Séminaire Imaginaire et Société : Émotion, Perception, Créativité – 2015-2016 (4)

Mondo Vino Rationalization and Resistance in the Sphere of Wine

We will question some notions of Pierre Bourdieu through a theoretical and ethnographic investigation of what Jeffrey A. Halley call the “wine-world,” in terms of taste and practices of standardization and resistance to those rationalizing tendencies more and more prevalent in the neo-liberal market. Fifty years after the publication of Pierre Bourdieu’s (1965) Un Art moyen, can we still ask the question “is taste available for some, but closed off for others?” Is any art “minor;” “moyen [middle-brow]?” If so, for whom and in what sense? Is there not invariably a “hybridity” effect in that people invariably transcend their immediate culture? Are not culture and life, at least in part, capacious, not girdled to one’s origins?

Key words: Taste; Bourdieu; rationalization; resistance; generative.

Jeffrey A. Halley is Professor of Sociology at The University of Texas at San Antonio, where he directs the Laboratory for the Sociology of the Arts, Culture, and Communications (SACC) of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). His research focuses on theory, art, culture, and media. Recent articles concern the problem of the rationalization of culture in the Dada art movement, Mexican American Conjunto music, and the wine industry. In 2010 and 2011 he was Guest Editor of two volumes of Sociologie De l’Art (Sociology of Art), “Théorie/Épistémologie/Littérature” [Theory/Epistemology/Literature], and “Rationalisation et Résistance/Postmodernisme” [Rationalization and Resistance/Postmodernism]. He has been a Fulbright Fellow and guest professor at the universities of Ljubljana, Metz, and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France. He was elected President, Research Committee [equivalent to ASA Section] on the Sociology of the Arts, the International Sociological Association.


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