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Cultivating 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