Transnational connections: The meaning of global culture in the tastes of Brazilian elites

•Integrates work on cultural capital with globalization literature.•Content analysis examines elite Brazilian taste culture.•Elite taste culture in Brazil valorizes commonality between the US, Western Europe and Brazil.•Both traditional high culture and popular culture are valorized.•Articles assume readers’ prior familiarity with non-Brazilian locations and cultural objects.

This manuscript integrates work on cultural taste and inequality with literature on globalization to explain how objects of global culture become markers of elite cultural taste in Brazil. A content analysis of a culture magazine oriented toward Brazilian elites shows that elite culture in Brazil integrates popular and highbrow objects from the United States and Western Europe with limited popular genres from Brazilian culture. A dominant interpretive frame asserted similarity (rather than social distance or exoticism) between Brazilian lifestyles and non-Brazilian culture by drawing on a white, wealthy disposition that relies on prior familiarity with non-Brazilian culture and places.