Abstract
This chapter focuses on the first out of three discourses found in the data. This ‘affirmation discourse’ emphasises the importance of both traditional highbrow-oriented participation and different kinds of everyday participation. In the affirmation discourse, the idea that participating in culture is ‘good for you’ is taken seriously. Culture is attributed an unquestionable intrinsic value. It can be interpreted that the affirmation discourse still has confidence in the power of cultural participation to function as a mechanism for providing cultural capital. In the affirmation discourse, the only boundaries are drawn downwards, and there seems to be an inherent idea of adjusting to the hegemonic discourse whereby one must participate in culture. It is argued that the affirmation discourse characterises the egalitarian worldviews of high conformity.
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Prologue
When she comes to meet me on the porch of her snow-surrounded house, Alma, a 69-year-old woman who lives on a family farm in a small countryside village in the north of Finland, hugs me warmly as if we were old friends. She receives me in her traditional countryside farmhouse filled with paintings by local artists and relatives and immediately starts serving me coffee and homemade buns.
As a child, as her father was the local station master, Alma lived by the railroad (‘When I heard the sound of the train, it was like being at home’). After finishing basic education, she worked for a while in an office but soon met her future husband, a farmer. Since then, Alma worked her whole life as a farmer’s wife with plenty of family members living in the vicinity and has never complained or shunned hard work (‘It was rough, we had a hundred animals and thirty cows, and it was just the two of us – I’ve also driven the tractor when needed’). After retiring some years ago, Alma made up her mind to remain active (‘I decided that this grandma won’t stay lying in bed’) and frequently mentions that she simply cannot stay still (‘I cannot just sleep, not even on holidays’). This means that she works around the house and maintains the grounds, bakes bread for selling it in the local marketplace and mows the lawn; in addition, she has joined a volleyball team and a water aerobics group, both of which meet twice a week. Alma is extremely social—even though she lives in a small village, she sees other people regularly in different events and prides herself on her sociable attitude (‘I always meet acquaintances even if I don’t know them yet … I’m a person that might just start to talk’). Her phone keeps ringing even as I interview her. Alma also volunteers for a church social work group that brings old people together for talks and activities. She has two children who used to be active in sports associations in their youth and that now live in the capital area of Finland. She has stayed in close touch with them and her large group of grandchildren.
Alma has been very busy travelling, especially in the Nordic countries and in Finland. Her trips are mostly for relaxation and socialisation (‘I always go for treatments – massage, haircut, pedicure, manicure, everything – that has been so relaxing, and then of course, during different celebrations, one has to go around Finland seeing relatives’). Alma reads a lot, especially historical novels, and recently, she has gotten into audiobooks. She has only occasionally been to concerts of classical music and never to the opera, but she basically attends any event that is brought to the cultural centres of the closest larger towns and cities (‘We used to always book a bus and go there together with a larger group’). These events mostly include different classical music concerts and plays. Alma draws basically no symbolic boundaries towards anything or anyone except for gossip magazines which she is critical of (‘I don’t like Seiska, I have sometimes browsed it at the hairdresser’s’) and some Finnish male writers (‘…maybe it’s because he so often talks about the private parts, but well, it does not really bother me, I know how to leap over those bits’). Usually, she likes more or less everything that is introduced into her universe.
More Active than the Middle Classes?
The above presented Alma is a good example of the main elements of the ‘affirmation’ discourse. First, this discourse endorses completely normative cultural participation. Alma happily participates in whatever is brought to her at the local cultural centre and feels completely at home attending concerts of classical music or theatre performances. Second, the affirmation discourse embraces the ideal of being active and busy and maintaining lifelong activity. Alma has consciously shunned a lazy life, occupying herself with the realms of both culture, sports, popular culture and social life, with a strong emphasis on not staying at home.
