El auge del gusto conservador convencional: clase, consumo y política en Turquía [= The rise of the conservative middlebrow taste: Class, consumption and politics in Turkey]

En este artículo, nuestro objetivo es utilizar los conceptos de Bourdieu para comprender la emergencia de un gusto conservador / islámico en el contexto de las recientes transformaciones políticas de Turquía. Para hacerlo, primero nos centraremos en las raíces históricas del fenómeno, la fuerte conexión entre la política y el consumo en Turquía, con el fin de abordar los impactos de la reciente transformación del conservadurismo político en el gusto con-servador. En segundo lugar, describimos la forma actual del gusto conservador conven-cional como la elección de un estilo elegante y religioso, a través del análisis de contenido de tres revistas de moda conservadoras. Por último, recurriendo a una investigación de campo realizada en Ankara, presentamos ejemplos concretos de cómo se incorpora el gusto con-servador y se utiliza para realizar la distinción de clase dentro y más allá de las fracciones conservadoras de la sociedad. = In this paper, we aim to use Bourdieusian concepts to understand the rise of conservative/Islamic taste in the context of Turkey’s recent political transformations. To do so, we first focus on the historical roots of the strong connection between politics and consumption in Turkey by addressing the impacts of recent transformation of political conservatism on conservative taste. Second, we describe the current form of the conservative middlebrow taste as the choice of elegant and religiously proper through the content analysis of three conservative fashion magazines. Lastly, drawing on a field research conducted in Ankara, we present concrete examples of how conservative taste is embodied and used to perform class distinction within and beyond the conservative fractions

Live or recorded? Reassessing the “Decline of the Highbrow Arts” debate using European newspaper data, 1960-2010

Recent scholarship has argued that the concept of highbrow culture is undergoing radical changes, both in content and modes of appropriation. We introduce a new layer to this debate by bringing to the fore the format of the cultural product, distinguishing between “live” cultural products (concerts, exhibitions, live shows) and “recordings” (distributable items such as books or music albums). Using culture sections of newspapers (The Guardian, Le Monde, ABC, El País, Helsingin Sanomat, Dagens Nyheter) from 1960 to 2010 (n=11,775) we ask what role the format of the cultural product plays for the highbrow/non-highbrow trajectories over time. We show that highbrow coverage faces a relative decline, mostly explained by the expanding non-highbrow arts coverage. Moreover, coverage on live events decreases, while coverage of recordings grows. This trend reflects the highbrow/non-highbrow divide, revealing that the “decline of the highbrow” phenomenon is under closer scrutiny a “decline of the highbrow live event”

The grand opening? The transformation of the content of culture sections in European newspapers, 1960–2010

This study presents an analysis of changes in the coverage of culture in major European newspapers from 1960 to 2010. Employing a content analysis of the newspapers, we examine how culture sections have changed in terms of the cultural areas covered. We ask whether the content of cultural coverage has become more heterogeneous and whether newspapers embedded in different geographical and cultural contexts differ in this respect. To assess heterogeneity, we first focus on the opening of culture through the increase in coverage of emerging art forms at the expense of the coverage of established art forms. Next, we turn our attention to music and measure openness according to the increase of pop-rock content. The results suggest a cultural opening, albeit mostly measured by the second proxy. Established art forms hold their mainstream position, while emerging forms are validated at a slower pace than expected. Regarding music, the transformation of coverage from classical music to pop-rock is very dramatic. The findings challenge expectations about the order in which the newspapers manifest the timing and thoroughness of the opening of culture, highlighting the complexity of the factors shaping newspapers’ cultural coverage

Enter Culture, Exit Arts? The Transformation of Cultural Hierarchies in European Newspaper Culture Sections, 1960–2010

Peer reviewe

How (not) to feed young children: A class-cultural analysis of food parenting practices

This study unpacks how class processes shape understandings and practices of ‘good feeding’ in families with young children. It brings a Bourdieusian class consumption focus together with food parenting studies and approaches feeding as encompassing a wide range of processes including cooking, shopping, and planning. To capture the lived experience of feeding work, the study draws on a longitudinal and ethnographic study conducted in the south-east of England over the course of two years. The analysis suggests that, regardless of their resources, parents tend to internalise the dominant discourse on ‘healthy’ and varied’ feeding. However, closer inspection of day-to-day practices reveals a nuanced class-cultural patterning in how these terms are defined and achieved. Moreover, it reveals how different interpretations of key notions such as homemade, nutritious, and balanced generate practices that contribute to the cultivation of distinctively classed culinary agencies in children. This study also questions what potential role these understandings can play in reproducing taste hierarchies and maintaining symbolic boundaries from very early ages

