Moral Habitus & Status Negotiation in a Marginalized Working

Directions:  Please answer 3 questions in short essay form for each article (you will be answering 6 questions in total).  You have the freedom to select any questions you find interesting.

Moral Habitus & Status Negotiation in a Marginalized Working-Class Neighborhood:

What are some of the blemished images of the trailer, trailer park and owner of the trailer?  How do these images reinforce the stigma?  What class-based taste are they offending?  Do you think popular culture and media reinforce these image (e.g. stigma-sign)?

Please describe the economic and cultural capitals of the trailer park residents.  What socioeconomic class are they in and why?

What is the moral habitus of the “nesters?”  What is their moral identity?  What forms of cultural capital do they use to enact distinction?  They affiliate with what class outside the trailer park?

How do the nesters try to mimic middle-class respectability?  Please give examples of their consumption practices?

The Reluctant Emigrant enacts a “Care Self.”  What is this moral disposition and how do they consume?  What is their ideal home?

What is the Community Builders moral habitus?  They are especially talented at one ofBourdieu’s capitals.  What is this capital and how do they use it?

Please describe why the Homesteaders are the most consistent with Bourdieu’s theory of working-class culture.  Please give examples.

The Outcast are considered the negative subculture of the park.  At all points with in the fields/practices of distinction they are the “lowest.”  What do the Outcast consume?  How do they view their life-chances?

Democracy Vs. Distinction:

What is a culinary omnivore?  They have rejected what high culinary art, and what strategy are they enacting?  Please relate this to consumption-orientation and connoisseur-orientation practices.

Please describe the primary dynamic of distinction between exotic-authenticity and democracy-distinction.  Do you think this is a product of global awareness while re-articulating snobbery?

How does the food writer/critic function as a “gatekeeper” in this emerging culture of consumption?  Do they function the same way as other popular culture icons in mass media (e.g. Anthony Bourdain)?  Are they producing the field of “foodie” culture and patters of consumption?

What is “desacralization?”  What is the brief cultural history of this process in American culinary culture?  Is this process continuing today?

“Authenticity” is a social construct, a prized notion of self in high modernity (i.e. Giddens).  How is “authenticity” framed in the new foodie culture of distinction and cultural capital?  With this in mind, please explain the phrase “tempura must have sincerity.”

Over 92% of the foodie articles mobilized “Food with a Face” tactic of distinction.  Please describe this act of distinction.  What groups of culinary artists are they disqualifying?  How is this related to colonialism?

What is the Exotic theme?  How does this theme and act of distinction involve class and economic capitals?  It seems to be multicultural, but they are always contextualized in “developing nations.”  Do you think this is another example of Marx’s commodity fetish?

Though omnivorousness constructs an allusion of multicultural, global, democratic equality, foodies are still practicing distinction.  Please explain the three principles the authors insist are still at work in this field of production.