Cultural Tastes Research Articles

The leafy greens of India - their diversity, pattern of consumption, and overriding implication on food and nutrition security

ABSTRACT Green leafy shoots are important components of the food culture of many Asian and African countries. We examined this aspect in India where a living tradition of consuming leafy green is ubiquitous. We investigated a database drawn from 105 studies to analyze the edible species diversity, spatial distribution, culinary diversity as a measure of acceptance, and complemented our interpretation with nutritional composition. We discussed it in light of the crisis of hidden hunger, agrarian change, and in formulating food policy. India demonstrated a rich heritage of eating leafy shoots that resonated in a high diversity of species (723 species) and culinary delicacies to accept them in various forms suiting its culture of taste. These plants are charged with key vitamins and minerals to mitigate micronutrient deficiency. Altogether, it emphasized their untapped potential to ensure nutritional security alleviating hidden hunger, specifically combating vitamin A deficiency. We also observed a heterogeneous distribution of edible species diversity across the regions perhaps affected by plant choice and suggested a data-driven framework to select a set of species for policy intervention. Building on our findings, we proposed their inclusion in national food policy through the encouragement of cultivation, awareness generation, and incorporation into meals.

Epistemic demarcations as social erasures: taste and the politics of distinction from the ‘revolutions of wisdom’ to the ‘Green Revolution’

AbstractThe epistemic and aesthetic dimensions of taste are always inscribed in conceptions of the social order that the discourse on taste simultaneously enacts and rationalizes, while veiling the logics of difference and power it thereby affirms and reproduces. This article illustrates the entanglement of social and intellectual hierarchies that anchors the resolution of the problem of taste in the mechanisms of social distinction and erasure. It does so by examining four socio-epistemic configurations in the history of Western knowledge. The first vignette contextualizes the original devaluation of taste in the competition between the Socratic philosophers and epistemic labourers whose elevation of taste disrupted the Athenian aristocratic order. The second vignette explores the entanglement of humoural theory with the racial and religious orders of the premodern age, as imperial encounters threatened European identity brought into contact with the tastes of others. The third vignette examines how the epistemic status of gustatory taste became anchored in the hierarchy of cultural taste within British empirical philosophy. Finally, the paper tracks new forms of social distinction in the resistance to the globalization of food systems and to the democratization of culinary tastes, as manifested in the constitution of an exclusivist ‘standard of taste’ for wine appreciation.

Cultural and social capitals as factors in self-rated health

The present-day epidemiological situation has once again drawn attention of the scientific community and policy makers to the importance of understanding of the social sources of biological risks. During the past few decades the empirical research into heath disparities has revealed the complex links existing between the socioeconomic status of an individual and his or her health. There are several theoretical models that explain health disparities chiefly focusing on various facets of the socioeconomic status and their effects on health. Those models point to the unequal distribution of health across different groups within a population, but they remain rather limited in terms of accounting for the mechanisms of its maintenance. Although the idea of the effects of socioeconomic status on health is not new and dates back at least as far as 19th c. social medicine, the body of knowledge regarding the social patterns of health, disease and mortality has increased considerably since then. Burgeoning new approaches to health disparities as well as incorporation of data from the epidemiological, medical, genetic and similar connected disciplines have enriched the sociological knowledge and changed the very conceptualization of health. The methodological means of assessing the social factors in health should be enhanced accordingly. The present study contributes to this empirical literature. The aim of the present study was to explore the factor of the cultural and social capitals in self-rated health status among the adult Ukrainians. During 2020–2021 the authors have conducted a two-phase mixed methods study employing the results of semi-structured interviews (n = 10) to develop a survey instrument (n = 156). The results pointed to the gradual data structure in self-rated health based on the cultural capital criterion. Individuals who were more knowledgeable in terms of healthy lifestyle habits and capable of translating this knowledge into practice adhering to it in their lifestyle, also had higher scores on all other forms of capital. This finding supports the notion that health is linked to the cultural taste which forms the status distinctions. As for the mechanisms of the interaction of capitals, it was found that cultural capital in the domain of health is connected to the variables of the cultural capital in the domain of diet and healthy habits, as well as with the social support aspect of the social capital. Cultural capital variables are intercorrelated among themselves, as well as with such aspects of social capital as social support and useful contact networks. Social capital emerged as a multidimensional construct with multiple interrelated compounds. The relationship between social and cultural capitals was mediated via social support availability.

