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Studies conducted from the 2000s are characterized as having "multinational contexts" and "an expansion of the cultural domains" and as using "big data and various methodologies." However, very few studies have been conducted in Asia, especially that examine hierarchical taste revealed across the culture and everyday life as Bourdieu (1984) suggested. Thus, this study attempted to identify how the cultural topography of Korean society is drawn by analyzing the preference for cultural activities, music genres, television programs, food, beverages, and alcoholic drinks. For this, the study used data collected from the Survey on the Cultural Capital of Korean Society (2011) conducted for a research project called The Social Landscape of Cultural Production and Consumption: An Approach of Economic Sociology for Cultural Capital. The data were analyzed by multiple correspondence analysis (MCA), an advanced method of correspondence analysis used by Bourdieu in his Distinction (1984) to examine the correlation between class and taste. As a result, the cultural taste and lifestyle of Koreans were divided into six types according to class and age. Among the age groups, the 20s and the 50s did not correspond to the class variables and were identified as having unique generational cultural taste.
Key Words: cultural taste and lifestyle, distinction, class and generation, multiple correspondence analysis (MCA)
I.Introduction
Bourdieu (1984) argued that one's individual taste and lifestyle, as revealed in everyday life, function as an indicator of one's social class and, at the same time, the mechanism of class reproduction. His argument evoked the notion of "taste": What had been recognized as personal, in fact, is extremely social. It also revived discussions on culture, which had been non-mainstreamed in sociological debates for some time. Follow-up studies using Bourdieu's concepts from American sociologists, on the one hand, have examined cultural taste according to class or sought to identify various socio-demographic variables other than class to explain individual cultural taste. On the other hand, a new trend of study is being conducted with an interest in omnivore (Peterson & Simkus, 1992; Bryson, 1996; Erickson, 1996; Peterson & Kern, 1996; Chan & Goldthorpe, 2007; Lizardo, 2014; Leguina, 2015; Leguina et al., 2016). Here, the focus has expanded to the form of correlation between class and cultural tastes instead of merely the existence of...