Permanent Distinctions: Tattoos, Taste and Cultural Capital

Taste and consumption are a recurring focus in the sociological analysis of cultural knowledge, drawing upon Bourdieu’s seminal work in Distinction. How and what we consume is shaped by, and continues to shape, our class-based cultural knowledge, as well as how we are seen by others. In our paper, we want to continue the study of visual representation of cultural class, through the empirical analysis of tattoos as representing a permanent and embodied marker of taste, cultural capital, and class. In previous sociological work, the analytical categories have been ‘tattooed versus non-tattooed’, and the tattooed population has been associated with deviance of different kinds (criminality, low class). However, in many contexts (including Sweden), the tattooed share of the population has grown significantly over the last decades, making the tattooed—non-tattooed division too blunt to capture class differences. Thus, in this paper, we aim to study how class-based differences in aesthetic or style in tattoos are seen, interpreted, and evaluated by others: do people recognize a lowbrow versus a highbrow tattoo, and if so, how do these assessments of cultural class shape their perception about the person carrying them? We are fielding a factorial survey experiment using a pool of online respondents from Sweden. Respondents will be tasked with evaluating several sets of tattoos on a range of different outcomes, including cultural class, warmth and competence, and other attributes.