CONTEXTUAL SEMANTIC AND STYLISTIC TRANSFORMATIONS OF ADVERTISING GUSTATIVES

The article is devoted to the analysis of gustatory vocabulary (nomen to denote food and drink) as a marker of food and taste culture of the Ukrainian people. The aim of the study is to highlight the most frequent contextual environment of gustator words within the sloganimicon of Ukrainian commercial advertising in the projection of their influential potential and linguocultural value. The aim was to perform the following tasks: to identify topical gustatives in Ukrainian advertising slogans in their dynamics; 2) to establish the most frequent contextual environments of such lexemes; 3) to explain the influential potential of the recorded patterns. The object of the article is Ukrainian advertising of food and beverages, the subject – gustatory vocabulary as a marker of a powerful advertising impact and as an element of national food and beverage mentality. The following general scientific and special methods were used during the research: analysis and synthesis, quantitative, descriptive to process the results of the study, continuous sampling to form a factual basis, as well as component, distributive and contextual-interpretive analysis to identify textual specificity and influential and cultural load of the analyzed lexemes. The source base is Ukrainian commercial advertising of food and drink, and the factual material is gustatory markers extracted from advertising slogans. Twenty-five advertising slogans were selected and analysed, within which the following gustatory markers were identified: varenyky, voda, horishky, zefir, yohurt, kava, kasha, kvas, kefir, kovbasy, moloko, morozyvo, oliia, pyvo, plavlenyi syr, syr, syrok, sik, smetana, snek, sous, tomatna pasta, khlib, shokolad, yaitsia (list is presented alphabetically). The most frequent and least used group of gustatory codes within food and drink advertising has been identified. We also found that the most frequently recorded gustatives appear in the following positions: a) gustatives used with artistic means: epithets, metaphors, comparisons, which increases the influential effect of the message as a whole; b) gustatives used with the assigned pronouns our, your, your, my, the adjective native, which causes unconditional trust of the consumers by creating a personal intimated space and accentuating certain national values; c) gustatives used with adjectives of the highest degree of comparison. It is established that the studied gustatory lexemes are bright markers of the traditional culture of culinary art of Ukrainians, an element of the centuries-old food and taste tradition of the Ukrainian people.

“The American Outlaws Are Our People”: Fox Sports and the Branded Ambivalence of an American Soccer Fan at the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup

Drawing on fan studies, sports media studies, media industries studies, and participant observation of the American Outlaws, this essay analyzes specific aspects of the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup as televised by Fox Sports in the wider context of soccer’s evolving place within the American sports media marketplace. American media companies have increasingly positioned soccer as an upscale sport in the U.S. In addition to representing an affluent and cosmopolitan taste culture, the representation of the American Outlaws as part of Fox Sports’ programming and branding flattened the frictions of class, national identity, politics, and race that shaped American soccer discourse in the summer of 2019. This essay explores this flattening and the underlying tensions between televising a tournament based in American national identity that allows for a more mass audience appeal and the more niche-based framing of soccer—including the progressive politics of women’s soccer—in U.S. sports media.

Algorithmic logics and the construction of cultural taste of the Netflix Recommender System

This article investigates algorithms and their construction of cultural taste through a socio-technical analysis of the Netflix Recommender System. I examined the key algorithmic processes in the intersection of its technological infrastructure, cultural processes, and social relations by employing Taina Bucher’s three methodological tactics for ‘unknowing’ algorithms. Drawing from media logic and computational logic, I propose the concept of ‘algorithmic logics’ to define the assumptions, processes, and mechanisms that govern the construction of taste within the Netflix platform. I identified these four logics of taste – datafication, reconfiguration, interpellation, and reproduction – and argue that they reappropriate old apparatuses of social control and generate new capacities in engineering cultural processes. Together, these logics transform algorithms from procedural to self-generative machines in the guise of algorithmic objectivity, user agency, and post-demographic experiences. Algorithmic logics function as an ‘interpretative schema’ in making sense algorithms in their entanglement with social actors, institutions, and infrastructures.

