Structure and Historicity of Cultural Tastes. Uses of Multiple Correspondence Analysis and Sociological Theory on Age: The Case of Music and Movies

Abstract

The sociology of cultural tastes and practices seeks, on the one hand, to show how tastes and practices are structured, and on the other hand, to explain them. For this purpose, multivariate analysis, and in particular, multiple correspondence analysis (MCA), has been chosen as the preferred statistical method to support a theory of ‘homology’ between ‘social position’ and preferences. This article reassesses the initial interpretation offered by Bourdieu of the two factor spaces of ‘dominant’ and ‘petit-bourgeois’ tastes in Distinction (1979) and discusses how MCA is used in the sociology of culture as ‘structural homology’, especially one-dimensionally (single-axis reduction) and positionally, without the inclusion of the age variable. The two ways of considering the effect of age are either by excluding it a priori (‘omitted axis’) or by not theorizing it (‘descriptive axis’). We show, using data from the 2008 French Cultural Practices survey on tastes in music and movies, how a factor analysis that incorporates age outlines a generational and historical structuring of tastes. We explain the different dimensions of age in terms of cultural practices and we interpret the level of education in terms of knowledge. The article advocates a model for the interpretation of tastes that is no longer based on the structure of capital, but rather on cultural history and specific competences.