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.

Acknowledgements

This paper is a product of the project ‘Australian Cultural Fields: National and Transnational Dynamics’ supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council (DP140101970). The project was awarded to Tony Bennett (Project Director, Western Sydney University), to Chief Investigators Greg Noble, David Rowe, Tim Rowse, Deborah Stevenson, and Emma Waterton (Western Sydney University), David Carter and Graeme Turner (University of Queensland), and to Partner Investigators Modesto Gayo (Universidad Diego Portales), and Fred Myers (New York University). Michelle Kelly (Western Sydney University) was appointed Senior Research Officer and Project Manager. The project has additionally benefited from inputs from Ien Ang, Ben Dibley, Liam Magee, Anna Pertierra, and Megan Watkins (Western Sydney University).

Notes

1. See the Introduction to this special issue for further details about this project.

2. Australia is ‘multicultural’ because it contains people who have come from many backgrounds. Therefore, it makes no sense to refer to specific people as being ‘multicultural Australians’; similarly, ‘culturally and linguistically diverse’ must refer to diversity across a population, not to specific groups or individuals.

3. Several things should be pointed out regarding the comparability of the main sample and the ethnic samples: there was a greater percentage of women in the latter, there is some unevenness in age distribution (the Chinese are over-represented in the 18–24 band, Italians over-represented in the 60 + band) and in class and education (Indian and Chinese samples included higher proportions of ‘large business owners’ and tertiary educated while there was a higher proportion in ‘small employers’ among Italians) and in location (Italian, Chinese and Indian more likely in inner city; Lebanese, Indian and Chinese more suburban).

4. The results of the knowledge questions should be interpreted as describing recognition of the item concerned rather than necessarily any deeper knowledge.

5. We use the term ‘local-national’ to designate indigenous and non-indigenous Australian items because some ethnic preferences can also be deemed to be ‘nationalist’ For the concept of ‘national cultural capital’, see Hage (2000, 53).

6. Bennett and Gayo (2016) point out that taste for Aboriginal art as a general category, referring across the spectrum from tourist Aboriginalia to Aboriginal fine art, may recruit broader patterns of liking than for specific named Aboriginal fine art figures.

7. This question had a lower response rate, between 55 and 65%, suggesting some reticence in answering.