Cultural tastes and practices of students from elite universities and careers in Chile

Abstract

Few empirical works have jointly addressed Bourdieu’s arguments on habitus, cultural capital, and social reproduction through education. Based on a survey applied to more than 1.200 students from universities and careers traditionally associated with the economic, political, and cultural elites in Chile, this article analyzes their cultural tastes and practices to assess the validity and applicability of Bourdieu’s theses in this context. Employing both Multiple Correspondence Analysis and Latent Class Analysis, this paper identifies seven response profiles regarding the cultural taste, consumption and practices of students attending elite universities and careers. While some profiles follow the patterns of highbrow and lowbrow culture, others reveal more heterogeneous tastes and practices, questioning both omnivores and traditional Bourdieusians perspectives. Additionally, the results show that, while social class and school of origin are not related with these cultural profiles, gender, university, and career do. This leads to reevaluate the relative importance of familiar factors and the strong socializing role of elite educational contexts for cultural tastes and practices.