Relationship between taste and social hierarchy in Baku, Azerbaijan

In the bachelor thesis I am going to examine the relationships between art and society. As French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued in his Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, “no judgement of taste is innocent” (1979). Sensing and experiencing aesthetics is not objectively given but rather the result of continuous choices between what we sense or perceive as aesthetically satisfying and what we consider tasteless, hideous or even trumpery. These various aesthetic choices represent positions within or mutual relations between classes. According to Bourdieu, society functions as a system of power relations and simultaneously as a symbolic system in which subtle differences in taste become the basis of the social hierarchy. Thus, Bourdieu’s thesis on the perception and conceptualization of taste provides us with useful analytical tools to study art as an instrument of social stratification. The aim of this thesis is to gain and provide a deeper understanding of the ways, in which taste creates and reproduces socially structured suffering in the contemporary post-socialist Azerbaijan