Tastes and Complex Tastes

Taste is central to the sociology of culture and a frequently invoked explanans in the discipline at large. Yet, it remains a semantically ambiguous polyseme that has been understood and operationalized in often divergent ways by sociologists. In this essay, we survey contemporary empirical research on cultural tastes and use retroductive reasoning from measurements of taste to clarify the semantic ambiguity surrounding taste. We argue that taste should be conceptualized as a person’s thick subjectivity in a cultural field, that is to say a fundamentally multidimensional orientation that describes how we feel, consume, and praise in cultural fields. Recognizing the inherent multidimensionality to taste allows us to refine our understanding of complex taste phenomena. We outline a family of complex tastes using characteristic antinomies among their constituent modalities of action, and use a case study to show how each variety corresponds to extant folk concepts about taste.