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Recent work shows cultural capital taking increasingly vague and embodied forms. Attitudes and understandings of "creativity" and "authenticity," for example, hold more symbolic value than any particular objects. How are these culturally valuable understandings defined and transmitted? This project examines thrift-store shopping to show how symbolic meanings are defined and employed as a form of embodied cultural capital. Ethnographic observation and interviews with shoppers at thrift stores in Portland, Oregon, reveal competing symbolic understandings among two groups of consumers. One group, the "thrift-seekers," is motivated by a desire to find bargains. Members of this group describe their consumption as a game in which they are able to compete with other consumers. The other group, the "creativists," comes from a more privileged background and is motivated by a rejection of conventional stores. They describe their consumption as an exercise of creativity through which they establish superiority over other consumers. Each group implicates the other as it constructs its narrative of consumption. Outside of the thrift store, the creativists employ their narratives of creativity as a form of cultural capital, giving them status in relation to similarly privileged peers. This project illustrates the embodied nature of contemporary cultural capital and shows how classes implicate one another in definitions of it. Furthermore, it demonstrates how thrift stores hold particular significance as sites in which embodied cultural capital is defined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This project examines how three groups in a winter resort town develop criteria of distinction through their everyday interactions. These groups--working-class locals, ski bums from privileged backgrounds holding low-wage jobs, and wealthy vacationers--each employ the idea of "nature" to distinguish themselves. Locals perform their perceived connection to "nature"--their interaction with and dependence on physical surroundings--to ski bums. Ski bums then draw on prior knowledge to redefine "nature," stressing its separation from humans, in order to apply it as a criterion of exclusion back toward the locals. Vacationers adopt a similar definition and use it to ally themselves with the ski bums, exclude the locals, and establish their own legitimacy. Challenging most models of cultural diffusion, the privileged ski bums and vacationers implicitly recognize the terms of distinction set by the marginalized locals, indicating that group's potential for cultural innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]