A Global-Middle-Class House?¹ Cultural Capital, Taste, and Kitsch

Abstract

In this article, I show how the category of the migrant house, as has been recently discussed in much scholarship, can be expanded to include another subcategory—the global-middle-class house. Recently, the migrant house has generated much research in migration studies and in disciplines of the built environment. Consequently, it has been examined through various perspectives, including home and belonging, materiality in the home, and the transnational home. It has not been examined, however, through the concepts of cultural capital, taste and kitsch, as developed by Bourdieu and others. This article applies these concepts in the exploration of the migrant house through a case study of one house and its transformation from old to new in suburban Melbourne. The article shows how the concepts of cultural capital, taste and kitsch can be utilized to expand the category of the migrant house to include the global-middle-class house. Following a theoretical discussion, the article analyses the old family house, the decision to demolish, the construction process and the redevelopment of a new house, together with an analysis of material objects in the new house and around it. The article argues that this is a specific kind of a migrant house, a global-middle-class house, because it combines popular global taste with objects taken from the ancestral past of its migrant residents.

KEYWORDS:

• global
• middle class
• cultural capital
• taste
• kitsch
• Bourdieu
• Chinese
• migrant house

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to thank the reviewers of this article for their insightful comments, as well as Sandy Gifford and Sharon Parkinson for helping me to think through some of the ideas in this article.

NOTES

Notes

1 A shorter version of this paper has been published in Levin (2012a). This article departs from the previous version in its discussion of kitsch and its detailed analysis of the meaning of cultural capital, taste and kitsch.

2 Neighborhoods in Australian cities are called suburbs, regardless of their distance from the city center.

3 This is part of a larger study that included four migrant groups in total (and 46 participants). Participants were recruited through connections at work and snowballing. The interviews were semi-structured, and participants took me on a tour in the house and yards and allowed me to take photographs during the visit.

4 Pseudonym. Lara’s real name (as presented to me) was an English name and therefore I chose to replace it with another English name.

5 This is, of course, not unique in any way to Chinese culture.

6 Comments from participants at the Cultural Ecology Symposium, Deakin University, 2012.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Iris Levin

IRIS LEVIN IS ASSOCIATED WITH CENTRE FOR URBAN TRANSITIONS, FACULTY OF HEALTH, ARTS & DESIGN, SWINBURNE UNIVERSITY, HAWTHORN, VIC 3122. [email protected]