Page 110 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

The omnivore thesis 101

such work with Eamonn Carrabine (Carrabine and Longhurst 1999) and
Mike Savage and Gaynor Bagnall (Savage et al. 2005), I found that with respect
to music, middle-class youth and adults expressed what can be termed an
‘omnivorous refrain’ with respect to initial discussions of taste. Thus, in a focus
group and interviews with respect to the former and interviews with the latter,
people tended to answer a general question about what music they liked by
stressing that they appreciate a wide variety of different forms. However, as
discussion proceeded, this position was often qualified in ways that showed
that actually their taste was not as wide as they had initially expressed or that
they had a pretty clear pattern of likes and dislikes. This suggests that with
respect to music, this kind of omnivoric refrain has become a dominant pat-
tern of speech – in some sense, what these sorts of people are expected to say –
and indeed a legitimate form of expression. However, the situation with
respect to other forms of culture varied. It is especially pertinent to consider
the case of television. Here the initial response was very different. People cer-
tainly did not in general say that they liked all television or even that they had
wide taste; rather, the opposite was the case. They sought to narrow what they
said they liked through emphasizing, first, that they did not watch much tele-
vision and, second, that when they did it was focused on news and docu-
mentary programmes. Thus, with respect to television people clearly sought to
distance themselves from a mass medium that is still talked about in terms that
stress its ‘addictive’ qualities and that still tends to be devalued culturally. It is
something to be as spoken about as to be resisted.
The group that we found that differed most from these patterns was a
section of the middle class that resided in the ‘trendy’ suburb of Chorlton in
Manchester (Savage et al. 2005). These people expressed their ‘imagined
cosmopolitanism’ in modes of elective belonging (see Chapter 5) that empha-
sized cultural pluralism and the ability to enjoy ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture. In
many ways they were classic omnivores and were relaxed about expressing this
with respect to music and television (as well as other forms of culture). Again,
how ‘deep’ this omnivorousness goes is debatable and our argument was that
actually this group was less cosmopolitan than their self-perception might
suggest. In a number of respects, this reinforces the points made earlier about
the need to look at taste in specific context and to recognize that patterns of
taste will differ with respect to different forms of culture, even if for certain
people they come together. Moreover, these patterns can be clearly related to
patterns of distinction.
Skeggs (2004: 144) argues very clearly that in many ways, if omnivoric
culture exists (and there are empirical qualifications and refinements to be
made) then it can be seen as a strategy on the part of sections of the middle
class to reinforce their already powerful position. As she states:

So time, knowledge, information, bodily investment, mobility across
cultural boundaries and social networking all constitute resources for
the formation of the new middle-class omnivorous self. The cultural
omnivore, therefore, enables the middle-classes to re-fashion and re-tool
themselves.
(Skeggs 2004: 144)