Memo 2: Lamont

Michele Lamont offers up a survey of literature concerning social and symbolic

boundaries as well as insight into how the privileged and disadvantaged in both the United States
and France form and perpetuate these boundaries. Lamont uses an interdisciplinary approach to
understanding boundary making and offering a theoretical framework that sheds light on how
these boundaries are manifested in academia and society at large. The most interesting
examination in the piece The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences was Bourdieus analysis
of symbolic class boundaries in the French educational system. This reminds me a lot of Marxs
argument that the dominant class have a monopoly on knowledge and what can be known the
bourgeois controlling what the proletariat have access to knowing. Hall disagrees with this
through empirical research gathered in New York, finding that musical exclusiveness decreases
with education, and that the link between involvement in high culture and access to dominant
class circles is undemonstrated. While I might agree that exclusiveness may decrease with
education, I posit that access to higher art forms such as symphony orchestras remain available
only to older whites. Despite having low cost tickets available for those under 35 (most
orchestras do), the patronage is still limited to those in the retired age range. The symbolic
boundary this sets is one of access to this high art form, only for the rich, despite cost being a
non-issue (I have a season pass for $25 which gives me access to all concerts). Young people
view the orchestra as having this holier than thou atmosphere and continue to be pushed towards
popular music, produced for the everyman. Demographically, too, the crowd is always older
(55+) and very, very white. Minorities are told subconsciously by the dominant class that they
cannot afford access to these concerts, and therefore patronage is reserved for only those in that
dominant class. Im not arguing here that classical music is in fact a higher art form, because
that, in and of itself, is giving into the symbolic boundary set up by the white tradition. What I
am trying to articulate is that the current state of classical music is artificially limited by
symbolic boundaries for whites to enjoy.