Consumption Structure in Urban and Rural Areas and Self-Rated Health of the Elderly: A Survey Based on Chinese General Social Survey

Health inequality is an aspect of social inequality, and has now become an important problem in the current society. This article uses the data from the Chinese General Social Survey (2017) (CGSS2017) and uses the Multinomial Logistic Models method to analyze the elderly population (over 60 years old) across the country. The study found that the differences in the basic consumption of food and daily necessities among the elderly are relatively small; while consumer goods that reflect the differentiation of social classes such as clothing consumption and cultural consumption have a significant impact on the elderly. Travel consumption status also has a certain impact on the self-rated health choices of the elderly, but housing consumption has no effect on these choices. Thess results pave the way for investigating health from the perspective of socioeconomic status in academic circles. By using this consumption pattern analysis it is possible to analyze the health of the elderly population more effectively. In the future supply of consumer goods, it is possible to strengthen the consumption and supply of cultural tastes for the elderly, enhance the beauty and value of the lifestyle of the elderly, and increase the health of the elderly. At the same time, due to the significant impact of urban–rural differences in the health of the elderly, it is necessary to improve the living security level of the rural elderly, reduce the difference in public services between urban and rural elderly groups, and promote urban–rural integration.

A critical examination of ageism in memes and the role of meme factories

Memes and meme factories are increasingly the new fronts for ageism online. To address the lack of studies exploring memetic expressions of ageism, this study utilized multimodal discourse analysis to analyze 98 image macros from five meme factories in Singapore. Expressions of ageism were consistently found in how the meme visually and discursively portrayed older adults, and three ageist themes of infantilization, barbarization, and fetishization were identified. Memes that infantilized older adults often portrayed them as immature and illiterate despite their age and emphasized their dependence on others. Memes that barbarized older adults portrayed them as being uncultured or having inferior cultural tastes, while memes that fetishized older adults positioned them as an object of sexual fetish. The intersections of ageism with sexism, classism, and racism were also noted. Practical implications of these findings were discussed, and several recommendations were offered for meme factories to reduce visual ageism.

Tastes, emotions, and social cohesion: Toward a cultural theory of social exchange

AbstractThe Affect Theory of Social Exchange (ATSE) research program has produced cumulative insights on how instrumental exchanges lead to the development of affectual attachments. With its focus on task responsibilities, ATSE leaves space to interrogate how factors not related to task execution are at play in the production of interpersonal bonds. In this paper, we integrate insights from social psychology, cultural sociology and organizational research to develop a theoretical framework suggesting (a) why and how cultural tastes contribute to social cohesion and (b) the conditions under which cultural tastes remain a source of strategic advantage or, worse, symbolic exclusion. Our theory rests on the basic proposition that shared cultural tastes increase the likelihood of experiencing positive emotions, which in turn are key in the development and maintenance of affectual attachments. Variations to this proposition are subsequently introduced, considering culture in declarative and nondeclarative forms.

All Roads Lead to Polenta: Cultural Attractors at the Junction of Public and Personal Culture

In the process of retelling information, individuals often inadvertently transform it to be more consistent with their cultural schemas. We explore the long‐term cultural change inherent in this process, focusing on utterances about cultural tastes as our case study (e.g., music, food, and outdoor hobbies). We use a word embedding model to simulate a “telephone game” where each actor partially hears an utterance, uses their cultural schemas to guess the missing word, and tells the result to the next actor. While laboratory “telephone games” explore short transmission chains of approximately four steps, our approach lets us simulate these chains out to 1000 steps. We find that these chains are often pulled toward powerful “cultural attractors”—essentially points of least resistance where communications end up through transmission error alone. Moreover, some attractors operate across taste domains: transmission chains gravitate toward these attractors regardless of which cultural domain they begin in. The most powerful such attractor we located concerns high‐status, broadly liked food. Taste in food may thus have an underappreciated centrality within personal taste: verbal accounts describing taste in food may be particularly stable across multiple retellings, while accounts about other taste domains may become transformed into accounts of taste in food.

THE MERGING OF MUSIC CRITICISM AND MUSIC PROMOTION: CONVERGED MUSIC INDUSTRY PROFESSIONALS ON FACEBOOK

This paper explores the changing socio-cultural dynamic between local music entrepreneurs and journalists/critics on Facebook in Estonia. Through the analysis of 32 semi-structured interviews with music industry professionals and experts and observations of their activities on Facebook, the study identifies the decreasing distance between music criticism and music promotion. On the one hand, the music critics once envisioned as ‘autonomous gatekeepers’ (Hirsch, 1972) find it increasingly hard to transfer their musical authority, expertise and perceived independence to the commercially driven social media environment. As a result, some of them have taken up entrepreneurship themselves, converged their various identities by mixing their critical/evaluative practices as critics and business-oriented practices as entrepreneurs. On the other hand, some niche music entrepreneurs are stepping into the role of cultural authorities by mobilizing and catering to specific taste cultures and genre communities by becoming expert gatekeepers in their own right, despite being compromised by their business interest. In this context, it is no more useful to talk about the ‘mutual dependency’ of the music press and industry PR (Forde, 2001; Negus, 1992). Rather, among the tightly interwoven music scenes like the ones in Estonia, where many players adopt a variety of different and often conflicting roles (especially on Facebook), we should recognize the complete convergence of music promotion and music criticism and the loss of critical distance and autonomy altogether.

