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I believe that the debate about the reality of eclecticism has already been resolved in part. It seems to me that there are after all a certain number of fairly robust indicators showing that practices and tastes are partly structured by an eclecticism gradient. We might note that this was already briefly referred to by Bourdieu in La Distinction – for him, the most subtle form of distinction was to borrow from repertoires that are not located within highbrow culture – an idea which Grignon and Passeron then somewhat developed in Le Savant et le populaire, with their image of a symbolic droit du seigneur. According to them, what allows a group to entrench its cultural domination is the privilege it has of borrowing things from other non-legitimate repertoires, with the reverse approach being far less easy to undertake.

Philippe Coulangeon