Struggling with distinction: How and why people switch between cultural hierarchy and equality

In research on cultural taste and distinction, inconsistent and ambivalent attitudes towards hierarchy versus equality have largely been ignored. This study shows, by means of in-depth interviews with 90 Dutch people on their own and others’ cultural tastes, that both a hierarchical and an egalitarian repertoire appear in people’s narratives, and that these repertoires are often used simultaneously. People still distinguish culturally from others, but not consistently and often reluctantly, as they morally object to high–low distinctions based on aesthetic evaluations at the same time. This article analyses both repertoires and explores when and how tensions between the two come forward. We interpret these tensions on the micro level of self-presentation and habitus, and on the macro level of changing structures of inequality and meritocratic ideas.