Questioning Omnivorism

1. Forgetting habitus - In a footnote on page 886 Bethany Bryson entirely sets aside what she calls "an important mediating variable in [her] description of Bourdieu's theory." This seems to me a crucial concept for her discussion of 'cultural tolerance' and knowingly ignoring it to make her argument 'simpler' seems like quite an oversight. Does Bryson's critique of Bourdieu's study stem mainly from this simplification?, that is, does American class mobility (at least for upper & lower ends of the middle class, which is really all we're talking about here) account for the perceived 'increase' in cultural omnivorousness?

2. Eclecticism vs. Omnivorism - To what extent do our authors (Peterson, Kern & Bryson) and/or do we truly believe in the cultural omnivore? It seems to me what the authors are really talking about is cultural eclecticism (which Peterson makes a very fleeting reference to in "Changing Highbrow Taste, p. 900). Bryson bases her use of the term omnivore on cultural tolerance, which doesn't seem like the same thing to me. Just because i don't dislike (or disdain) country music, and may even have a song or artist or two that i like does not make me a connoisseur (or even really a consumer) of it.

3. Social Taylorism vs. Social Darwinism - What is generally overlooked in each of these articles is Bourdieu's (and Veblen's) central Marxist critique about the commodification of leisure time. In "Understanding audience segmentation" R.A. Peterson paints a very simplistic picture for explaining discrepancies found in leisure activities (and by some extension musical tastes) (p.251). I would suggest two alternative explanations for our author's findings:

ST - Given the increased commodification and organization of leisure time & activities, lower class/less educated workers spend less time (if any) pursuing their 'actual' cultural interests and so can be conversant in only one or very few as opposed to Peterson's model of the inverted pyramid (254-5).

SD - The discrepancy between high-end omnivorousness and low-end univorousness might be explained by relative 'coolness' or the security each has in their social stature, so that a high-class/highly educated person can 'take the risk' of enjoying lower-class endeavors, because they have enough cultural capital to do so, whereas an attempted move in the other direction is more likely to get you branded a wannabe.

What do you think?


Bonus Question (Meta-Question) - To what extent do sociologists (or social scientists in general) take into account the question of how honest their survey respondants are? When answering surveys or interviewers about any sorts of questions (but particularly relatively 'personal' questions) to what extent are people likely to answer with (a) what they 'want' their answer to be, rather than what's true, (b) random answers just to get through/get finished/get paid, (c) what they think the interviewer 'wants to hear', particularly if there is some potential reward, but only if they fall into the 'correct categories', (d) outright lies, because they don't want to support the seemingly corporate causes most of this 'market research' seems to be for? In the articles, i only saw one brief indication of this possibility in Bryson's "Hypothesis 6" (p. 888), when some people are "less likely to report they are unfamiliar with any music genre", and even this is likely a result of phrasing and not any kind of doubt in the systems of data collection.