Cultural stratification in Hungarian youth’s life in Transylvania

Abstract

Abstract In this paper we investigate the leisure time preferences of Hungarian youth in Transylvania, and identify the patterns of social stratification of their cultural consumption. We discuss three widely discussed theories related to social stratification: (1) individualization, (2) homology and (3) the omnivore-univore theory. According to Beck (1999) (1), the validity of the notion of social class is vanishing with the diversification of individual life-paths. The homology argument (2) claims that the stratification of cultural consumption is based on social class and individuals in higher social strata prefer and consume “high” or elite cultural items while individuals in lower social strata prefer and consume popular or mass culture (Bourdieu 1978a, 1978b). The “omnivore-univore” (3) argument, in contrast to the homology theory, sees cultural differentiation as a duality between cultural omnivores and cultural univores (Chan–Goldthorpe 2006). In this study we look at the validity of the shift in status markers from “highbrow-lowbrow” to “omnivoreunivore” by analyzing the cultural consumption of Hungarian youth in Transylvania.