The article takes up the question wether cultural sociology needs cultural quality criteria, a topic which has been discussed during the meeting of the section of cultural sociology at the German Sociology congress in Jena. This question is answered neither positively nor negatively, but is used to map, referring to the expectable and diverging answers, the current positions within the field of current cultural sociology. In that field, which has been influenced by the “cultural turn”, views that share the criteria of bourgeois culture are still coexisting with others that rely on a concept of culture based on ethnography and cross-cultural comparison. Instead of distinguishing these positions as “outdated” and “current”, following the logic of scientific progress, the article reconstructs their underlying and particular backgrounds of experience and shows how these manifest in different, not fully convertible paradigms of cultural sociology. Such distinctive and paradigm-formative backgrounds of experience come out when we focus on the diverging understandings of cultural alterity, which can be differenciated as the experience of heterogeneity (the other culture) and the experience of heteronomy (the other of culture).