The Ethical and Civic Dimensions of Taste

Abstract

The Australian Cultural Fields’ interview data illustrates contemporary Australians’ readiness to present their cultural consumption in terms that are ethical and/or hedonistic and that evince certain senses of belonging to some kind of community. First, we show interviewees liking or disliking heritage in terms of feelings of various kinds: spiritual connection, national belonging, moral obligation. Second, we note the moralisation of sport and the alternative of refusing to allow athleticism to stand for any value higher than itself. Third, we witness some interviewees’ sense of taking their pleasures within a field of more or less authorised tastes. Our fourth section illustrates that when people talk about watching television they are apt to comment on the different ways TV inflects what is ‘real’. Having evoked the interviewee as a choosing customer, relishing personal autonomy, we then return, in our fifth and final section, to a quality of response that is also evident in our first section on ‘heritage’ – a sense of obligation to imagined moral communities. We argue that Reconciliation discourse evokes Australia as a nation engaged in self-transformation, and this discourse has established the terms of a new form of ‘collective or group involvement’ in which liking Indigenous things signifies a re-positioning of self in relation to the nation’s imagined community. Australian Cultural Fields questionnaire data suggests what kinds of contemporary Australians are more likely to be susceptible to this appeal.