High, Popular, Mass and Folk Culture

Culture is not only varied (2.1.7) — it is ranked. Some of it is called refined and some common, some serious and some trivial, and the ranking is treated as though it were a property of the objects.

This lesson takes the four categories the ranking uses, and shows that they describe positions at least as much as they describe content.

A wedding reception. Three hundred guests, a stage, a sound system.

Early in the evening a Carnatic vocalist performs, accompanied by violin and mridangam. About forty people listen attentively. Three of them are visibly moved. Some of the rest are eating.

Later a DJ plays film songs from four decades, and two hundred and eighty people dance, including several of the forty.

Now watch the talk around the edges, because that is where the sociology is.

A man in his sixties says, to a small group, that nobody appreciates real music any more. A woman in her thirties says she loves both, and says it in a slightly careful way. A young man says, with some heat, that the film songs are the actual music of the country and the classical stuff is a colonial-era invention for drawing rooms — and he is not entirely wrong, as we will see. Someone says, "of course I like it, but I wouldn't put it on at home." A teenager, asked what she listens to, says "everything," which is not an evasion but a very specific answer.

Notice what nobody is doing: describing the music. Every one of those statements is a claim about the speaker, addressed to an audience, and calibrated to it.

So here is the question. Is Carnatic music "higher" than film music?

You cannot answer that by examining the music. Both are complex; both require skill; both move people. What differs is the institutional apparatus around them: one has academies, state patronage, printed treatises, festivals with critics, a place in university syllabi, and a vocabulary of connoisseurship. The other has enormous audiences, commercial production, and — until relatively recently — no academic standing at all.

That apparatus is not a measurement of quality. It is a mechanism of consecration: the social process by which some cultural products are certified as legitimate. And what this lesson will show is that the four familiar categories — high, popular, mass, folk — are largely descriptions of where something sits in relation to that apparatus.

The idea, in plain words

Keep popular and mass distinct, because conflating them is the commonest error here. Popular is about how many like it; mass is about how it is made. A locally invented dance that spreads without any company behind it is popular and not mass. An industrially produced film nobody watches is mass and not popular.

The great argument: is mass culture a problem?

Two traditions gave opposite answers, and the dispute organised cultural sociology for half a century.

The Frankfurt School: the culture industry

Adorno and Horkheimer (5.6), writing in exile from Nazi Germany and observing the American entertainment business, gave the case against in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Their term is the culture industry, and the argument has four parts.

Standardisation. Industrial production requires predictability, so products are built from interchangeable formulas — the same plot, the same chord progressions, the same three-act structure — while being marketed as new.

Pseudo-individuation. Superficial variation disguises the sameness. You are offered a choice among products that differ in surface and not in kind, and the experience of choosing does the ideological work.

The passive consumer. The product does the work for you: the laughter is on the soundtrack, the emotion is signposted, nothing is required of the audience except attention. Adorno contrasted this with the demand made by serious music, which he thought required active listening.

Distraction as control. Most importantly, mass culture absorbs the leisure of people whose work has exhausted them, supplying pleasure that reconciles them to their conditions. Not censorship — entertainment — as the mechanism by which a system secures consent. This is the Frankfurt answer to the question that founded the school: why did the revolution not come?

Take the argument seriously; there is real observational force in it, as anyone who has watched three formula films in a row can attest.

The reply: audiences are not passive

The criticisms are equally serious, and mostly won.

It is elitist, and its own taste is unexamined. Adorno's standard of the "active listener" is the trained appreciation of European art music — his own cultural capital, presented as the measure of humanity. He wrote dismissively of jazz, which has not aged well.

It denies audiences any agency. Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding model (5.12, 9.7) is the decisive intervention: a media text is encoded with a preferred meaning, and audiences decode it — sometimes as intended (dominant reading), sometimes partially (negotiated), sometimes against the grain (oppositional). Empirical audience research repeatedly finds people arguing with, mocking, reinterpreting and repurposing what they consume.

Popular culture carries genuine resistance and genuine art. Reggae, hip-hop, blues, Dalit song traditions, protest cinema, satire under censorship — all industrially or semi-industrially produced, none reducible to distraction.

And the mass audience it describes barely exists any more. The critique was built for an era of three broadcast channels. Fragmented, algorithmic, participatory media raise different questions — about attention, targeting and platform power (9.7, 12.3) rather than about homogenisation.

Raymond Williams's position (2.1.1, 5.12) is the better starting point: culture is ordinary, working-class cultural life is culture in the full sense, and the interesting questions are about the conditions of production and the meanings people make, not about ranking.

Bourdieu: taste as a weapon

The most influential single work here is Bourdieu's Distinction (1979), and its argument is uncomfortable (5.10, 2.1.13).

