Conclusion: Dimensions of Taste

Abstract

Taste remains an intriguing and perplexing problem for scholarly analysis — and specifically for analysis within the sociology of culture. It is also a complex problem that, as I hope the preceding discussion of the various dimensions of taste indicates, requires more than either an assumption of its equivalence to rational forms of choice and preference, or its reduction to a weapon in ongoing struggles over class and status. Some aspects of taste and tasting remain the same in the early twenty-first century global North as they were during those historical periods when the problem of taste was shaped the most. These periods were identified in Chapter 1 in the early modern Europe of Elias’s (1997) account where taste was bound up with questions of conduct and the management of the body in relation to other people and, for higher social strata, with the specific performance of restraint in the presence of relative abundance. The revolutionary, Enlightenment Europe of Kant’s (1790) reflections on aesthetics make taste part of a more general philosophical project about the formation of the person, and the primary means through which to understand and articulate the human sensory relationship with the external world. The nineteenth- and early twentieth century European and North American accounts of Simmel (1997a, 1997b), Veblen (1899) and Tarde (1903, 2007) introduce some further abiding concepts — that taste is related to the negotiations of life in emerging urban, market-oriented and socially diverse societies, and that competition and emulation or imitation in the practice of taste are part of the negotiation between expressions of individual identity and group membership.