Conference: Exploration of Class, Distinction, and Habitus in Popular Culture of Eurasia

Filozofická fakulta UK zve na konferenci, která se bude konat 26.–28. října 2023 ve Voršilské 1, Praha 1. Konferenci pořádá Německý historický ústav, DHI Warschau – NIH Warszawa a FF UK.

Program konference naleznete zde.

Popis konference

Class, distinction, and habitus have a contested position in the political and social sciences. No less controversial are the concepts in the humanities, even though the study of class in cultural studies seems to be long past its prime. Since the 1960s, Western youth and working class popular and urban cultures have received wide scholarly attention. Minority groups and people on the margins ridiculed and stigmatised by popular culture experienced a research boom several decades ago and a renewed interest owing to research into reality TV shows. Representations of white upper-class heterosexual male domination in popular culture has been interrogated with the finest critical tools in the last years.

The research agenda of Central and Eastern European popular culture looks a bit different. Due to the allegedly different path to modernity, exploration of class, distinction, and habitusin popular culture offersinteresting stimuli even today. A closer look at the political and socioeconomic changes that the region has undergone shows that these phenomena were closely linked to the development of industrial capitalism and the rise of the bourgeois society in the 19th century on the one hand. On the other, class often dissolved into nationalist and even racist ideology. Unique group’s distinctions were melted into the cult of the common people. A specific habitus was suppressed by the all-encompassing folksiness. Mass movements in the interwar period placed the removal of the enemy class and distinction at the centre of their politics.
The socialist dictatorship after the Second World War declared that it had done away with class and group-specific distinctions; differing habitus was to be replaced by uniformity. However, in the post-Stalin period, even the mildest proclamations concerning a classless society had to be revised. New social differentiations and subtle distinctions among people became more visible and found not infrequent reflection in literature, film, music, and visual arts. In late socialism, power elites gradually abandoned the banner of egalitarianism and the new class manifested in a showy manner its distinctions and habitus.

The conference asks what the (dis)continuities between late socialism and post-socialism in terms of class, distinction, and habitus in the popular culture were. It seeks to answer how class, distinction, and habitus have been represented in popular culture in the “long durée” perspective. In what ways have these representations been transformed? What were the causes and consequences of these transformations, if any? Did these representations affect their recipients and in what manner?