Taste, he argued, is not a private aesthetic response but a marker and a weapon of class position. What you find beautiful, boring, vulgar or pretentious is closely patterned by your upbringing and education. And crucially, the hierarchy of tastes is not neutral: the tastes of the dominant class are institutionally certified as legitimate, so that people who lack them appear to lack sensibility rather than to lack schooling.

Two of his observations are especially sharp.

He distinguished a legitimate taste oriented to form — appreciating how a thing is made, its technique, its allusions, its distance from immediate pleasure — from a popular taste oriented to function, substance and feeling: does it move me, is it about something recognisable, is it enjoyable. The first requires the leisure and training to attend to form rather than content, which are unequally distributed.

And he insisted that "taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier." Every judgement you make about a film, a song, a wedding or a garment is simultaneously a statement about yourself, legible to others. The man at the wedding complaining about real music was not making an observation. He was placing himself.

This is one of the clearest documented cases anywhere of the boundary being moved, and it is Indian.

The dance form now called Bharatanatyam descends from sadir, performed in Tamil temples and courts by hereditary women performers, the devadasis — women dedicated to temples, with a distinctive and complicated social position that included artistic training and hereditary rights, and which reformers of the early twentieth century attacked as immoral.

Through the 1920s and 30s, an anti-nautch campaign stigmatised the practice and legislation curtailed the devadasi system. In the same period the form was "revived" — reconstructed, renamed, given a Sanskritised lineage traced to the Natyashastra, moved from temple and court to the proscenium stage, and taken up by women from upper-caste, educated families, with Rukmini Devi Arundale's institution at Kalakshetra central to the process.

The outcome: the art form gained enormous prestige and became a marker of respectable classical Indian culture — and the hereditary communities who had carried it were largely dispossessed of it. The sociologist Amrit Srinivasan's work on this is the standard reference, and the episode is a textbook case of what 6.2.3 calls Sanskritisation operating on an art form rather than a caste.

Every element of this lesson is present in one story: consecration by institutions, the reclassification of a practice, the conversion of cultural material into status, and the fact that who is honoured and what is honoured can move in opposite directions.

Go deeper

Consecration: how the boundary is actually maintained

If the high/popular line is not in the objects, where is it? In a set of identifiable institutions doing identifiable work:

Academies and conservatories that certify training. Museums and concert halls that provide a physical frame demanding reverence. Critics who supply a vocabulary of appreciation. Prizes. Universities, which decide what is worth studying — and note that including something in a syllabus is itself an act of consecration. State patronage — an academy, a national broadcaster, a heritage list. And provenance: whether the form has a written lineage and a named tradition.

Once you see the apparatus, you can watch things move through it. Jazz travelled from disreputable dance music to conservatory subject within one lifetime. Cinema travelled from fairground novelty to auteur art. Comics became graphic novels when universities began teaching them. Nothing about the objects changed.

The omnivore turn: the modern update you need

Bourdieu described France in the 1960s, where elite distinction was signalled by exclusivity — knowing the right things and disdaining the popular.

Richard Peterson's research from the 1990s found something different in contemporary societies: high-status people increasingly signal status through cultural omnivorousness — a broad, cosmopolitan range of tastes including popular forms — while low-status consumption tends to be more univorous, concentrated in fewer genres.

Notice this does not abolish Bourdieu's mechanism; it updates it. The signal is no longer "I only like opera" but "I like opera and Punjabi hip-hop and Korean cinema" — a claim that requires exactly the mobility, education, travel and free time that are unequally distributed. And note there are still rules: the omnivore's range is wide but not unlimited, and there remain forms that are declasse to enjoy without irony.

This is why the teenager who says she listens to "everything" is making a very specific move, and why the woman in her thirties said she loved both "in a slightly careful way."

Folk culture and its afterlives

Folk culture has a particular relationship to modernity worth spelling out, because it is not simply "old culture."

Heritage-isation. Once a practice is at risk of dying, states and institutions may preserve it — as a listed heritage form, a festival, a museum display. Preservation typically changes the practice: it is removed from the occasion that gave it meaning, performed for an audience rather than a community, standardised so it can be taught, and given an official version where there were many.

Commodification. Folk forms sell — as tourism, craft, "authentic" music, fabric, cuisine. This brings income to communities and it also transfers control to intermediaries, and it rewards whichever version of the practice photographs best.

Appropriation. When material from a subordinate group is taken up by a dominant one, the profit and prestige frequently do not follow the material back. The Bharatanatyam case is one version; the history of popular music contains many.

And do not romanticise. Folk culture is not automatically egalitarian or benign. Village forms carry caste rules, gender exclusions and hierarchies of their own, and calling something traditional is not a moral endorsement (2.1.8).

