Cultural omnivorousness

A philosophy professor who keeps a Dolly Parton record next to the Bach on the shelf would have puzzled the sociologist of 1970. The whole point of elite taste, as Bourdieu had just finished arguing in Distinction, was exclusion: the dominant class secured its standing by drawing a hard line around legitimate culture and refusing everything beneath it¹. Snobbery was the mechanism. Then, across the 1980s and 1990s, the line seemed to dissolve. The people with the most education and the highest-status jobs turned out to be the ones who listened to the widest range, opera and the blues alike, while narrow and loyal taste drifted down the social ladder². Sociology named the new figure the omnivore and spent the next thirty years arguing about what its appetite means.

From snob to omnivore

Richard A. Peterson reframed the question. Where Bourdieu read high status as exclusion, Peterson read it as range. In a 1992 paper he relabeled the cultural hierarchy: at the top sat the omnivore who moved freely between high and low, displacing the old snob who admitted only the legitimate; at the bottom, the univore whose taste ran narrow and deep³. Four years later, comparing two national surveys of American arts participation taken a decade apart, Peterson and Roger Kern showed the shift was real and accelerating, with highbrows sampling more middlebrow and lowbrow genres in 1992 than they had in 1982⁴. “From snob to omnivore” became one of the most-tested claims in the sociology of culture, replicated from the Netherlands to England⁵.

Is openness a better disguise?

The skeptics never accepted that breadth meant the end of hierarchy. Bethany Bryson, working with survey data on what Americans claimed to dislike, found that the educated did reject fewer genres, but the ones they rejected were reliably those whose audiences had the least schooling⁶. Tolerance had a pattern, and the pattern was class⁷. Breadth, in this reading, is its own kind of capital: the ease of being conversant everywhere and beholden to nowhere is exactly the disposition a certain upbringing produces and a certain kind of job rewards. Shamus Khan watched it form in the students of an elite boarding school, where privilege now presents as “ease,” the comfort to range from Beowulf to Jaws without anxiety, in place of the old snobbery⁸. A British line of work has given the disposition a name: Prieur and Savage call it cosmopolitan cultural capital⁹, and Friedman and colleagues argue that even omnivorousness is being overwritten by subtler signals, the manner of appreciation and the disinterested pose behind the breadth¹⁰.

The country exception

The most revealing recent finding is about the one taste that runs the other way. When Omar Lizardo and Sara Skiles compared what Americans disliked in 1993 with what they disliked in 2012, almost every genre had become safer to admit; dislike of rap and heavy metal fell hardest of all¹¹. The exceptions were country, bluegrass, folk, and religious music, which more people rejected in 2012 than in 1993, and the rejecters were disproportionately the young and college-educated¹². The omnivore, it turns out, is not infinitely open. The breadth has an edge, and the edge falls along a familiar line: country is among the most commercially popular music in America and among the least welcome in the rooms where cultural authority is brokered¹³. Openness that stops precisely at the music coded white, rural, and working-class is openness doing the boundary-work Bourdieu described, in a new dialect.

Why it matters for the music

Taste is one of the questions the whole project is organized around, and omnivorousness is the modern shape of it. It describes the listener this kind of history assumes, someone who can hold the blues and a country record in one head without ranking them by class, and it names the suspicion that such openness is never quite as innocent as it feels. Country is the genre that exposes the omnivore’s last boundary, and this is the lens it comes under. It also names the place this note sits in the analytical core. Where Distinction gave the first account of taste as class, omnivorousness is its sequel, and the authenticity debate is its cousin one field over, the same sorting that Frith traced inside popular music run across the whole cultural span¹⁴.

See also

• Cultural capital — the parent concept: omnivorousness is what cultural capital looks like once breadth, rather than highbrow exclusivity, became the elite’s distinguishing taste
• Authenticity and its discontents — the cousin argument: where omnivorousness asks whether breadth across genres is real openness, authenticity asks the same question inside one genre about realness, and both arrive at status rather than sound
• Pop as craft — omnivorousness is what finally lets a high-status listener take craft pop seriously, the revaluation that the older legitimate hierarchy refused to grant

Footnotes

1. In Distinction (French ed. 1979; English trans. 1984), Bourdieu argued that aesthetic choices function as markers of class position, made in opposition to the tastes of other classes, so that “good taste” is defined by the dominant class against what lies beneath it. In 1998 the International Sociological Association named it one of the ten most important sociology books of the 20th century, “Books of the XX Century” (accessed June 16, 2026). ↩

