What is Taste? Re-Thinking Cultural Capital & Symbolic Bounding using Ten Songs about Love

• In Event: 078 - Section on Sociology of Culture Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 05. The Sociology of Taste

Abstract

Music has been used many times to examine taste and how it symbolically bounds society into classes by cultural capital. These studies debate Bourdieuan homology and cultural omnivorism using likes and dislikes of genre as their measure of taste. These studies, though, do not use music itself but rather labels of the music (the genre titles). For this study, actual music was used to gauge taste. Ten original musical excerpts in ten genres were written. Two surveys were distributed: one contained each excerpt then asked 106 respondents how much they liked them, and the other did the same with 103 separate respondents, except labeled each excerpt by genre. I found that the addition of the label affects how much the respondents reported liking the genre. This suggests that it is not embodied taste that bounds, as many theories assume, but rather is a reaction to the label of the cultural object, in this case music. Thinking about taste can no longer be simplified to asking “Do you like classical music?” This question does not necessarily capture taste but is capturing a reaction to the label of “classical music.” The theories on symbolic bounding are still valid, however, the mechanism behind the bounding is not taste, it is the reaction to the label.

Author

• Andrew Nietes