Summary Of Taste In Late-Ming China

In late-Ming China, even though tea drinking had been accepted by the whole society, tea tasting remained its aesthetic function, in which people believed that it could reflect the taste and the social status of the drinkers. The relationship between taste and social status has been studied by some scholars. In the very influential Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Pierre Bourdieu argues that taste, the faculty of perceiving beauty and the capacity to discern aesthetic values, functions to legitimize social differences and establish one’s social orientation or “sense of one’s place.” After comparing the cultural pattern in both Ming and early modern Europe, Clunas has noticed that, If the unequal distribution