Description
Fields, Capitals, Habitus provides an insightful analysis of the relations between culture and society in contemporary Australia. Presenting the findings of a detailed national survey of Australian cultural tastes and practices, it demonstrates the pivotal significance of the role culture plays at the intersections of a range of social divisions and inequalities: between classes, age cohorts, ethnicities, genders, city and country, and the relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.
The book looks first at how social divisions inform the ways in which Australians from different social backgrounds and positions engage with the genres, institutions and particular works of culture and cultural figures across six cultural fields: the visual arts, literature, music, heritage, television and sport. It then examines how Australians’ cultural preferences across these fields interact within the Australian ‘space of lifestyles’. The close attention paid to class here includes an engagement with role of ‘middlebrow’ cultures in Australia and the role played by new forms of Indigenous cultural capital in the emergence of an Indigenous middle class.
The rich survey data is complemented throughout by in-depth qualitative data provided by interviews with survey participants. These are discussed more closely in the final part of the book which explores the gendered, political, personal and community associations of cultural tastes across Australia’s Anglo-Celtic, Italian, Lebanese, Chinese and Indian populations. The distinctive ethical issues associated with how Australians relate to Indigenous culture are also examined.
In the light it throws on the formations of cultural capital in a multicultural settler colonial society, Fields, Capitals, Habitus makes a landmark contribution to cultural capital research.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Tony Bennett, David Carter, Modesto Gayo, Michelle Kelly and Greg Noble
Part 1: Fields
Introduction
1. Aesthetic Divisions and Intensities in the Australian Art Field
Tony Bennett and Modesto Gayo
2. Book Value: Reading the Australian Literary Field
David Carter, Modesto Gayo and Michelle Kelly
3. The Mark of Time: Temporality and the Dynamics of Distinction in the Music Field
Tony Bennett, Ben Dibley and Modesto Gayo
4. The Elite and the Everyday in the Australian Heritage Field
Emma Waterton and Modesto Gayo
5. Television: The Dynamics of a Field in Transition
Tony Bennett, Modesto Gayo, David Rowe and Graeme Turner
6. Contesting National Culture: The Sport Field
David Rowe and Modesto Gayo
Part 2: Class
Introduction
7. The Australian Space of Lifestyles
Tony Bennett, Modesto Gayo and Anna Cristina Pertierra
8. Class and Cultural Capital in Australia
Modesto Gayo and Tony Bennett
9. The Middle Space of Lifestyles and Middlebrow Culture
David Carter
Part 3: Capitals
Introduction
10. The Persistence of Inequality: Education, Class and Cultural Capital
Megan Watkins
11. Capital Geographies: Mapping the Spaces of Urban Cultural Capital
Liam Magee and Deborah Stevenson
12. Indigenous Cultural Tastes and Capitals: Gendered and Class Formations
Tony Bennett, Ben Dibley and Michelle Kelly
13. Cultural Diversity and the Ethnoscapes of Taste in Australia
Greg Noble
Part 4: Habitus
Introduction
14. Engendering Culture: Accumulating Capital in the Gendered Household
Deborah Stevenson
15. Cultural Participation and Belonging
Anna Cristina Pertierra and Graeme Turner
16. The Politics of Consumption: Positioning the Nation
Greg Noble and David Rowe
17. The Ethical and Civic Dimensions of Taste
Tim Rowse, Michelle Kelly, Anna Pertierra and Emma Waterton
Conclusion -- ‘distinction’ after Distinction
Greg Noble, Tony Bennett, David Carter, Modesto Gayo and Michelle Kelly
Methodological appendices
