Highbrow Culture Research Articles

A vote at the opera? The political economy of public theaters and orchestras in the German states

Policymakers generally have powerful incentives to attract votes by strategically manipulating public policies, for instance by increasing public spending during election periods or by implementing ideologically valued policies for their electoral base. At first sight, public theaters and orchestras appear an unlikely domain for such tactics. Highbrow culture is elitist and provides few jobs to artists as voters (patronage). However, we argue that policymakers indirectly target a larger highbrow culture-consuming voting public, as this public is more likely to go voting, to actively engage in politics, and to influence other voters' political behavior through political and sociological multiplier effects. We find evidence of such manipulation tactics in Germany, 1993–2010. Artist numbers increase during state-level, and even more during municipal-level, election years (electioneering). More tentatively, leftwing party power increases cultural subsidies and jobs in Eastern states.

A Vote at the Opera? The Political Economy of Public Theatres and Orchestras in the German States

Policymakers generally have powerful incentives to attract votes by strategically manipulating public policies, for instance by increasing public spending during election periods or by implementing ideologically valued policies for their electoral base. At first sight, public theaters and orchestras appear an unlikely domain for such tactics. Highbrow culture is elitist and provides few jobs to artists as voters (patronage). However, we argue that policymakers indirectly target a larger highbrow culture-consuming voting public, as this public is more likely to go voting, to actively engage in politics, and to influence other voters’ political behavior through political and sociological multiplier effects. We find evidence of such manipulation tactics in Germany, 1993-2010. Artist numbers increase during state-level, and even more during municipal-level, election years (electioneering). More tentatively, left-wing party power increases cultural subsidies and jobs in Eastern states.

Cultuurparticipatie van Turken en Marokkanen in Nederland - Toetsing van een identificatie- en sociale netwerkverklaring

Cultural participation of Turkish and Moroccans in the Netherlands. Testing an identification and social network explanation Research on social differentiation in cultural participation traditionally focuses on educational or income inequalities. With respect to ethnic differences in highbrow culture relatively little is known. Employing recent data from the Netherlands Longitudinal Lifecourse Study (2010) we explore to what extent educational differentiation in cultural participation among Turkish and Moroccan minorities is mediated and moderated by aspects of identification and integration. Our study shows that ethnic minority members, who identify themselves more with the Netherlands and participate in a social network with Dutch friend and higher educated friends, are more active in the highbrow cultural realm. A most interesting result is that identification with Dutch society actually moderates the relationship between an individual’s education and cultural participation; higher educated from Turkish and Moroccan decent who identify more with the Netherlands participate more in elitist culture than higher educated low in their identification with the Netherlands.

'Ma mère l’oye' and the misfortunes of the musical canon

This essay introduces and discusses a series of viewpoints on the Western musical canon, selected from the most representative of those that can be found on the web. The focus is almost exclusively on Italian websites, from Wikipedia entries to various forums. I have deliberately given more room to statements of modest cultural and intellectual value, for their documentary value as evidence of widespread opinions, and real attitudes, that give us a vivid picture of how serious the situation is. One of the worrying aspects in this survey of mostly negative judgments is the fact that, among these boorish critics of the Musical Canon, there are also esteemed musicologists, who seem to enthusiastically support the primitivism of so many immature critics of “classical stuff”, mimicking their jargon and hostility towards highbrow culture. Their purpose in doing so may be to ingratiate themselves with their dialogue partners, but it is unclear whether, after successfully applying this ‘entryist’ tactic, they intend to carry out targeted educational actions (a sort of modern take on Horace’s castigare ridendo mores , or correcting customs by laughing at them) – or whether, as seems more likely, they just want to climb on the bandwagon.

Culture, Entertainment and Listening Habits in The West German Discourse on Radio During the 1950s

This article examines the intellectual discourse in West Germany on the role of entertainment in radio programs during the 1950s. Although accounting for most of the airtime and being an assigned mission of public broadcasters, many radio officials and experts continued to be suspicious of entertainment. Strongly adhering to the classical tradition of highbrow culture, these humanistic intellectuals had difficulties accepting entertainment as an integral component of broadcasting. The only discursive path for them to adopt entertainment as a legitimate concept was to discuss its specific contribution in the context of Bildung and Kultur. The article thus provides insight into how members of the cultural elites came-to-terms with the rise of popular culture during the 1950s.

