EMERGING FORMS OF CULTURAL CAPITAL

ABSTRACT

This paper takes stock of recent research on patterns of cultural engagement in various European nations, with specific reference to British and Danish research. It argues that Bourdieu's original theorisation of cultural capital in ‘Distinction’ needs to be significantly updated to register the decline of ‘highbrow’ culture which these studies reveal. However, we argue that this shift does not entail the erosion of cultural capital itself, or the rise of the ‘cultural omnivore’, so much as the emergence of a form of ‘cosmopolitan cultural capital’. We argue that this emerging cultural capital can be associated with the partial creation of a European field and testifies to the continued stakes of cultural engagement today

Keywords:

• cultural capital
• cosmopolitanism
• stratification

Notes

¹This article has emerged out of collaboration in a European network on studies of cultural distinctions and social differentiation – SCUD (www.soc.aau.dk/scud). See the discussion in Prieur and Savage (2011).

²This was an ESRC funded project award no. R000239801. The team comprised Tony Bennett (Principal Applicant), Mike Savage, Elizabeth Silva, Alan Warde (Co-Applicants), and David Wright and Modesto Gayo (Research Fellows). The applicants were jointly responsible for the design of the national survey and the focus groups and household interviews that generated the quantitative and qualitative data for the project. Elizabeth Silva, assisted by David Wright, coordinated the analyses of the qualitative data from the focus groups and household interviews. Mike Savage and Alan Warde, assisted by Modesto Gayo, coordinated the analyses of the quantitative data produced by the survey. Tony Bennett was responsible for the overall direction and coordination of the project. The full results have been reported at length in Culture, Class, Distinction, Routledge, 2009.