Table Of ContentCultivating
SYMBOLIC BOUNDARIES
Differences
AND THE MAKING
OF INEQUALITY
EDITED BY
Michele Lamont and
Marcel Fournier
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO AND LONDON
Michele Lamont teaches sociology at Princeton University.
She is the author of Money, Morals, and Manners, also
published by the University of Chicago Press. Marcel
Fournier teaches sociology at the University of Montreal.
He is the author of Marcel Mams, le savant et le militant
(forthcoming).
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 1992 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 1992
Printed in the United States of America
01 00 99 98 97 96 95 94 93 92 5 4 3 2 1
ISBN (cloth): 0-226-46813-5
ISBN (paper): 0-226-46814-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publieation Data
Cultivating differences : symbolic boundaries and the making of
inequality / edited by Michele Lamont and Marcel Fournier,
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Culture. 2. Social structure. 3. Equality. 4. Social status.
5. Symbolic interactionism. I. Lamont, Michele, 1957-
II. Fournier, Marcel, 1945-
HM101.C83 1992
305—dc20 92-15204
CIP
Excerpts in Chapter 9 are from Randall Collins, “Women and Men
in the Class Structure,” Journal of Family Issues 9 (1988): 27—50.
Reprinted with permission from Sage Publications, Inc. Excerpts
in Chapter 10 are from Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, ‘Workplace
Boundaries: Conceptions and Creations,” Social Research 56,
no. 3 (1989), Reprinted with permission from Social Research.
© The paper used in this publication meets the minimum
requirements of the American National Standard for Information
Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI Z39.48-1984.
CONTENTS
Preface
Herbert J. Gans vii
Acknowledgments xvii
One Introduction
Michele Lamont and Marcel Fournier 1
Part One: The Institutionalization of Cultural Categories
Two Cultural Boundaries and Structural Change:
The Extension of the High Culture Model to Theater,
Opera, and the Dance, 1900—1940
Paul DiMaggio 21
Three High Culture versus Popular Culture Revisited:
A Reconceptualization of Recorded Cultures
Diana Crane 58
Four Nature’s Body and the Metaphors of Food
Joseph R. Gusfield 75
Five Constructing a Shifting Moral Boundary: Literature
and Obscenity in Nineteenth-Century America
Nicola Beisel 104
Part Two: High Culture and Exclusion
Six The Audience for Abstract Art:
Class, Culture, and Power
David Halle 131
vi Contents
Seven How Musical Tastes Mark Occupational
Status Groups
Richard A. Peterson and Albert Simkus 152
Eight Barrier or Leveled The Case of the Art Museum
Vera L. Zolberg 187
Part Three: Resources for Boundary Work:
The Case of Gender and Ethnicity
Nine Women and the Production of Status Cultures
Randall Collins 213
Ten Tinkerbells and Pinups: The Construction and
Reconstruction of Gender Boundaries at Work
Cynthia Fuchs Epstein 232
Eleven The Capital(s) of Cultures: A Nonholistic
Approach to Status Situations, Class, Gender,
and Ethnicity
John R. Hall 257
Part Four:
Exclusion and the Polity
Twelve Citizen and Enemy as Symbolic Classification:
On the Polarizing Discourse of Civil Society
Jeffrey C. Alexander 289
Thirteen Democracy versus Sociology: Boundaries and
Their Political Consequences
Alan Wolfe 309
Contributors 327
Index 331
PREFACE
Herbert J. Gans
I
This is a book about culture, class, gender, and boundaries, four com
plicated concepts that social scientists and humanists use to try to un
derstand even more complicated social arrangements. A single preface
cannot pretend to summarize a very broad book, but at least I can
write a little about what I learned from it and how I was stimulated
by it. A preface writer is, among other things, an initial stand-in for
the readers of a book, and if I am at all representative of later readers,
I can promise that they will come away from Cultivating Differences
with a great deal of learning and stimulation.1
Several disciplines use culture as a basic concept, and of course they
mean different things by the same word. I shall not review these con
ceptual differences; suffice it to say that many American sociologists
currently favor Ann Swidler’s notion of culture as a kit of tools and
action strategies for coping with social life. Swidler’s tool-kit metaphor
is graphic and useful, for it tells us at once that different people have
access to tool kits of different costs and completeness.
This is only to state in another way what I consider to be one basic
theme of this book: that culture is shaped above all by class and thus
particularly by economic and related inequalities. True, culture is also
shaped by gender, among other things, but as a late section of the
book reminds us, gender is itself fundamentally affected by class. While
working-class women may have their differences with working-class
men, they also have sharp differences with upper-middle-class women.
