Speaker
Description
Long established lines of research have discussed the relationship between social class and cultural taste. In this paper, we build on Peterson’s distinction between omnivore and univore tastes to explore the link between cultural consumption and participation in associations and cultural life in the community; in particular, focusing on members of cultural associations, we ask whether cultural capital (formal education) still influences their adoption of omnivore styles of cultural consumption, after various forms of social participation and the resulting networks are controlled for. We do so by drawing upon data collected between 2021 and 2023 among members of brass bands (N=810) and choirs (N=1876) in the province of Trento, Italy. Treating the two groups separately, we operationalize omnivorousness in two different ways: (a) as an additive measure of interest in various genres; (b) as an additive measure of “contamination”, i.e., interest in genres that a duality analysis shows to belong usually in different musical families (e.g. rap and classic music), while discounting interest in genres usually regarded as close (e.g. jazz and blues). Community life is operationalized in both categorical and relational terms. In categorical terms, we look at overall levels of participation in associations and local cultural activities. In relational terms, we look at networks originated from the duality of individuals and associations/cultural practices. We plan to run regression models which include centrality measures (betweenness and closeness) and estimates of the heterogeneity of respondents’ networks. They will enable us to expand on earlier findings, suggesting that participation in associations and involvement in networks may substantially reduce the impact of education and status over omnivorousness.
Keywords/Topics
omnivorousness. networks of genres. associational networks.status & taste.
