A Cultural Map of South Korea, 2011

Abstract

Studies conducted from the 2000s are characterized as having "multinational contexts" and "an expansion of the cultural domains" and as using "big data and various methodologies." However, very few studies have been conducted in Asia, especially that examine hierarchical taste revealed across the culture and everyday life as Bourdieu (1984) suggested. Thus, this study attempted to identify how the cultural topography of Korean society is drawn by analyzing the preference for cultural activities, music genres, television programs, food, beverages, and alcoholic drinks. For this, the study used data collected from the Survey on the Cultural Capital of Korean Society (2011) conducted for a research project called The Social Landscape of Cultural Production and Consumption: An Approach of Economic Sociology for Cultural Capital. The data were analyzed by multiple correspondence analysis (MCA), an advanced method of correspondence analysis used by Bourdieu in his Distinction (1984) to examine the correlation between class and taste. As a result, the cultural taste and lifestyle of Koreans were divided into six types according to class and age. Among the age groups, the 20s and the 50s did not correspond to the class variables and were identified as having unique generational cultural taste.