The feminist movement, like the civil rights movement and other politi
cal movements, has suffered from the inability to understand how much
gender, race, and other statuses are influenced, and Split, by class.
vu
viii Herbert J. Gans
II
In this book, culture is used mainly in two ways. A number of authors
write first about the media and popular culture, that is, what the tool
kit provides for entertainment or diversion, and second about culture
in its translation from the German Kultur, that is, what the tool kit
offers for intellectual-aesthetic experience. In past generations, Euro
pean intellectuals, mainly of the Right but also of the Left, complained
about the culture of the masses, decrying what they conceived to be
the mass desire for entertainment rather than intellectual-aesthetic expe
rience. Rightiy or wrongly, they assumed that, as intellectuals, they
sought mainly the latter and shunned the former while for the masses
it was the other way around. Intellectuals of the Left thought that
the masses could be mobilized to give up entertainment for more
intellectual-aesthetic experience—and during the same process in which
they would be converted to socialism. Conversely, intellectuals of the
Right believed that the masses were too stupid and vulgar to give up
mass culture.
In America, this debate was reframed as the choice between high
culture and popular culture, with some taking up the European argu
ment that everyone should really be choosing high culture. However,
others, myself included, argued that it was unfair to expect workers to
behave like upper-middle-class professionals as long as they could not
obtain access to the time, money, learning, and other opportunities of
the professional strata. Besides, in an individualistic society, people
have the right to the culture of their choice, provided that choice can
not be proved to harm anyone.
This debate eventually ended, at least for the present, sometime
during the late 1970s or early 1980s, in part because of the inability
of the two “sides” to say anything new. However, at about that time,
the distinction between high and popular culture also became fuzzy. A
new generation of professionals, managers, and technicians appeared
who decided that they did not have to imitate the tastes of their elders
and that they could be, to use a current phrase in a different sense,
multicultural. That is, people could choose from both popular and high
culture, from museum and poster art, from classical music and jazz and
rock—and without any loss of cultural or social status. This produced
theoretical and empirical analyses—which also appear in this book—
indicating that the old differences between high and popular culture
had been considerably reduced. Some even claimed—but no one in
this book—that these differences had disappeared completely and that
Preface ix
America appeared to be developing a single, unbounded, although
internally variegated culture that served both for diversion and for
intellectual-aesthetic experience.
Some of the people making this argument were extrapolating from
empirical findings about changes in cultural choices, which reflected
changing tastes, alterations in the American class structure, and related
revisions in the boundaries of popular and high culture. Other writers,
notably conservatives, were, however, using what they viewed as the
end of the popular culture—high culture distinction to claim that class
and class differences were disappearing in America. Conservatives have
always been very good at making empirical sounding ideological state
ments, but class differences remain in American culture, however cul
ture is defined. Moreover, economic and political class differences
became more pronounced again during the government-sponsored
increases in income and wealth inequality of the 1980s and early 1990s,
although the cultural consequences of the new rise in inequalities re
main to be studied.
Some illustration of how changing tastes affect the conception of
popular and high culture is provided by Peterson and Simkus, whose
data on class and country music indicate that such music is no longer
solely the preserve of rural and small-town low-income people. They
also provide some suggestive evidence that, when class positions are
assigned to taste levels, it is the class position of the audience, not the
cultural qualities of the music, that determines the assignment—which
says in yet another way that class shapes culture. To be sure, this is not
quite the same for all culture, and it is probably less true of intellectual-
aesthetic culture than it is of entertainment. For example, fiction is in
some respects more diversified than country music, and the novels of
Philip Roth are more complicated than those of popular writers like
Sidney Sheldon.
By the criterion of complexity, Roth is “higher” than Sheldon, al
though the choice of the complexity criterion, generally offered by the
supporters of high culture, is not coincidental. Ability to deal with
literary complexity correlates with years of schooling and thus with
class. However, class-correlated complexity levels are less relevant in
determining who prefers what kinds of country music. (And what
would sociologists say about taste and class in a society in which the
educated strata choose Sheldon and country music while the unedu
cated prefer Roth and chamber music?)
While it is true that some old low-, middle-, and highbrow bound
aries have fallen or been crossed, yet others remain, and will do so as
x Herbert J. Gans
long as there are differences of class, gender, race, and taste preferences
that reflect them. For example, despite their frequent, albeit superficial
efforts, art museums have not yet been able to attract lower-middle-
and working-class audiences to come to see museum art.
Ill
I found this book particularly useful-for thinking more about the differ
ences between culture as entertainment and culture as intellectual-
aesthetic experience. Although empirical social research has not often
emphasized these differences, it is likely that some people’s entertain
ment is others’ intellectual-aesthetic experience, and vice versa. One
problem has been a scholarly class bias, for scholars, especially in the
humanities, have been writing about “our” intellectual-aesthetic culture
and “their” entertainment. Sociologists have also been touched by this
bias, and as a result they have not paid enough empirical attention to
how highbrows entertain themselves or where lower-income groups
get their intellectual-aesthetic culture. Nor have the similarities and
differences between entertainment and intellectual-aesthetic experience,
for all classes, been explored sufficiendy.
