{"product_id":"distinction-9780674212770","title":"Distinction","description":"\u003cp\u003eNo judgment of taste is innocent. In a word  we are all snobs. Pierre Bourdieu brilliantly illuminates this situation of the middle class in the modern world. Frances leading sociologist focuses here on the French bourgeoisie  its tastes and preferences. Distinction is at once a vast ethnography of contemporary France and a dissection of the bourgeois mind.  In the course of everyday life people constantly choose between what they find aesthetically pleasing and what they consider tacky  merely trendy  or ugly. Bourdieu bases his study on surveys that took into account the multitude of social factors that play a part in a French persons choice of clothing  furniture  leisure activities  dinner menus for guests  and many other matters of taste. What emerges from his analysis is that social snobbery is everywhere in the bourgeois world. The different aesthetic choices people make are all distinctionsthat is  choices made in opposition to those made by other classes. Taste is not pure. Bourdieu finds a world of social meaning in the decision to order bouillabaisse  in our contemporary cult of thinness  in the California sports such as jogging and cross-country skiing. The social world  he argues  functions simultaneously as a system of power relations and as a symbolic system in which minute distinctions of taste become the basis for social judgment.  The topic of Bourdieus book is a fascinating one: the strategies of social pretension are always curiously engaging. But the book is more than fascinating. It is a major contribution to current debates on the theory of culture and a challenge to the major theoretical schools in contemporary sociology.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45665897185333,"sku":"ByrdShop_0674212770","price":55.52,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780674212770.jpg?v=1782413425","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/distinction-9780674212770","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}