ABSTRACT

This chapter presents an overview of the relative significance of level of education, occupational class, gender and age in accounting for the differentiations of cultural tastes and practices across the six cultural fields – art, literature, music, heritage, television and sport – encompassed by the Australian Cultural Fields project. It does so by means of a Multiple Correspondence Analysis of the Australian ‘space of lifestyles’ complemented by a Cluster Analysis. These are accompanied by vignettes of interviewees who illustrate both differences and points of convergence between the clusters. Two main lines of argument are pursued. The first concerns the strong role that practices and tastes linked to the art and literary fields and, albeit to a lesser extent, music field play in marking distinctions within the professional and managerial classes as well as between those classes and other classes relative to the stronger role that heritage, sport and television play in marking distinctions between the classes occupying the centre of the space of lifestyles and lower class positions. The second concerns the significance of the role played by practices representing different times within the space of lifestyles, operating at the intersections of class and age, in influencing the cultural orientations which differentiate the clusters produced by the Cluster Analysis.