Cultural consumption across countries: A multi-level analysis of social inequality in highbrow culture in Europe

Participation in highbrow culture for individuals is often recognized as an important but unequally distributed asset. Although numerous studies have confirmed social differentiation in highbrow cultural consumption, cross-national research on social inequality in the cultural domain is still scarce. We contribute to the existing body of knowledge by examining to what extent social inequality in highbrow cultural consumption varies between European countries. We further test to what extent this social inequality in cultural consumption is moderated by a country's wealth, social mobility, and level of cultural funding. Multi-level regression models are employed using Eurobarometer data on 20,622 individuals living in 29 countries. Our results show that highbrow cultural consumption in European countries is affected by a nation's wealth, social mobility level, and level of cultural funding and supply. Furthermore, we find that educational and affluence inequality in cultural consumption is less outspoken in wealthy countries as compared to less wealthy countries. It is also shown that educational differentiation in highbrow cultural consumption is less profound in countries with large social mobility.

Women's Preference for Highbrow Culture Does Not Begin in the Family: Comparing Cultural Participation Among Brothers and Sisters

Research reports that women are more likely than men to participate in highbrow cultural activities, but we do not know whether this gap develops within the family at an early age or is the outcome of economic and positional differences between men and women later in life. We use a Danish data set to analyze cultural participation among brothers and sisters from the same family and report three findings: gender differences in highbrow cultural participation are mostly unrelated to family-background characteristics; there is little evidence that parents engage in gender-specific cultural socialization; and socioeconomic position and family obligations account for less than 20 percent of brother-sister differences in highbrow cultural participation. Our results suggest that gender differences in highbrow cultural participation originate in factors outside the family.

Science and Eastern Orthodoxy: From the Greek Fathers to the Age of Globalization by Efthymios Nicolaidis (review)

Reviewed by: Science and Eastern Orthodoxy: From the Greek Fathers to the Age of Globalization by Efthymios Nicolaidis Maria Mavroudi Science and Eastern Orthodoxy: From the Greek Fathers to the Age of Globalization. By Efthymios Nicolaidis. Translated by Susan Emanuel. [Medicine, Science, and Religion in Historical Context]. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2011. Pp. xx, 252. $55.00. ISBN 978-1-4214-0298-7.) Recent discussions on the relation between religion and science in various historical contexts have mitigated an earlier view, influenced by Enlightenment anticlericalism, that this encounter was generally inimical. The volume under review offers Greek-speaking Eastern Orthodoxy as an example inviting further reflection on this problem. It also partly redresses the lack of any monograph on Byzantine science (pp. 197–202), generated by a widely shared perception that Byzantium was marginal to developments in world history and that the Byzantine legacy of the entire Orthodox world (Greek, Slavic, or other) is incompatible with and obstructive to modernity. Accordingly, researching the sciences among Orthodox Christians under Ottoman rule meant measuring Greek progress toward modernity and eventually explaining what led to the creation of a modern Greek nation-state. The Byzantine period (fourth to fifteenth century) is covered in approximately 100 pages, whereas another 100 are dedicated to subsequent developments among Greek-speaking orthodox Christians until the end of the twentieth century (geopolitically covering the Ottoman lands, Eastern and Western Europe, and Greece since its independence in 1830). Conceived and completed within four years (p. xii), this volume is admirably succinct. Its author, who acknowledges the difficulties generated by the dearth of existing research on the subject and the complexity of the issues involved, deserves gratitude for producing the only comprehensive reference available to scholars working both within and outside the fields it directly covers. The volume focuses on the aspects of science where later developments led to the so-called scientific revolution: the constitution of the world as a physical entity and its function in astronomical terms, especially planetary motion. It implicitly assumes that the definition of science and its distinction from “pseudo-science” remained stable throughout the seventeen centuries it covers and was approximately the same as the modern one. The author repeats ideas found in secondary literature instead of scrutinizing and reformulating them. As a result, the book reproduces earlier interpretations [End Page 96] of Byzantine culture abandoned by Byzantinists and occasionally includes factual errors. For example, chapter 2 contrasts the spherical universe of a postulated Alexandrian school, derived from “Hellenic” sources and embraced by highbrow culture, with the flat universe of an Antiochian school based on “Asiatic” sources and propagated by monks and the lower clergy in “popular” texts such as lives of saints. This contrast is no longer tenable, especially since what the author describes as the “popular” and “primitive” angelology of the Antiochian school (p. 31) is, in fact, a key ingredient of a particularly highbrow medieval endeavor: the ninth-century translations of Greek material into Arabic by Hunayn b. Ishaq and his associates, who routinely rendered the ancient gods of the pagan texts as angels. This reflected a philosophical tradition embraced by both pagans and Christians in late antiquity and beyond: the derivation of cosmology from the allegorical interpretation of ancient mythology. The book’s negative assessment of Byzantine culture during iconoclasm (seventh–ninth centuries) ignores its positive reevaluation by recent scholarship. The account of Byzantine-Arab astrological exchanges during this period is muddled and inaccurate regarding the careers of the elusive Stephen (of Alexandria, Athens, and so forth) and Theophilos of Edessa (not a Greek Orthodox astrologer who immigrated from Byzantium to the caliphate, but a Syrian Christian born in Muslim lands and active at the court of caliph al-Mahdi). Two very distinct literary forms, hagiography and the Erotapokriseis (teaching manuals in question-and-answer form) are conflated (p. 54). Psellos is presented as a reader of predominantly “pagan” literature, which presumably led to a subsequent need for Emperor Alexios I to “re-Christianize” Byzantine education; this interpretation disregards Psellos’s extensive engagement with patristic literature and generally distorts the outlook of eleventh-century Byzantine education. The author states that, in the fourteenth century, Theodore Metochites “hoped to purify...

