Bourdieu argues that legitimate or ‘highbrow’ cultural products depend for their appreciation on a style of consumption grounded in cultural knowledge acquired through formal education. To explore this idea, all available customer reviews of two Man Booker prize-winning novels—Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006) and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008)—were collected from the Amazon.co.uk website. Analysis of these reviews focussed on styles of cultural consumption, as implied by the relationship between the words in the reviews and the numeric ‘star ratings’ that accompany those reviews. Positive reviews resemble discourse on the same novels by what Bourdieu calls ‘professional interpreters’ or ‘professional commentator[s] on texts’ in their tendency to interpret formal features in relation to political and philosophical themes, while negative reviews instead express disappointment that these novels do not measure up to ‘middlebrow’ standards, highlighting the novels’ lack of characteristics apparently considered conducive to readerly enjoyment. Mentions of the Man Booker Prize itself were associated with negative evaluations of both novels, often featuring in expressions of confusion or anger.

布迪厄认为，合法或“粗俗”的文化产品的升值取决于通过正规教育获得的文化知识所基于的一种消费方式。为了探索这一想法，所有可用的顾客评论都收录了两本曼布克奖获奖小说-基兰·德赛（Kiran Desai）的《继承的遗产》（2006）和阿拉维德·阿迪加（Aravind Adiga）的《白老虎》。（2008）—从Amazon.co.uk网站收集。对这些评论的分析集中在文化消费的风格上，这是由评论中的单词与伴随这些评论的数字“星级”之间的关系所暗示的。积极评论类似于布迪厄所说的“专业解释者”或“专业评论家”对同一小说的论述，因为它们倾向于解释与政治和哲学主题有关的形式特征，而消极评论则对这些小说感到失望没有达到“中庸”的标准，突出了小说缺乏明显被认为有利于读者享受的特征。提到曼布克奖本身就与两部小说的负面评价有关，