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 (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