June Edmunds

The Distaste of Taste Bourdieu, cultural capital and the Australian postwar elite

This article explores cultural taste through a modification of Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital, taste and ‘distinction’. Mainly through an in-depth, qualitative study of members of Australia’s postwar elite, it is suggested that the particular group under consideration in this article displayed not highbrow but distinctly middle to lowbrow cultural taste. Members of the Australian elite who took part in this study showed little interest in highbrow cultural activities such as opera, classical ballet and classical literature. We argue that this apparent ‘distaste for taste’ within the Australian elite has to do with the specificity of Australian culture, together with particular generational influences that predisposed members of this generation to challenge the validity of highbrow cultural activities. Thus, the federal structure of Australia’s cultural field and an anti-authoritarian current peculiar to Australia, combined with generational factors, explain the consumption patterns of this strand of elite. By introducing generational analysis into Bourdieu’s theory of taste, a more dynamic explanation that can capture shifts in the cultural taste of the elite is offered.

The Re-Invention of a National Identity? Women and ‘Cosmopolitan’ Englishness

Current developments towards globalization, European integration and devolution have opened up a space for the transformation of national identity in Britain. Our interest is in the question of how this space is being filled by members of the post-war generation elite. Given that the relationship between generations and national consciousness has received little attention, this article explores how a particular generation is responding to these developments. Moreover, because the literature on both generations and nationalism has tended to marginalize women, this article focuses on post-war women. Based on an inductive approach, we have constructed a model of an emergent national identity that we have called ‘cosmo-politan nationalism’. We found that members of the post-war elite generation of women were offering narratives about national identity that were open in their tol-eration for local national identities such as Welsh and Scots; cosmopolitan in their identification with Europe and empathy for multiculturalism; ironic in their aware-ness of the constructed nature and inventiveness of national identities; feminine in their antipathy towards aggressive nationalism and militarism; and creative in their objective to rebuild a more open identity. We suggest that the sense of national iden-tity being promoted by these women could be both a function of their gender and generational location, reflecting as it does the values formed in the 1960s and by the womens movement.

The limits of post-national citizenship: European Muslims, human rights and the hijab

Abstract Innovative approaches to citizenship emerged in the 1990s. Post-national theory suggested that European minorities no longer needed national citizenship because supra-national political structures such as the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) offered them protections. Denationalized citizenship held that universal human rights were now available at the national level too as the Council of Europes member countries had to incorporate human rights principles within their own jurisdictions. New forms of claims-making among European Muslims were cited as evidence of this trend as religious claims, especially relating to the hijab, began to be made through human rights litigation. This paper demonstrates the limits of post-nationalism through a discussion of the outcomes of such claims. While European Muslims are indeed mobilizing around human rights, there is no evidence – at the level of litigation – that this has helped them to win recognition of their religious or cultural rights. This paper explores the reasons for this.

Human rights, Islam and the failure of cosmopolitanism

The rise of global human rights has been presented as compelling evidence for cosmopolitan progress, especially in Europe, with particular benefits for ethnic and religious minorities. New conceptions of citizenship – post-national, de-nationalized, disaggregated and cosmopolitan – have been used to show how minorities have created and profited from European cosmopolitanism. Some theorists have pointed to human rights activism, especially around the foulard affair, to illustrate the arrival of cosmopolitan justice. However, this paper suggests that cosmopolitan optimism has misjudged the magnitude of the impact of human rights. European cosmopolitanism’s commitment to ‘cool’ attachments has difficulty with ‘thick’ religious attachments. Muslim cosmopolitanism – expressed for example though religious pilgrimages – makes Muslims ‘bad’ cosmopolitans in the European version. This clash needs to be reconciled before Europe can define itself as the unrivalled source of cosmopolitan justice.

The British Labour Party in the 1980s: The Battle Over the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict

Labour Party policy developments in the 1980s have been well-documented. However, the focus has tended to be on intra-party organisation and aspects of domestic and defence policy, with Labours policy on international issues receiving comparatively little attention. Yet, some of the most interesting debates occurred in this area. One such concern was that over the partys policy towards the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, a set of nationalist rivalries that has long been a source of dilemma for the left. This paper examines how the partys previous pro-Israeli consensus broke down during the 1980s and the processes behind the eventual policy outcome, shedding light on the wider issue of policy change.

Migration Studies: New Directions?

S. Ahmed, C. Castaneda, A. Fortier and M. Sheller, eds, Uprootings/ Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2003. xiv + 304 pp. ISBN 1–85973–629–7. S. Castles and M.J. Miller, The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World, 3rd edn, revised and updated. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. xiii + 338 pp. ISBN 0–333– 94879–3. B. Jordan and F. Düvell, Migration: The Boundaries of Equality and Justice. Cambridge: Polity, 2003. viii + 191 pp. ISBN 0–7456–3008–1.

