How Cultural Tastes Shape Personal Networks

ture and social structure—going all the way back to the classic statements by Marx and Engels (1939) and Durkheim ([1933] 1997:215, 276)—aim at explaining the connection between these two domains by highlighting the ways in which patterns of social relations affect the composition and structure of cultural systems (Bearman 1993; Douglas 1978; Martin 2002). Some of the more ambitious projects, such as formulations in which large-scale cultural formations are linked to social structure broadly conceived (i.e., Swanson 1967), have been criticized for positing an unwarranted “reflection model” of the relation between culture and society (Wuthnow 1985), in which culture is seen as somehow being isomorphic with social structure but the mechanisms that produce this convergence are left unspecified (Martin 1997:5). Bourdieu, for instance, dismissed this stance as the “short-circuit fallacy” (quoted in Wacquant 1989:33), whereby a “direct link” is How Cultural Tastes Shape Personal Networks