Mitchell Centre Seminar Series: Shamus Khan
| Dates: | 3 December 2014 |
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| Times: | 16:00 - 17:30 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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| Who is it for: | University staff |
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| Speaker: | Shamus Khan |
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Shamus Khan, Columbia University and Fabien Accominotti, LSE
Subscribers to the New York Philharmonic in the Gilded Age: From Cultural Purity to the Cooptation of Culture
In this paper we use a uniquely gathered database of subscribers to the New York Philharmonic to explore how high culture participation worked to cement elite status in late nineteenth-century America. Our database has information on who subscribed to the Philharmonic between 1880 and 1910 – by many accounts a key period of elite consolidation in the U.S., and in the city of New York in particular. By exploring these data we seek to think anew about how high culture worked as an elite resource in that period. We argue both with and against the classic account of monopolization and exclusiveness of culture, showing how over the long Gilded Age the social elite of New York attended the Philharmonic both increasingly and in more socially patterned ways. Yet we also find that the orchestra opened up to a new group of subscribers who did not share the social practices, occupational background, or residential choices of more elite patrons. This shift away from exclusiveness, we argue, was made possible by the willingness of the social elite to increase the profile of concerts through the cooptation of a group of cultured, non-elite subscribers. It was also facilitated by the fact that the two groups would not mingle within the hall. We speculate on the implications of these findings for elite theory and cultural sociology. Finally, the paper makes a methodological contribution by suggesting how spatial analysis, typically reserved in sociology for the investigation of residential patterns, can be applied to study the relationships between multiple social spaces.
Speaker
Shamus Khan
Organisation: Columbia University
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