“The Question of Culture and Stratification Revisited”: A Response to the Comments

While the question of whether there exists a connection between social stratificationand lifestyle differentiation seems to be uncontroversial, the primary issue that continues tobedevil research at the intersection of the sociology of culture and the study of structuredinequality, concerns the precise nature of this connection. While various answers havebeen proposed to this question, the current state of the field is one of “ambiguity” as towhat is the best way to proceed. In this paper, I use a long-term historical perspectiveto tackle this question. I argue that understanding the cultural stratification system thatappears to have coalesced in the richer societies of the contemporary Global North,we must attend to the historical origin and trajectory of the system of production ofsymbolic goods in the West, and how this has interacted with the system of scholastic“production” of consumers of such goods. This system can best be described as an embodiedcultural capital regime, in which the ability to indirectly decode the formal properties ofcultural goods using habitualized schemes of perception and appreciation has replaced thecapacity to directly acquire cultural works through purchase as the primary marker ofstatus.