Investigating the Cultural Tastes of Art among the Youth (Case Study: Gilane Gharb City)

Art in any culture reflects the cultural tastes of the people of that culture. Artistic taste is also the link between some artistic products and its consumption in a regionalized space (whether geographical, ethnic and tribal, cultural, etc). The theoretical framework of the research is based on the theory of sociology of art of Pierre Bourdieu in measuring and analyzing the cultural tastes of art. And Kumaraswamy theory (traditional art and modern art) is also formulated. The method of this research is sampling and the method of sampling is simple random. The sample size was selected based on Cochran's formula of 384 people. Our statistical population also includes young people aged 15-25 in Gilane Gharb. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and Pearson correlation coefficient, t-test, analysis of variance and regression. The research results indicate that: The highest tendency towards cultural tastes of art was related to the variable of traditional art, which about half of the population studied have a strong tendency towards traditional art. Also, the most important social factor influencing the art of interest was gaining pleasure and then the economic factor. Furthermore, in terms of having the amount of cultural capital and social capital, most respondents have lower to moderate cultural and social capital, which has a positive and direct effect on artistic tastes. Also, most respondents have little or no economic capital, which has a positive and direct effect on artistic tastes. Finally, the variable of cultural tastes of art indicates a low and moderate taste of the sample, which is due to the low level of cultural, social and economic capital.

Critical Approaches Towards (A New) Arts Education

Arts education still strives to claim its specificity and equal relevance comparing to other kinds of knowledge. There remains an idea that arts are powerful transformative agents, but neoliberalism tends to put economic utility and usage as principles that capture art under the great jargons of creativity, cultural industries, or flexibility. Today, it is necessary to question the very concept and status that arts, but also education, built from European perspectives, aligned with colonial practices, the building of nations, identity constructions and a culture of taste, under a universalist idea of civilization and progress. Thus, in this JSTA special issue we aim to question how to critically build a place and status for arts education which does not assume for itself, from the outset, a privileged or exceptional place, which does not reproduce the hegemonic power relations it seeks to criticize, and which stimulates change instead of accommodation and homogenization.

Elisabetta Caminer Turra’s Editorial Strategies for Introducing English Novels in Italy through her Periodicals

This article investigates the figure of Elisabetta Caminer Turra (1751–96) and the role she played in the Italian reception of English novels during the eighteenth century. One key characteristic of Caminer Turra’s editorship of Giornale enciclopedico (1774–82), Nuovo giornale enciclopedico (1783–89), and Nuovo giornale enciclopedico d’Italia (1790–96) was the diffusion of foreign culture in the Italian peninsula: during her career she always aimed at the renovation and improvement of the intellectual milieu of the time. Caminer Turra’s journals played an important role in the Italian reception of foreign literature during the second half of the eighteenth century. The goal of this study is to show (a) how English novels were reviewed, censored, and introduced to the Italian public through the many articles, reviews, and announcements that appeared in the journals she supervised, and (b) to examine, from a stylistic, thematic, and political point of view, the ways in which she played her role as maker of culture and arbiter of taste, in order to clarify the importance of her function as a cultural mediator.

City planning, urban imaginary, and the branded space: Untangling the role of city plans in shaping Dallas's urban imaginaries

Drawing on notions of the symbolic economy and urban imaginary as an inherent dimension of the neoliberal public sphere, this paper examines historicized city plans and their visions, and develops a framework for understanding the role of city plans in shaping urban imaginaries and branded spaces. The paper claims that future city visions, fundamental to plan-making, help legitimize the power elites' growth agendas and ambitions to invest in both symbolic and material flagship place-making projects heavily bolstered and publicized by the media. The study examines this claim in the American context, selecting Dallas, Texas as a unique entrepreneurial city overly concerned with its public image characterized by a long-standing legacy of place promotion and plan-making. Using archival research and semi-structured interviews with key informants, this paper finds that city plans' visions, subservient to the civic elites' cultural tastes, have been instrumental in rallying public support to materialize place-making projects in accord with the city's larger preoccupation with “world-class” status showcased and widely promoted by media outlets. This study concludes by reflecting on the subtle yet tangible link between plan-making and urban imaginaries, an overt tendency of ever more commodified urban spaces, and the paradox it poses to city planning.

