The Everyday, taste, class

Theoretical approaches to everyday life, particularly in the work of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, have developed methodologies that refuse to treat social and cultural life as either explained by individualised experience or by overarching social structures. Using this cue the essay looks at the way class and taste are connected in the work of the sociology of taste (for example in the work of Pierre Bourdieu) and suggests that an everyday life approach can help us to recognise the potential of different articulations of the daily. It suggests that the understanding of taste as a form of attachment, offered by Antione Hennion, and Carolyn Steedman’s micro-histories of class and gender, provide productive approaches attuned to the conjunction of everyday life, taste and class.