Page 104 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

The omnivore thesis 95

class leisure pursuits’ (1992: 253), as has already been noted. Those at the
bottom of the hierarchy were better able to choose their favourite type of
music, which suggests that in Peterson’s view they can be characterized as
univore (thus neither mass-like nor omnivoric).
In conclusion to this summary argument, Peterson suggests that the
patterning of taste, status and culture can be characterized in terms of two
pyramids:
In the first representing taste cultures there is at the top one elite taste
constituting the cultural capital of the society and below it ever more
numerous distinct taste cultures as one moves down the status pyramid.
In the inverted pyramid representing concrete individuals and groups,
there is at the top the omnivore who commands status by displaying
any one of a range of tastes as the situation may require, and at the
bottom is the univore who can display just one particular taste. This
taste is nonetheless greatly valued by the univore because it is a way to
assert an identity and to mark differences from other status groups at
approximately the same level.
(Peterson 1992: 254)
Peterson considers whether this omnivore/univore pattern is new or
whether the received elite-to-mass view was wrong and had been based on
inadequate research. His view is that the omnivore does actually represent the
emergence of a new cultural pattern, but that there may always have been
univores. The culture of lower end of society was misrepresented by studies in
the past. He briefly introduces three explanations that might be offered for this
new pattern. First, the idea of the superiority of high culture was affected by
the ‘realities of two World Wars’ (p. 255). Second, that education has led to the
decline of birth and cultural heritage as a basis for high status. Third, that social
mobility entails that people continue to value their past culture. Peterson also
argues that there are a number of processes in train that have made previously
working-class forms of culture more ‘respectable’. The processes that he iden-
tifies include, ‘liberal education’, the greater value placed on a range of cultural
expressions, the way in which the media have exposed wider audiences to
different forms of cultural expression and the commercial exploitation of a
range of ‘folk and ethnic-based’ cultures. At this point in the development of
the idea, Peterson could only speculate about the causes of the process and
indeed more evidence was needed for the idea as a whole. This was recognized
and more research called for.
As noted earlier, the original statement of the omnivore idea in 1992 was
based on data gathered in 1982 and Peterson and Kern (1996) updated the
discussion using data collected as part of a repeat of the same survey in 1992.
To summarize, they found that in 1992 those at upper end of the social scale
had become more omnivorous over the 10-year interval. Perhaps more
importantly, however, the discussion took forward the consideration of the
causes of these cultural changes. The discussion considers the impact of period
effects (i.e. are people changing their tastes over time?) or cohort effects (i.e.
are people with one set of tastes being displaced by younger members who
have different tastes?). Peterson and Kern argue that both effects are present