the ethnic specificity of taste and the intersection with issues of class, recentness of arrival and generation in contemporary Australia. Finally, bearing in mind the problems of measuring both ethnicity and cultural consumption, the paper speculates on the implications of the data for recent claims about the recomposition of cultural capital.