Female bestsellers: A cross-national study of gender inequality and the popular–highbrow culture divide in fiction book production, 1960–2009

This article studies trends in gender inequality in the domain of fiction books between 1960 and 2009 in France, Germany and the United States by analysing bestseller lists and literary award winners. It is argued that gender inequality is larger in fields or genres where more status is at stake for individual agents, as this causes an influx of men who then ‘edge’ women out of the field. The study finds evidence for this mechanism, as the presence of female authors in bestseller lists (exponent of the popular culture system) is larger than that among literary award winners (highbrow culture system) in all three countries. Cross-national differences are consistent (US smallest inequality, France largest), emphasizing the importance of field characteristics in explaining social inequalities in cultural production.

CULTURAL AND MORAL CLASS BOUNDARIES IN A NORDIC CONTEXT

ABSTRACT One of the major contributions of Pierre Bourdieu in Distinction was to illuminate the function of cultural consumption as a marker of status in 1960s' France. Since then, there has been an ongoing debate as to whether these findings are applicable in other national contexts, and not least whether other forms of symbolic boundary-drawing might be more relevant. Based on a survey conducted in the Danish municipality of Aalborg in 2004 and by using multiple correspondence analysis, I am able to show that both cultural consumption and politico-moral stances serve as markers of class positions. By introducing a range of qualitative semi-structured interviews, I argue that politico-moral boundaries are at least as important as cultural boundaries, and that both are used to establish symbolic boundaries between social positions, divided by the same principles as those found by Bourdieu in Distinction; that is, by the volume and the composition of economic and cultural capital. One of the distinctions cutting across both the cultural and the politico-moral modes of drawing boundaries is a divide between what I have termed a global and a local mode of orientation. Finally, antipathies towards cultural elites are expressed through aversions against state subsidisation of highbrow culture.

Gender and highbrow cultural participation in the United States

Empirical analyses of cultural choice consistently report that gender is an essential determinant of cultural participation. In particular, women are significantly more likely than men to participate in high-status cultural activities. However, research on the determinants of the gender gap in high culture remains scarce. Using recent data on the United States (Survey of Public Participation in the Arts 2008), this research integrates several explanations of the gender gap in highbrow cultural participation. Specifically, the models explore the effect of (1) early socialization in the arts and socioeconomic status; (2) differential involvement by gender in the labor force; and (3) the influence of marriage on women's and men's cultural participation. A key result is that the gender gap in highbrow culture can be traced partly to differences in early socialization in the arts for women and men. Several employment-related variables also reinforce the gender gap in cultural participation.

