This article looks at hospitality practices in the process of recreating and modifying social structure. The author seeks the general regularities and behavioral patterns that appear when people visit others and are visited, as well as how they speak of these visits, or, in Pierre Bourdieu’s language, the principles that organize practices that are part of the class habitus. For the purposes of the analysis, two comparative groups were selected: people with the highest and lowest levels of economic, social, and cultural capital. The analysis allowed several conclusions to be drawn. First, in addition to the class factor, the age or generational factor should be taken into account as it has proven to be relevant in terms of the diversity of practices. Second, the research showed that several of the practices studied were not differentiated between the groups; they turned out to be intense in the case of people with high and low levels of capital. Such patterns involved informality and freedom, the striving for agreement and group solidarity, and an aversion to aesthetics and decoration. Third, there were sometimes differentiating nuances—the general principle could be the same, but the justification or motivation behind it was different. For people with a high level of both types of capital, naturalness/honesty was an important justification and was contrasted to falsehood, artificiality, and pretentiousness. This justification seemed to be a meta-principle that permeated many other patterns of behavior.

This article looks at hospitality practices in the process of recreating and modifying social structure. The author seeks the general regularities and behavioral patterns that appear when people visit others and are visited, as well as how they speak of these visits, or, in Pierre Bourdieu’s language, the principles that organize practices that are part of the class habitus. For the purposes of the analysis, two comparative groups were selected: people with the highest and lowest levels of economic, social, and cultural capital. The analysis allowed several conclusions to be drawn. First, in addition to the class factor, the age or generational factor should be taken into account as it has proven to be relevant in terms of the diversity of practices. Second, the research showed that several of the practices studied were not differentiated between the groups; they turned out to be intense in the case of people with high and low levels of capital. Such patterns involved informality and freedom, the striving for agreement and group solidarity, and an aversion to aesthetics and decoration. Third, there were sometimes differentiating nuances—the general principle could be the same, but the justification or motivation behind it was different. For people with a high level of both types of capital, naturalness/honesty was an important justification and was contrasted to falsehood, artificiality, and pretentiousness. This justification seemed to be a meta-principle that permeated many other patterns of behavior.

After an introduction (§1), all the Ugaritic terms for occupations, professions and social classes are set out in a classified list together with their cognates in other Semitic languages and their equivalents in Afro-Asiatic, Indo-European and other language groups (§2). There are also sections on composite expressions (§3) proper nouns (§§4–5) and both syllabic Ugaritic and Ugaritian Akkadian terms in these categories (§6). A table sets out the results (§7), with statistics for distribution (§8) and language (§9) and finally there are some conclusions (§10).

One of the key issues in contemporary urban studies is to consider the city from the perspective of culture and consumption, which are treated as new drivers of urban development and economic prosperity, the essence of urban ways of life, and arenas for the implementation of urban policies. In a consumer society, cities become important nodes where collective and individual consumption takes place on a massive scale. The urban system organizes capabilities and provides the resources for consumption, thus facilitating various kinds of lifestyles. As a result, the urban space operates as an arena of competition, where different consumer orientations and social categories strive physically and symbolically to occupy ground, produce meanings, and create belonging in the spaces and places that constitute the city. In applying Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of a “social field,” the aim of the article is to show how the space of social positions corresponds to the space of cultural practices. Drawing on the study of cultural and leisure activities in Wrocław, four general categories of urban residents are revealed and characterized by their distinct positions in different dimensions of the social space. The analysis also points to social capital (social networks) as an efficient new principle of cultural differentiation. The paper closes with the author’s concluding remarks and guidelines for further research.

This article examines Henryk Sienkiewicz’s proto-racist distinction between the gentry and the commoners in his novel With Fire and Sword (1883–1884). This division, which is believed to be part of the divine world order, credits the commoners with an inferior humanity. It is founded on a set of essentialist beliefs – that social class is inherited, that ‘noble blood’ confers superiority, and that physiognomy bespeaks high birth (you can tell a noblemen or noblewoman by their physical appearance). As the article claims, Sienkiewicz allows no room for a voice questioning those beliefs, let alone exposing their class-bound arbitrariness.