Abstract

Alan Warde's analysis of the focus group data from the Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion (CCSE) project is notable both because it remains open to the possibility that contemporary taste patterns are subject to multiple forms of differentiation, and because it acknowledges the deep-seated uncertainty (and even confusion) that some people express in matters of taste. From Warde's wide-ranging analysis, I rather arbitrarily select two issues that I think require further development using the CCSE data: 1) the question of whether and how "cultural omnivores" - the object of a colossal literature in cultural sociology - are actually apprehended in everyday interaction; and 2) whether currently popular schemas, such as the omnivore/univore and highborw/lowbrow distinctions, are in fact sufficient to capture the relation to culture that predominates in various segments of the working class, the unemployed, and the under-credentialed.