Cultural Domains and Class Structure: Assessing Homologies and Cultural Legitimacy

International audienceIt is well known that the figures representing the French social space in Distinction (Bourdieu 1979) are based on several partial analyses. This means that one of Pierre Bourdieu’s central hypotheses – the structural homology between social and cultural spaces as wholes – was not empirically tested by way of correspondence analysis (although Bourdieu did perform such an analysis for the bourgeoisie and petite bourgeoisie). Furthermore, many of the sociological discussions of cultural practices which have appeared since the publishing of Distinction use data describing a single taste domain, often music. This is beginning to change, as large-scale surveys have been conducted for Australia (Bennett et al. 1999), Norway (Rosenlund 2000), Porto in Portugal (Borges Pereira 2005), Aalborg in Denmark (Prieur et al. 2008), Great Britain (Bennett et al. 2009) – but not for France. Furthermore, as it has never been empirically tested, it is not obvious that cultural tastes constitute a homogeneous universe of practices. They can be structured by domains, depending on the relative autonomy of their respective fields of production: taste in music is not necessarily distributed in the same way as taste in books, and their relation to the social space may also differ. The French survey on cultural practices Pratiques culturelles des Français (PCF 2008), enables new implementations and tests of these hypotheses through empirical analysis