In his piece, “Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste,” Herbert J. Gans writes the following line: “Decisions about cultural choices often reflect status considerations, and when a culture of lower status borrows the content of a higher one, the latter usually drops the item from it cultural repertoire.” (142-143) While there is some humor to be found in the idea that people of higher class tend to shy away for things which they initially like because they catch on with people in lower classes, there are some real implications to take into consideration.
What came to my mind when reading this article was the thoughts around body size and class in American society. In other cultures, being bigger is associated with being wealthier because of assumed resources one must have to have a lot of food and not do a lot of work in order to pack on extra pounds. Here in the US however, food is not as scarce as it is in other countries. In fact, lower class individuals often find high caloric goods more readily available to them both financially and physically than higher class individuals. Although quite an extrapolation and needing to be tempered with an understanding of the health, culture, and preference issues associated with it, it is possible that obesity has become stigmatized greatly in our country in some part because higher class individuals began to stop identifying it as a characteristic of their status since it was attainable by others of lower socioeconomic status. Obese individuals are viewed by many as being out of control, greedy, or lazy in our country now, but such attributions seem less common in other areas where obesity is not connected to lower class individuals. It is intriguing to think about this sort of avoidance culture of the wealth-to-do in contrast to the oppositional culture of some poor individuals that W. J. Wilson describes as challenging “the system” and intentionally dissenting from certain social norms.
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Martha’s Tangential Cartoon Pick!
Sociology 155- Class & Culture 