In his article "Sociogenetic Fields and the Fiction of Unity: Classed Taste and Regional Differentiation in Italian Food Consumption," published in Cultural Sociology, Tomas Bilevicius develops a new theoretical framework for the study of classed taste in historically differentiated national fields, using Italy's enduring North-South divide as its central analytical lens.
Italy represents a strategically important case for cultural sociology. Since unification in 1861, the country has nominally operated as a single social space, yet its North and South have followed deeply divergent sociogenetic trajectories - in terms of economic organization, state formation, and cultural development. Gramsci famously theorized this cleavage as the "Southern Question," pointing to the structural asymmetries and cultural hegemony of the North that persisted long after formal unification. The article takes this historical differentiation seriously, arguing that it has produced not one but at least two partially distinct fields of food, each with its own symbolic hierarchies of legitimacy, refinement, and necessity, even as they appear to constitute a unified national field.
To address this theoretically, the article proposes a sociogenetic fields theoretical (SFT) framework that integrates Bourdieu's field theory and his thesis of structural homology with Elias's concept of sociogenesis. While Bourdieu's framework maps how social positions correspond to structured taste preferences, it tends to treat national fields as symbolically unified. Drawing on Elias, the SFT framework foregrounds how long-term civilizing processes, unfolding differently across territories, sediment distinct practical logics, affective thresholds, and valuation schemes. The result is a theoretical synthesis that retains the Bourdieusian homology between positions and tastes while accounting for why the same relational positions may be populated by different symbolic content in historically differentiated regions.
Empirically, the study applies correspondence analysis to the 2021 Italian Household Budget Survey, mapping food expenditure patterns across six occupational classes and the South-Centre/North macro-regional divide. The findings confirm that the Italian food space is organized around the two familiar Bourdieusian dimensions of capital volume and capital composition. Yet the symbolic content filling these homologous positions diverges sharply between the two macro-regions. In the Centre-North, the dominant antinomy opposes lean, fresh, health-coded foods against heavier staples - a pattern consistent with institutionalized circuits of consecration and the cultural entrepreneurship of movements such as Slow Food. In the South, the structuring opposition runs instead between expensive, status-bearing traditional items - fresh fish, local cheeses, citrus - and lighter, more convenient alternatives, reflecting the deep valorization of the Mediterranean diet and the centrality of community-based culinary traditions. Items that carry one symbolic meaning in the North carry a different one in the South: seafood, breadsticks, and citrus each occupy different positions in the two regional fields, illustrating precisely how distinct sociogenetic histories sediment distinct symbolic universes within an ostensibly unified national space.
These findings contribute to the Southern Question scholarship by demonstrating that Southern taste patterns are not a mere variation on a national norm, but the product of a historically specific civilizing process, raising further questions about whether Southern tastes are equally valorized in the national arena of cultural legitimacy.
The full text of the article is available here.
Citation: Bilevicius, T. (2026). Sociogenetic Fields and the Fiction of Unity: Classed Taste and Regional Differentiation in Italian Food Consumption. Cultural Sociology, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/17499755261415654
