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Cultural Stratification: Constructing High and Low Culture

Cultural Stratification: Constructing High and Low Culture. Globalisation, Culture and Lifestyle Daniel Turner and Jenny Flinn Lecture V. Culture and stratification. The concept / object separation High culture the best cultural artefacts a civilisation has to offer

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Cultural Stratification: Constructing High and Low Culture

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  1. Cultural Stratification: Constructing High and Low Culture Globalisation, Culture and Lifestyle Daniel Turner and Jenny Flinn Lecture V

  2. Culture and stratification • The concept / object separation • High culture • the best cultural artefacts a civilisation has to offer • Often linked to Greco-Roman origins, Renaissance • Worthy, substantial, reflects the essence of the human condition • Literature, art, dance, music • “Anna Karenina”, “La Triviata”, “Death in Venice”, Polo • Popular / Mass Culture • Cheap and easily accessible • Baseless and disposable • Reflects the worst of the human condition • Often commercialised and mass • Heat, Big Brother, X-Factor, Football, WWF

  3. Understanding ‘high culture’ • Zelochow (1993) – high culture is removed from the everyday experience • Emerged 1850-1950 (Di Maggio, 1998) • 3 stage process for creation of high culture (McConnacie, 1988) • Separate • Sharpen • Mystify • Levine (1998) – often anti-spectacle – deliberately difficult to follow • Lack of cultural or educational capital can cause exclusion

  4. The construction of high culture • A selective tradition (Williams) • Created via the judgement of the academic and the critic but also the wider public (Lewis) • Pierre Bourdieu – ‘Distinction’ and cultural ‘taste’ • Economic capital is not the primary mechanism for the maintenance of social stratification • Educational and cultural capital reinforce and reinvigorate the status quo

  5. Reification • Rojek (1985) making the historical and social ahistorical and natural • The artificial becomes ‘God given’ • Cultural tastes become set in stone, enforcing and being enforced by social stratification • “it suits the capitalist class to portray the strife-ridden conditions of work and property relations under capitalism as primodial ‘God-given’ state of affairs” (Rojek, 1985:45)

  6. Challenging stratification • Globalisation • Separates the concept / object • Commodification of high culture • Postmodernism • Delegitimising the ‘high’ • Collapsing of high and low cultural forms • Ironic consumption of cultural forms • Reification of low culture

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