Post-modernists regard Sociologist Pierre Bourdieus study of the 
French colonial educational system in Algeria as a benchmark in 
critical studies. Bourdieu showed how the system tracked most 
colonized Algerians into a knowledge system in which their values, 
tastes, and expertise were manipulated in such a manner that, 
upon emergence from it, they would have to struggle not to be 
socially branded as ordinary, mundane, common. On the other hand,
French colonials and selected Algerian "natives" would have 
expunge any taint of localized or Arabic knowledge, values, 
and tastes from their consciousness in order to succeed in the 
system. The result was a social elite, groomed by the educational 
system, whose tastes in art, literature, and lesure activities 
conformed to a standard already established by the social elite 
in France, the colonizer country.

Bourdieu followed up this study with others, including one in 
France, that surveyed the artistic, literary, and cinematic 
tastes and leisure activities of individuals in various 
occupations. This study, summarized and analyzed in Distinction 
(Bourdieu 1984),  developed the concept of "cultural capital".  
"Cultural capital" consists of the knowledge and tastes that must 
be conspicuously possessed and expended in order for an individual 
to be regarded by the social elite as belonging to them. 
By defining what is culturally acceptable or praiseworthy, 
the social elite maintains a boundary between itself and lower 
classes. For example, those persons in the "dominant class" 
"riches in cultural capital" will prefer Well-Tempered 
Concerto for the Left Hand,  paintings by Breughel or Goya, with 
the latest expressions in jazz. "Middle-brow tastes" of technicians,
 junior administrative executives, an engineers favor Hungarian 
Rhapsody and the art of Utrillo and Renoir. "Popular taste" 
characteristic of manual workers, shopkeepers, clerical employees, 
and domestic servants favors the opera La Traviata,  
Strauss waltzes, and the music of Petula Clark and other 
singers whose songs are "totally devoid of artistic ambition 
or pretension". (Bourdieu 1984:  14,16).

Thus, says Bourdieu, "art and cultural consumption are 
predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfil 
a social function of legitimating social differences" 
(Bourdieu 1984:7). Bourdieu (1984:6) illustrates this point 
with two different reviews of Hair, one of which pans it as 
offensive (simulated intercourse) and ineffective because "the 
nakedness fails to be symbolic", the other of which praises it, 
noting "nothing could be obscene on the stage of our premier 
theatre, and the ballerinas of the Opera, even as naked dancers, 
sylphs, sprites or Bacchae, retain an inviolable purity". 
Because "a work of art has meaning and interest only for someone 
who possesses the cultural competence, that is, the code, into 
which it is encoded, ...a beholder who lacks the specific code
feels lost in a chaos of sounds and rhythms, colours and lines, 
without rhyme or reason" (Bourdieu 1984:2). And the result is that
to the socially recognized hierarchy of the arts, and within each
of them, of genres, schools or periods, corresponds a social 
hierarchy of the consumers" (Bourdieu 1984:1).