Cultural participation and taste cultivation in a transitional setting: museum education fever in contemporary China

Abstract

Despite an extensive body of literature that has examined the role of museums in cultural reproduction and public education, most of the current discussion is western-centred. Whilst explorations of museum education in developing countries often focus on the institution, the agency perspective regarding how different social groups negotiate access to museum resources is relatively understudied. Aiming to address these lacunae, this paper presents a qualitative case study of a major museum in Hangzhou, China, focusing on how people from distinct social groups, with different orientations to cultural consumption, developed multiple strategies for cultural participation in museums. Their practices arguably reinforced and justified a dispositioned judgment of taste and class identities that mirror the social transition of contemporary China. Conceptually addressing Bourdieu’s theories of ‘cultural capital’ and ‘taste’, this study explores the dialectics between culture and power and demonstrates the complexity of cultural reproduction in a state-funded museum.

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