mikaraento comments on Why Real Men Wear Pink - Less Wrong

51 Post author: Yvain 06 August 2009 07:39AM

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Comment author: mikaraento 29 December 2014 08:00:34PM 0 points [-]

If anybody wants to get deeper into how fashion, class and status work I highly recommend Bourdieu's 'Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste'.

Bourdieu collected large amounts of data on the expressed taste of different social classes in visual art, food, music, literature, social gatherings etc., augmented by semi-structured interviews with a smaller sample. It's not too useful to try and summarize it, but some of the major useful concepts include: Fields (not everybody plays the same status game), Distinction (actions and taste are arbitrary, but need to be distinguishing) and Objectification of taste (how society and the educational system measure taste and conflate it with skill).

Bourdieu is somewhat unfairly known for his theory, but I find he's data-driven sociology extremely compelling (he used just the kind of surveys my sociology teachers kept warning me about in the early 90s).