Spousal influence in time use – On book reading, highbrow culture attendance and computer use

Spousal influence on time use has been studied quite intensively in the context of domestic work. Spousal influence means how the properties or behavior of a spouse affect the other spouse's behavior. However, spousal influence studies on time use in leisure time are very rare. This research focuses on just that. The general hypothesis was that the power of spousal influence is dependent on the type of leisure activity in question. Three different types of leisure activities were investigated. They were: book reading, visiting more or less high culture places, or attendance at high culture events, and computer use. Data came from two recent Finnish time use surveys from the years 1999-2000 and 2009-2010. General univariate linear models were used as the method. It was found that spousal influence was very strong in high culture attendance, remarkable in book reading, and non-existent in computer use. It was also evident that a person’s age and education increased spousal effect in time devoted to highbrow culture.

A Creative Machine: The Media History of Theodor Fontane's Library Network and Reading Practices

This article proposes a new understanding of Theodor Fontane's reading techniques in the context of nineteenth-century textual practices. On the basis of Fontane's unpublished notebooks and other sources, the article reconstructs Fontane's management of a postal library network that supplied him with a ceaseless influx of materials from both highbrow and lowbrow culture. Analyzing the reading practices with which he traversed this variegated overabundance of material, the article contends that the virtuosic technique of “brutal reading” enabled Fontane to break textual sources down into discrete passages that became available for creative recombination for his own writing process. The article rebuts conventional approaches in Fontane scholarship that focus on his reading of individual authors and their influence, arguing that the question of how Fontane read is far more important than the question of what he read.

Highbrow culture in Finland: Knowledge, taste and participation

This article explores the social distribution of involvement in highbrow culture in light of three issues being discussed in cultural sociology. One is that highbrow cultural orientation is an indicator of cultural capital or of social status. A second, the ‘meltdown scenario’, suggests that not only the popularity of highbrow activities, but also their distinctiveness, has decreased among younger cohorts in comparison to older cohorts. A third deals with the ‘feminization’ of highbrow culture. These issues are empirically addressed in contemporary Finland using nationally representative survey data. Highbrow culture is measured in three dimensions of cultural practices – knowledge, taste and participation – covering four different fields: music, literature, cinema and the visual arts. The results support all three arguments: First, education and occupational class are important social determinants of involvement in highbrow culture in Finland. Second, younger age cohorts show less interest in highbrow culture than do older Finns. Third, women tend to be more involved in highbrow culture than men. The results indicate considerable stability across the measures of highbrow culture and cultural fields. Social determinants of knowledge and cinema, however, are different from those in other dimensions and fields.

Changing relations: Class, education and cultural capital

Based on analyses of survey data of the cultural practices of Norwegian students in 1998 and 2008, this article addresses the changing relations between class, education and cultural tastes of students in Norway – particularly focusing on what Bourdieu termed “cultural capital”. Proceeding from international and Norwegian debates regarding the nature and social importance of cultural capital, the article first discusses the changing relation between social class and educational careers. On this basis, changes with regard to the use of music and literature, both in forms of genres and individual artists/authors, are analysed. While general relations between preferences for musical and literary genres and social background appear to be quite stable, with traditional highbrow genres in both years being closely related to students with high levels of cultural capital, students’ interest in traditional highbrow genres have weakened considerably in the period under study. This suggests that traditional forms of highbrow culture are becoming increasingly more irrelevant for most students cultural lives, but also more socially distinctive, and they still appear to command a large degree of recognition. However, the article concludes, the general decline in interest towards such forms of culture suggests an increasingly precarious position for traditional highbrow culture. 1 1 Project title and website: Democracy and the Digitisation of Audiovisual Culture (DIGICULT). http://digicult.uib.no/.

