Tuesday, August 09, 2005

Hectic 

I woke 45 minutes late today, bled on the train, ran to several wrong platforms trying to get back to Redfern from Central, powerwalked the 2km from Redfern to bloody OTC,
missed my Psych experiment anyway, chased a boy with my friend who has a crush on him cos he likes tea and biscuits and is British (good a reason as any), had banana bread with her, almost slept through Psych (interesting but dark + warm + already sleep...), lunched, Frenched, ran across campus for Govt, ran BACK across campus for other French which was painful and incomprehensible (though there are several quite beautiful people it's fun staring at), staggered home.

Pop Culture was actually quite interesting today, we did a bit on Bourdieu, whose text was a bit dense but whose ideas about culture and class actually struck an "aha!" note with me. You know when you recognise stuff you've been rattling around your own head, that some academic has put to paper and made it all smart-sounding? That sort of aha. The basic thing was that one's tastes are determined by one's class, and one's class is determined by one's background and education. Which is so sad and true. My whole academic career has been a fruitless attempt to escape my class, climb up the ladder. My mum did the economic climbing - it's thanks to her that I went to a private school and lived in Camberwell and learned piano. And she drinks wine and dines at French restaurants and drives European cars. It's my job to do the cultural climbing. Everything's been geared to it. Take French and Latin for example, my best subjects at school. The languages of Western Civilization, colonisation, empire. Read the classics, dreamed of Europe, chose a wordy humanities degree, turned my back on fobby Viet culture (also known as my heritage).

The class structure we looked at doesn't really seem to apply to Australian society though: upper class/high culture/big bosses, middle class/inbetween culture, lower class/pop culture. The upper and lower class cultures aren't very distinct here. And I don't think popular culture, here, belongs to the lower classes. I reckon the middle class is the dominant culture - TV, music, movies, everything. And things such as sport cross all three classes. Moreover, many of those considered lower class are from different immigrant backgrounds, which means there isn't a unified "popular culture". And in the immigrant-origin middle class I belong to, there's a sort of cultural shallowness - no longer rooted in ethnic culture, but not entirely part of mainstream white culture either.

I'd say that there needs to be a separation between economic and intellectual/cultural hierarchies. At the top of the former are the mega rich businessmen and such, and of the latter, intellectuals, artists, academics.

Ah farg, it's late, will write the sociological thesis later.

# posted at 9:55 pm

Comments: Post a Comment