ABSTRACT
For well over 30 years, social and cultural analysts have wondered how far Pierre Bourdieu’s classic account, in Distinction, of the relationships between cultural tastes and class position in 1960s France might apply to the UK (Bourdieu, 1984). Many questions arose. Does legitimate culture in Britain have the degree of centrality it enjoyed in French social and intellectual life? Do the connections that Bourdieu found between class and culture in 1960s’ France pertain here? Does cultural competence confer power in the same way in Britain? Might the intervening development of broadcasting and, latterly, of the Internet have made all kinds of culture so generally accessible as to call into question the existence of any clear separation of distinct class cultures? And as the vocabularies of class have lost much of their purchase in both public and political life, have other types of social division – gender, ethnicity, age – assumed greater significance in relation to differences in cultural tastes and practices?