"High culture is objectively better." There is no non-circular way to establish this: the criteria of excellence are supplied by the institutions that consecrate it. This does not mean quality is imaginary — it means it is judged from a position.

"Popular culture is passive consumption." Hall's encoding/decoding and decades of audience research say otherwise. People argue with, mock and repurpose what they consume.

"Popular and mass are the same." Popular = widely liked. Mass = industrially produced. Keep them apart.

"Bourdieu says people are snobs." He says taste is structured by position and that the hierarchy is institutionally certified. That is a claim about mechanisms, not a moral accusation — and he included his own class in it.

"Liking popular culture proves you are not a snob." Peterson's omnivore finding complicates this considerably. Range itself became the status signal.

"Folk culture is authentic and pure." All culture is hybrid (2.1.1), and folk forms carry their own hierarchies. "Authentic" is usually a claim made by outsiders about a version they prefer.

Why it matters

It shows you a status system operating in what feels like pure pleasure. Your taste in music, film, food and clothes feels like the most personal thing you own (compare 1.1.3's disgust). It is also a signal others read in seconds, and a filter operating in interviews, marriages and friendships (2.1.13 takes this up directly).

It explains a whole class of arguments. Every dispute about whether something is "real" music, "proper" literature, or "just entertainment" is a boundary dispute over consecration, conducted in the vocabulary of quality. Recognising the form of the argument does not settle it, but it tells you what is being fought over.

And it gives you a case study in how cultural hierarchy is made. Bharatanatyam, jazz, cinema, the novel: each moved. Which means the current arrangement is not a natural order but a snapshot — the exact lesson of 1.1.2 and 1.2.3, applied to taste.

Culture is ranked, and four categories carry the ranking: high (institutionally consecrated), popular (widely liked), mass (industrially produced), folk (locally produced and informally transmitted). Popular and mass are not the same: one is about audience, the other about production.

The Frankfurt School's culture industry (Adorno and Horkheimer) charged mass culture with standardisation, pseudo-individuation, passivity and distraction-as-control. The reply — Williams, and Hall's encoding/decoding — is that the account is elitist, denies audience agency, and ignores the art and resistance popular culture carries.

Bourdieu's Distinction: taste is a marker and weapon of class position; legitimate taste attends to form, popular taste to substance and feeling; "taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier."

The boundary is maintained by consecration — academies, museums, critics, prizes, syllabi, state patronage — and things move through it (jazz, cinema, comics).

Peterson's omnivore thesis updates Bourdieu: contemporary elites signal status through breadth rather than exclusivity, which still requires unequally distributed resources.

Bharatanatyam's transformation from devadasi sadir to consecrated classical form shows the whole apparatus at work — including the dispossession of the community that carried it.

Folk culture is reshaped by heritage-isation, commodification and appropriation — and should not be romanticised.

High culture — cultural forms accorded prestige by consecrating institutions.

Popular culture — cultural forms widely liked and consumed across classes.

Mass culture — culture produced industrially for a mass market.

Folk culture — locally produced, informally transmitted culture of collective or anonymous authorship.

Culture industry — Adorno and Horkheimer's term for the industrial production of standardised culture as a mechanism of social control.

Pseudo-individuation — superficial variation that disguises standardisation.

Encoding/decoding — Hall's model of media meaning as produced by both text and audience, permitting dominant, negotiated and oppositional readings.

Distinction — Bourdieu's account of taste as a marker of class position and an instrument of domination.

Legitimate taste / popular taste — Bourdieu's contrast between an orientation to form and an orientation to substance and function.

Consecration — the institutional process by which cultural products are certified as legitimate.

Cultural omnivore — Peterson's high-status consumer who signals position through breadth of taste.

Heritage-isation — the institutional preservation of a practice, which typically transforms it.

Cultural appropriation — the taking up of a subordinate group's cultural material by a dominant group, usually without transfer of profit or prestige.

Sanskritisation — Srinivas's concept of status elevation by adopting higher-caste practice; here applied to an art form (6.2.3).

One — the party test. Recall the last time you told someone what you like to read, watch or listen to. Who were you talking to, and did you edit? The edit is the data.

Two — trace a consecration. Choose a cultural form that has risen in prestige within living memory (a genre, a cuisine, a sport, a medium). Identify which institutions did the consecrating and roughly when.

Three — Bourdieu on yourself. List three things you find vulgar and three you find pretentious. Then ask, of each, where you learned that judgement — and what it would say about you to admit the opposite in the wrong room.

Four — the omnivore audit. Write down the range of your own tastes. Then ask what resources — travel, languages, education, time, income, internet access — were required to acquire that range. That is the question Bourdieu's framework asks of breadth.