Generationen und soziale Schließung. Die britische Nachkriegsgeneration

Das Konzept „offener“ und „geschlossener“ sozialer Beziehungen hat Max Weber in Abgrenzung zu Karl Marx entwickelt und darauf hingewiesen, dass Schliesung nicht nur auf Klasse sondern ebenso auf Kaste, Abstammung und Geschlecht sowie ethnischen und religiosen Charakteristika beruhen kann. Fur Webers Vorstellung von Schliesung ist sein Verstandnis sozialer Statusgruppen entscheidend: Wahrend Schichtung mit der Monopolisierung ideeller oder materieller Guter und Chancen zusammenhangt, bezieht sich soziale Schliesung auf die Situation, in der eine dominierende soziale Gruppe ihre Position gegenuber anderen sozialen Gruppen produziert und reproduziert, indem sie mittels verschiedener Strategien ihr Monopol uber okonomische, politische und kulturelle Ressourcen sichert. Schliesung stellt damit eine Methode dar, durch die es im Prozess des Wettstreits um knappe Guter einer sozialen Gruppe gelingt, gegenuber einer anderen einen Vorteil zu erringen und das Monopol uber bedeutende Ressourcen zu erlangen.

The headscarf debates: conflicts of national belonging

respectability in order to prove their ‘racial fitness’ and to distance themselves from the African Americans. The case that the Irish in nineteenth-century America were seen predominantly in racial terms rather than in terms of class or religion is based on shaky evidence, largely gathered by the dredging up of a few by now familiar caricatures and quotations that get copied from one writer of self-serving history to another. Duffy uses a very strained definition of race: ‘Though they [the Irish] had the skin color necessary for naturalization, they were lacking in other racial standards, namely class and religion’(9). Blurring the concept of race in this way does not advance our understanding and it denies the independent importance of both class and religion. In context, it seems to be a way of dealing with the hostile comments of her informants, including the new arrivals from Ireland, about the local African Americans, whom they refer to as lazy, disorderly people living off welfare. Even here the link is uncertain, since the same informants describe the local West Indian and Mexican immigrants, whom they nonetheless regard as racially distant, as hard-working. If I were an African American feeling threatened by and seeking to challenge the Irish claim of having overcome intense discrimination through industry and virtue alone, I would be inclined to cite historical evidence that the Irish often rose up the ethnic hierarchy through their corrupt control of municipal government. Jobs were reserved for members of their own group and competing Italian, German, Jewish and African American applicants were kept out. Local government was affirmative action for the Irish, as indeed was the Roman Catholic Church. A decent Polish priest would have stood little chance of becoming a bishop in an Irish-dominated hierarchy, which indeed led to a schism with many Poles leaving the Church. The author’s grasp of economics, which can be summed up as ‘neo-liberalism is bad’, and of the reasons why Irish people tend to have more problems with alcohol than individuals of other nations, which she sees as a ‘postcolonial’ phenomenon or as an act of defiance, is somewhat lacking in sophistication. It reads as if the author had been told that her perfectly good descriptive account was ‘under-theorized’ and needed to be pushed through untestable, value-laden grids. All too often it reads like a political tract. There is no reason why people should not write political tracts, but is it really the business of a respected university press to publish them?

Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul's School – By Shamus Rahman Khan

At its best sociology reveals how the natural order of things is anything but natural. Easy talk of ‘elite’ institutions rests on an often unspoken but widelyheld premise that the cream naturally rises to the top. Exposing the myth that high-status positions in high-standing institutions are occupied by people of exceptional natural ability should be the target of any self-respecting sociological study on elites. This is precisely what Shamus Rahman Khan deftly achieves in his book Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School. As a former member of St. Paul’s boarding school (established in 1856 in Concord, New Hampshire) Khan’s insights into the subtlety of elite formation are acutely observed. Nuanced interpretations of everyday interactions at the school between and among students and staff, informed by a seamless use of concepts derived from scholars such as Pierre Bourdieu and Erving Goffman, make a compelling read. The formative impact of Khan’s own personal experience at the school is critical. As one of a small number of Asian American students entering this institution in the early 1990s, Khan’s initial surprise at being met by a number of black and Latino faces in the common room of his dormitory was swiftly tempered by recognition of a deceit. He had been placed in a dormitory for people like himself – sequestered into a ghetto within the school which instantly informed him of his place in such an institution. The question that intrigues Khan and motivates the study is a simple one:why are inequalities growing in the US despite a principled commitment, rooted in the Jeffersonian ideal of a‘natural aristocracy’ selected by talent, to meritocracy where only talent not privilege is the supposed route to success? He notes that the US,committed to meritocracy,has recently seen a dramatic growth in the gap between the richest and the poorest. Between 1967 and 2008 the income of the richest 1% of US households increased by 323% and that of the richest 0.1% by 492%, compared with 25% for average household income (p. 5). As a microcosm of the wider world, the same question is asked of St. Paul’s. While the school was invested in a meritocratic ethos based on recruiting only the best pupils, why did the best always seem to be wealthy? Thus, the opening up of elite institutions such as St. Paul’s and a shift from the exclusivity of old wealth has not created a levelling out of inequalities. The paradox that Khan seeks to unravel is that the most elite institutions, those that guarantee access to the higher echelons of society, have started to open their doors to previously excluded groups while general levels of inequality have dramatically increased. A new elite has been created and sustained, access to which is limited in more subtle ways. Through close observation of the backgrounds and interactions of St. Paul’s pupils, Khan reveals the new elite. By replacing old wealth this elite group Book reviews