Wearing class: A study on clothes, bodies and emotions in Turkey

This article examines how cultural capital shapes the ways Turkish women, both religiously covered and not covered, experience their presented self' in social interactions. The analysis draws on 44 in-depth interviews conducted as part of a larger project on embodiment of class in Turkey, using the parts where the interviewees reflect on the repercussions of different clothing and adornment tastes. It approaches clothing as an embodied practice and uses the conceptual tools Bourdieu offers to analyse the link between women's appearance-driven experiences and wider class-cultural processes. Consistent with its theoretical framework, it examines the experiencing of tastes by analysing women's emotions. The analysis demonstrates that, regardless of the volumes of capital they hold, the majority of the sample presume that the dressed body' does have value and enhances or limits opportunities, suggesting the relevance of the term capital' to refer to such embodied competence, as Bourdieu did. Moreover, some of the emotional responses are found to be more common among culturally cultivated interviewees of both Islamic-leaning and secular fractions while others only appear among those having limited access to cultural and economic resources. Interview excerpts show that the aesthetic categorisations made by the culturally advantaged, regardless of their religious orientation, are internalised by those who suffer from such hierarchies most, highlighting the role of class culture-driven symbolic violence in maintaining inequalities. The material is then contextualised within the class dynamics in Turkey, where self-fashioning has remained a value-laden domain since the beginning of the country's top-to-bottom modernisation. Focusing on how tastes are lived in the everyday, this article reveals the subtle processes that manifest and reproduce class privileges and calls for an emphasis on the repercussions of embodying particular tastes, which could enhance our understanding of taste, power and cultural exclusion more directly than interrogations of the correlations between taste and class position

El auge del gusto conservador convencional: clase, consumo y política en Turquía

In this paper, we aim to use Bourdieusian concepts to understand the rise of conservative/Islamic taste in the context of Turkey’s recent political transformations. To do so, we first focus on the historical roots of the strong connection between politics and consumption in Turkey by addressing the impacts of recent transformation of political conservatism on conservative taste. Second, we describe the current form of the conservative middlebrow taste as the choice of elegant and religiously proper through the content analysis of three conservative fashion magazines. Lastly, drawing on a field research conducted in Ankara, we present concrete examples of how conservative taste is embodied and used to perform class distinction within and beyond the conservative fractions.En este artículo, nuestro objetivo es utilizar los conceptos de Bourdieu para comprender la emergencia de un gusto conservador / islámico en el contexto de las recientes transformaciones políticas de Turquía. Para hacerlo, primero nos centraremos en las raíces históricas del fenómeno, la fuerte conexión entre la política y el consumo en Turquía, con el fin de abordar los impactos de la reciente transformación del conservadurismo político en el gusto conservador. En segundo lugar, describimos la forma actual del gusto conservador convencional como la elección de un estilo elegante y religioso, a través del análisis de contenido de tres revistas de moda conservadoras. Por último, recurriendo a una investigación de campo realizada en Ankara, presentamos ejemplos concretos de cómo se incorpora el gusto conservador y se utiliza para realizar la distinción de clase dentro y más allá de las fracciones conservadoras de la sociedad

Exploring patterns of children’s cultural participation: parental cultural capitals and their transmission

Cultural participation during childhood significantly impacts an individual’s chances of future social mobility and well-being. Research to date has focused disproportionately on adults’ cultural practices, failing to comprehensively examine how children’s cultural participation is formed, structured and linked to their parents’. Drawing upon data from the Taking Part Survey, this article first examines the cultural profiles that emerge in children’s participation in England (including highbrow, eclectic, popular or restricted) and then employs regression techniques to disentangle the effects of parental capital (level of education versus cultural participation profile) on children’s cultural profiles. The analysis provides the greater granularity needed to understand the relative strength and significance of parentally embodied versus institutionalised cultural capital in children’s varying forms of engagement with arts and culture. While the patterns of intergenerational transmission revealed in the study largely confirm the role of institutionalised cultural capital in the reproduction of cultural inequality, they also reveal the significance of parental participation for children’s cultural participation. This highlights the need to approach cultural mobility and arts engagement policies at the household level rather than targeting children individually