Cultural and Moral Class Boundaries in a Nordic Context

ABSTRACT One of the major contributions of Pierre Bourdieu in Distinction was to illuminate the function of cultural consumption as a marker of status in 1960s' France. Since then, there has been an ongoing debate as to whether these findings are applicable in other national contexts, and not least whether other forms of symbolic boundary-drawing might be more relevant. Based on a survey conducted in the Danish municipality of Aalborg in 2004 and by using multiple correspondence analysis, I am able to show that both cultural consumption and politico-moral stances serve as markers of class positions. By introducing a range of qualitative semi-structured interviews, I argue that politico-moral boundaries are at least as important as cultural boundaries, and that both are used to establish symbolic boundaries between social positions, divided by the same principles as those found by Bourdieu in Distinction; that is, by the volume and the composition of economic and cultural capital. One of the distinctions cutting across both the cultural and the politico-moral modes of drawing boundaries is a divide between what I have termed a global and a local mode of orientation. Finally, antipathies towards cultural elites are expressed through aversions against state subsidisation of highbrow culture.