The differences among these kinds of culture also complicate the
general relation between culture and class, and this book provides con
siderable evidence that the relationship is hardly direct. The upper
classes, whether defined by money or prestige, pay some of the bills
for high culture (and use their class power to get governments to pay
the rest), but they do not constitute a loyal audience for it. Their
cultural preferences seem to be more for middlebrow cultures, whether
for entertainment or intellectual-aesthetic experience. In a telling analy
sis, David Halle shows us that, although the working class tends to
buy landscape paintings while the upper classes choose abstract art, the
latter often see landscapes in the abstractions that they acquire. Thus,
it appears that, literally or figuratively, just about everyone winds up
with landscapes on their walls. Moreover, the upper classes seem to
choose the same movies and television programs as other people for
their electronic entertainment, although they may still do their boating
on yachts while those of more moderate income opt for motorboats
or go rowing.
In any case, high culture is the culture, not of the upper class, but
of a professional stratum that earns its living by creating, distributing,
analyzing, and criticizing the various works identified as high culture
as well as of a small but loyal set of cultural amateurs, many of them
Preface xi
in related professions, who add to the total high culture audience.
Although they are amateurs, the latter view culture as if they were
themselves professional cultural creators or critics, which may be why
they are called cultured or cultivated. In this respect, they differ radically
from other audiences of high culture—and of popular culture—who
want to be treated and satisfied as audiences and do not care much
about the intellectual-aesthetic questions with which creators grapple
in their work. (I called the former creator oriented and the latter audience
oriented in my Popular Culture and High Culture,2 and I still think the
distinction is useful.) The professional high culture audience is in some
ways the successor of that group of people who, as Paul DiMaggio has
reported,3 were imported from Europe in the late nineteenth century
by the Boston Brahmins to bring high culture to Boston and a new
source of prestige to the Brahmins.
Although the study of high culture institutions is now getting under
way in America, we still know very little about the persons who make
these institutions function. We have not yet studied the social sources
and inspirations of their intellectual-aesthetic directions or how and
why they make the creative and other decisions they do. The news
media cover only the fights they sometimes get into with boards of
trustees, with the marketers who help concert halls and museums max
imize audience size, and lately with the federal government. We also
need to study the private cultural lives of this professional stratum.
Presumably, they get their intellectual-aesthetic culture from their
work, and perhaps their entertainment too, although, typically, we have
not asked what they do for diversion—or even whether they practice
what they preach about the virtues of high culture. (Similar questions
could be asked about the professionals who create popular culture, in
New York, Hollywood, and elsewhere, but that too will have to wait
until sociologists of the professions develop a greater interest in the
sociology of culture.)
Last, but perhaps not least, there is the relation between culture and
prestige. Earlier in this century, the existence of people who chose their
culture for reasons of prestige, that is, who went to the opera to be
seen and went to sleep when the performance started, were a common
subject of discussion and of criticism. This may have been an upper-
class pattern only, or a highbrow stereotype of rich middlebrows, but
while we know that the search and competition for prestige is not
dead, we do not know much about how, where, and among whom it
takes place today, in the lower as well as the higher classes.
Ordinary Americans consume more and more of their entertainment
xii Herbert J. Gans
and intellectual-aesthetic culture inside the home, but presumably the
furnishing of the house, the pictures on the walls, and, in the more
educated classes, the books on the coffee table are still used to impress
relatives, friends, neighbors, and other visitors. And we know even less
about whether and how the poor, who do not have much money to
spend on impressing anyone, use culture to obtain and compete for
prestige. But then we remain ignorant about people’s current prestige
seeking strategies in general. Furthermore, while we know that peer
pressure, reference groups, and word of mouth still influence cultural
choice, we do not know which peers, reference groups, and mouths
are considered by different classes when choosing among the various
kinds of culture.
The connections between culture and prestige are relevant, not only
among consumers or audiences, but also among professionals, in part
because there are taste-related status distinctions among kinds of cul
tural work. Creators of high culture still appear to have more status
than those of popular culture, even though the latter are far more
affluent. However, similar comparisons can be made in a variety of
cultural fields. The equivalents of high culture and popular culture exist
in architecture, in part because of its connection to art, but they can
also be found in sociology.
Professional sociologists feel that they do better and more presti
gious work than pop sociologists, and within professional sociology
academics continue to look down their noses at market and applied
researchers. Within the academy, the people who “do theory” are often
accorded more prestige than those who carry out empirical studies and
especially than those who write textbooks. To some extent the ranking
is related to the perceived complexity of the cultural product, but it
also has to do with the status of the final consumer. As in all profes
sions, those who deal with higher-status clients outrank those who deal
with lower-status ones—which is why writers of sociology textbooks
for high school students rank low on the professional prestige scale.
IV
This book is also a work about boundaries, and I have alreadv made
passing references to cultural boundaries. Like other social arrange
ments, cultures have boundaries—and before the concept of bound
aries became popular, sociologists talked about subcultures as a primi
tive way of dealing with such boundaries. Cultural concepts have
boundaries too, or else they would melt into other concepts, and the
