La compétence culturelle

Abstract

Cultural categories such as ‘comedy’, ‘rock’, ‘painting’ and others – where generic categories prevail – are ordinary in social life and in sociological analyses. Yet, these are often considered as uncertain designations, even arbitrary and not common. If asked, individuals would be incapable to identify a cultural object, and ultimately in a common manner. The Cultural Practices, Media and Information Technologies (PMTI) inquiry, conducted in 2015 by the ELIPSS panel, offers, in the context of music, the empirical material to evaluate individuals’ capacity as well as the categorial and generic diversity to identify musical extracts. The identification inquiry enables us to defend a socio-cultural model of generic understanding that articulates competency, generic conventions and level of prototypicality of sound to categorise, which is underpinned by a determination by a socio-historic familiarity with the musical offer in its diversity.

Keywords

• music
• categories
• genres
• ability
• competence
• familiarity