ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the political dimensions of cultural consumption, exploring the ways in which the Australian Cultural Fields household interviews revealed views around questions of politics, involving both key political issues and broader orientations to politics. It takes a more wide-ranging approach to the political than is generally evident in Bourdieu’s work, showing how discussions of cultural consumption draw people to diverse issues including national identity, migration, Indigenous Australia, multiculturalism, Americanisation, globalisation, racism, community and commerce. Connecting with the themes of belonging, nation and locality in previous chapters, it emphasises the ways in which political subjectivities are mediated through cultural practices and the construction of habitus. It analyses tastes not simply as forms of symbolic representation that reproduce relations of inequality, but as practices of positioning which locate people in lived social relations and cultural systems of meaning. The chapter’s focus is on the ways in which politics and cultural consumption are interwoven, producing complex relations to the nation, cultural diversity and the larger global context within and between different social positions. Participants’ accounts are shown to demonstrate the centrality of ambivalence in our relations both to questions of cultural value and of the nation.