2. The core empirical pattern of the omnivore thesis: high-status, highly educated people consume the widest range of genres, while narrow taste runs down the social ladder. Richard A. Peterson and Roger M. Kern, “Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore,” American Sociological Review 61, no. 5 (1996): 900–907 (accessed June 16, 2026). ↩

3. Richard A. Peterson, “Understanding Audience Segmentation: From Elite and Mass to Omnivore and Univore,” Poetics 21, no. 4 (1992): 243–258, Semantic Scholar entry (accessed June 16, 2026). Peterson coined “omnivore”/“univore,” placing the high-status omnivore who crosses genre boundaries at the top and the narrow-taste univore at the bottom. See also EBSCO Research Starters, “Cultural Omnivorousness” (accessed June 16, 2026). ↩

4. Peterson and Kern compared the 1982 and 1992 waves of the NEA’s Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA) and found highbrows liked significantly more lowbrow genres in 1992 than in 1982, a larger increase than among non-highbrows. Richard A. Peterson and Roger M. Kern, “Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore,” American Sociological Review 61, no. 5 (1996): 900–907 (accessed June 16, 2026). ↩

5. The omnivore thesis has been tested cross-nationally, including Koen van Eijck’s work on the Netherlands and Tak Wing Chan and John H. Goldthorpe’s on England. See Chan and Goldthorpe, “Social Stratification and Cultural Consumption: Music in England,” European Sociological Review 23, no. 1 (2007): 1–19, which finds an omnivore–univore pattern in English musical taste; and the overview in Oxford Bibliographies, “Cultural Omnivorousness” (accessed June 16, 2026). ↩

6. Bethany Bryson, “‘Anything But Heavy Metal’: Symbolic Exclusion and Musical Dislikes,” American Sociological Review 61, no. 5 (1996): 884–899 (accessed June 16, 2026). Using the 1993 General Social Survey, Bryson found that the genres most likely to be rejected by the musically tolerant — gospel, country, rap, and heavy metal — were those whose fans had the least education. ↩

7. Bryson framed this tolerance as a form of “multicultural capital” — unevenly distributed and still drawing symbolic boundaries against less-privileged groups, so that openness coexists with class-based exclusion. Bethany Bryson, “‘Anything But Heavy Metal’: Symbolic Exclusion and Musical Dislikes,” American Sociological Review 61, no. 5 (1996): 884–899 (accessed June 16, 2026). ↩

8. Shamus Rahman Khan, Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School (Princeton University Press, 2011). Khan argues that elite students now embody “ease” — being at home with everything “from Beowulf to Jaws” — rather than old-style highbrow snobbery. Princeton University Press (accessed June 16, 2026). ↩

9. Annick Prieur and Mike Savage, “Emerging Forms of Cultural Capital,” European Societies 15, no. 2 (2013): 246–267, Taylor & Francis (accessed June 16, 2026). They argue Bourdieu’s account of cultural capital needs updating to register an emerging “cosmopolitan cultural capital” that valorizes commercial, often Americanized forms. ↩

10. Sam Friedman, Mike Savage, Laurie Hanquinet, and Andrew Miles, “Cultural Sociology and New Forms of Distinction,” Poetics 53 (2015): 1–8 (accessed June 16, 2026). They argue distinction is increasingly less about consuming the “right” objects than about the manner of appreciation and the cultivation of taste. ↩

11. Omar Lizardo and Sara Skiles, “The End of Symbolic Exclusion? The Rise of ‘Categorical Tolerance’ in the Musical Tastes of Americans: 1993–2012,” Sociological Science 3 (2016): 85–108 (accessed June 16, 2026). Comparing the 1993 GSS musical-taste items with a 2012 replication, they document a broad decline in expressed dislikes; dislike of rap/hip hop and heavy metal fell most sharply. ↩

12. Omar Lizardo and Sara Skiles, “Musical Taste and Patterns of Symbolic Exclusion in the United States 1993–2012: Generational Dynamics of Differentiation and Continuity,” Poetics 53 (2015): 9–21 (accessed June 16, 2026). Country, bluegrass, folk, and religious styles were more likely to be disliked in 2012 than 1993, driven by younger, college-educated respondents. ↩

13. In 2010 the country format was the most popular U.S. radio format, outdrawing even news and talk in listener share. Media and Culture (Lumen Learning), “Radio Station Formats” (accessed June 16, 2026). Its low standing among the college-educated is documented in Lizardo and Skiles 2015. ↩

14. Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Harvard University Press, 1996), traces how value judgments and status-sorting operate within popular music itself — the parallel this note draws to the omnivorousness debate’s sorting across the cultural span. ↩