Identities and social change in Britain since 1940: the politics of method

Preface and acknowledgements Introduction 1. 2005 to 1938: Lifting social groups out of the landscape. ART I: TECHNICAL IDENTITIES AND SOCIAL CHANGE 2. 1938: The British intellectual and high-brow culture 3. 1954: The challenge of technical identity 4. 1950: The resurgence of gentlemanly expertise in post-war Britain. 5. 1962: The moment of sociology PART II: THE SOCIAL SCIENCE APPARATUS 6. 1956: The end of community: the quest for the English Middletown 7. 1951: The interview and the melodrama of social mobility 8. 1941: The sample survey and the modern rational nation PART III: TECHNIQUE AND EXPERTISE 9. 2009: The Politics of Method References Appendix: Details of Archival Sources consulted

Sociétés chorales et Renaissance de la musique anglaise, 1840-1910

The great English choral tradition as we know it today was born along with the Industrial Revolution with the development of choral societies like the oldest, the Halifax Choral Society in 1817, while the Birmingham Choral Society, founded in 1843, was to provide a chorus for the town’s Triennial Music Festival. Those societies were fostered so as to tame, civilise and educate the potentially unruly new unskilled labour force who manned “the dark Satanic mills” of the expanding northern industrial cities and to lead them away from drink or the profanities of the nascent music-halls. Their favourite repertoire was the English oratorios of Handel and Mendelssohn, a genre which flourished all century long in the wake of the great religious awakening of the late eighteenth century and provided English and foreign composers with work in an opera-shy kingdom. Various social reformers, like John Curwen of Tonic Sol-Fa fame, developed methods to teach the untrained choristers how to read music, thus permitting their exposure to high-brow culture, to which the policy of the music publisher Novello greatly contributed. Paradoxically, the Renaissance of English music in the late 19th century benefited from the craze for choral singing but also somehow triggered its demise when native composers, who had assimilated the lessons of their foreign competitors and raised their standards of composition, required more from their amateur choristers, gradually forced to give up in favour of professionals, increasing the gap between popular and high brow culture.

« Culture for the million, or society as it may be » 1

When in the late nineteenth century Aestheticism slowly lost ground to the Arts and Crafts Movement and then to Decadence and Art Nouveau, the Victorian artistic field had considerably evolved. Freed from the moral task traditionally assigned to it, English art now claimed its autonomy — « All art is quite useless » wrote Wilde in the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1891 —, relying on a pictorial idiom which, in time, had become quite familiar to a large public. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role and function of the graphic arts in the Victorians’ familiarity with avant-garde theories. At a time when the demands of an enlarged readership triggered a remarkable development of periodical literature, the illustrated press was partly responsible for the circulation of the very ideals it meant to ridicule. From the vantage point offered by such publications as The Illustrated London News and, of course, Punch, cartoons became the missing link between highbrow and lowbrow culture, thus contributing to the long-lasting fascination exerted by Aestheticism on the rest of society.

The Israeli Music Scene: An Essay in Secular Culture

This essay deals with some issues relating to music in Israel. Many regard music as a universal language bridging barriers thrown up by spoken tongues, but there is more to music than meets the ear, for music divides by ethnicity, social class and age. Since the middle 1960s when classic Israeliness began to be challenged, Israeli culture has become much more contentious. Canonical highbrow culture was important in creating Israel’s social structure, especially differences between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim. Thus classical “art” music is jostled for supremacy by such genres as Israel rock, musica mizrahit, Mediterranean music, and exposure to global pop cultures. Israeli culture has developed an open market in which everyone competes for devotees.

Making the Case for Middlebrow Culture

It is commonly assumed that Caribbean culture is split into elite highbrow culture—which is considered derivative of Europe and not rooted in the Caribbean—and authentic working-class culture, which is often identified with such iconic island activities as salsa, carnival, calypso, and reggae. In Caribbean Middlebrow, Belinda Edmondson recovers a middle ground, a genuine popular culture in the English-speaking Caribbean that stretches back into the nineteenth century. Edmondson shows that popular novels, beauty pageants, and music festivals are examples of Caribbean culture that are mostly created, maintained, and consumed by the Anglophone middle class. Much of middle-class culture, she finds, is further gendered as female : women are more apt to be considered recreational readers of fiction, for example, and women's behavior outside the home is often taken as a measure of their community's respectability. Edmondson also highlights the influence of American popular culture, especially African American popular culture, as early as the nineteenth century. This is counter to the notion that the islands were exclusively under the sway of British tastes and trends. She finds the origins of today's dub or spoken-word Jamaican poetry in earlier traditions of genteel dialect poetry-as exemplified by the work of the Jamaican folklorist, actress, and poet Louise Miss Lou Bennett Coverley-and considers the impact of early Caribbean novels including Emmanuel Appadocca (1853) and Jane's Career (1913).