Individual's cultural capital: Intergenerational transmission, partner effect, or individual merit?

For decades, social stratification research has focused on the effect of families’ cultural capital on their offspring's educational attainment. However, few studies have focused on the shaping of individuals’ cultural capital. This study aimed to examine the effects of family background, individual, partner, and household characteristics on individuals’ reading preferences and cultural participation. Structural equation modeling was applied to Czech Household Panel Survey (CHPS) data (N = 6,040). The results revealed the different social mechanisms responsible for cultural tastes and participation. While reading preferences are affected by individual characteristics and aspects of the family of origin, cultural participation is influenced by educational level and own cultural preferences, which outweighed the direct effect of family background. Furthermore, the individuals’ cultural behavior was also possibly affected by their partners’ cultural behavior, which was almost as strong factor as their own cultural preferences. In this respect, our results did not show any significant gender differences.

The social positions of taste between and within music genres: From omnivore to snob

Are higher status cultural tastes in the modern United States better described as being inclusive and broad or exclusive and narrow? We construct an original dataset in response to conflicting answers to this question. We fill a major gap in the literature on cultural tastes by simultaneously considering taste for both musical genres and artists within genres. By examining the compositional balance of respondents’ taste portfolios, we reconcile seemingly incommensurate theoretical frameworks of class homology and omnivorousness. The results indicate that an omnivorous disposition to music is a relatively middle-status position in the social structure. In contrast, positions characterized by higher levels of cultural capital map onto exclusive and narrower tastes for consecrated culture.

Taste boundaries and friendship preferences: Insights from the formalist approach

What is the association between cultural tastes and the qualities we prefer in our friends? Previous research has studied cultural tastes and friendship preferences in conjunction but either relates both to people's occupancy of social-structural positions or limits attention to the association between high-culture preferences and preferences for cultured friends. Adopting an alternative approach, I reconceive tastes as “contentful forms” whose numerical or relational properties lend them inherent meanings. Performing OLS regression on 1993 General Social Survey data, I show that friendship preferences vary in relation to two such properties of tastes: (1) the popularity of respondents’ preferred musical genres and (2) conventionality, which concerns the frequency that respondents’ preferred musical genres are selected in tandem by others. I find that favoring highly disliked genres and atypical combinations of genres are each associated with making boundaries on aesthetic grounds. These results suggest that, affording us a sense of position vis-à-vis others, relational properties such as popularity and conventionality operate as platforms from which we render judgments regarding what kinds of people make appropriate candidates for friendship.

Cultural connections: the relation between cultural tastes and socioeconomic network resources

Previous research has argued that by discussing and demonstrating cultural tastes, people identify shared preferences and group membership. Nevertheless, it remains relatively unclear to what extent cultural tastes are related to the formation of social network relations. The present study therefore examines the relationship between individuals’ highbrow and popular tastes and their socioeconomic network resources (i.e. the network's level and heterogeneity in terms of education and job status). Additionally, it examines to what extent highbrow tastes are more positively related to the network's socioeconomic status level among higher status groups (cultural reproduction) or lower status groups (cultural mobility). Based on Dutch panel data (2009–2013), the analyses yield three main findings. First, cultural tastes are related to the network's socioeconomic status level, but not to its heterogeneity. That is, individuals with more highbrow tastes, have more (non-kin) network members with a higher education/job status and fewer with a lower education/job status – and highbrow tastes are generally more strongly related to the network's socioeconomic status level than popular tastes. However, individuals with more popular tastes do not have a more heterogeneous network in terms of socioeconomic resources, after controlling for network size. Second, the effect of highbrow tastes on the network's socioeconomic status level is stronger than the reverse effect. Third, there are indications that highbrow tastes are more positively related to the network's socioeconomic status level among lower than higher status groups (cultural mobility).

Ice Dancing to Arirang in the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games: The Intersection of Music, Identity, and Sport

This cultural-interpretive essay offers critical commentary on Koreanness, racial ideology, hegemonic racial power, and racialized cultural taste with the aim of interpreting the sport–music nexus by examining a case of the interface between music and sport: The authors focus on the case of the Olympic ice dance that the South Korean team performed for the Korean traditional folk songArirangat the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games. The authors argue that music and sport can be understood as a semiological system that shapes non-Whites’ ideological belief system. In addition, this essay engages with a discussion of cultural classification that often racializes skaters of color as the aforementioned are informed by Orientalism.