Connotation of Distinction

In his social critique on taste, Distinction, Pierre Bourdieu seems to assert that our tastes are cultivated facets of our lives that manifest themselves in order to confirm ourselves as part of a group that ascribes to a certain thing and the connotation of that certain thing, or to exclude those as a group of those who do not share our “taste” for that thing. This indirectly contradicts my original notions of taste as a fairly random and individualized aspect of our lives that we have little power to change. Obviously I assumed economic factors largely played into our tastes, (for example it seems highly unlikely that someone with little financial means would have an overwhelming preference for decadent truffles) but I felt as though taste exhibited a wide variation even among those who are of similar economic and even class stature. Bourdieu also touches on this when he elaborates on working class taste as a function of utility and necessity rather than the leisure and aesthetic afforded the rich. The interesting facet of Bourdieu’s claim is that this somewhat structural division of taste transcends economic capital and leaks into nearly every other “metric” or arena of our lives.