We know from previous research that cultural activity and engagement in itself are distinctive (Heikkilä and Lindblom 2022; Prieur and Savage 2013; Purhonen et al. 2014; Weingartner and Rössel 2019): the fundamental division seems to run between the people who participate abundantly in culture and those who mostly abstain from it. Moreover, we know that being busy is also a sign of status distinction. As the Finnish writer Juha Itkonen has aptly put it, ‘The entire middle class runs away from death in their expensive gear, they run to stay on the fast track, they run to repel the anxiety that is after them’ (Itkonen 2009). Sociologist Hartmut Rosa speaks of a ‘social acceleration’ (Rosa 2013), whereby everyday life is conducted at an increasingly high pace due to the accelerated nature of technology and social changes, which introduces a fundamental aspect of busyness into our lives. What is important here is that this feeling of the ‘shrinking of the present’ (Rosa 2013) does not necessarily affect everyone in the same way; rather, it is an essentially socially structured perception. For instance, Oriel Sullivan notes that it is the ‘income rich and time poor’ individuals that mainly use busyness as a means of status distinction (Sullivan 2008).
This idea of busyness and activity as an ideal is strongly recognisable in the affirmation discourse. Many interviewees come from strong working-class backgrounds, and the idea of being constantly on the move is an important building block for their identities. There is ‘no need to twiddle one’s thumbs’, like Henrik, a 68-year-old pensioner bus driver puts it. Tuomo, a 77-year-old pensioner who comes from a farmer background like both Henrik and the above-described Alma, sums it up by referring to another study:
Some years ago they did a survey (…) about what was the most dangerous piece of furniture of the house, it said that a kitchen stool is something that you can easily fall from, but I personally think the living room sofa is more dangerous. If you start lazying on the sofa, that’s a problem.
The probably busiest person of the whole data is Julia, a 68-year hairdresser on pension. She seems to value activeness over everything else and has a tight regular schedule for each day of the week, including weekends:
Mondays I first have yoga at 11 o’clock, then I have my daily walk, I have to walk one hour at least four times a week. And then Tuesday is a day that I can decide myself what I do, and many times it becomes a day for skiing or something like that, also depending on the weather. If I’m tired I don’t go anywhere, but that rarely happens, and then on Wednesdays I have this gymnastics class and then in the daytime I go to this polka dance or Finnish folk dance hobby. Then on Thursday I go to the gym and then swimming, to the swimming hall I go walking. I walk for half an hour and then I do aqua jogging for half of an hour. On Friday I have stage dancing. (…) On Saturday I have a free day that I also most often use for dancing or partying somewhere. (…) On Sunday I have also yoga, another yoga in which I am in the executive committee of the association.
A younger and highly similar example is 37-year-old Sami, who is a cook at a restaurant. He talks abundantly about the fact that although his work shifts are physically very straining and that he is separated from his partner and sometimes spends time with his child, he still has the energy to do many things on his free time. For instance, he plays disc golf (‘the shorter route is a good six kilometers, and you are carrying a backpack of 20 kilograms in a mixed terrain’), makes his own cosmetic products from the beeswax that he buys online, volunteers as an administrator of a computer game, brews his own beers and is the president of his housing cooperative. The last activity typically requires especially administrative work, but Sami has also volunteered to participate in the pipeline renovation of the house, which is typically an enormous, skill-dependent operation. When asked how he manages to do everything, he downplays his own role, saying, ‘Well, I like to take on these kinds of projects’.
The ideal of activity is present even in individual profiles that otherwise are quite critical of cultural participation as such (and who we will meet in Chap. 7). For instance, Marko, a 47-year-old farmer with no formal education and with a largely hostile attitude towards traditional highbrow culture states:
RH: Do you have any moments when you are not doing anything? Kind of just lying on the sofa or…?
Marko: Well, I just don’t feel at home simply lying around. If I lay down on the sofa, I need something like a sudoku or a crossword.
Meanwhile, within the affirmation discourse there is plenty of evidence of also traditional cultural participation which is often discussed in highly passionate tones. This is the case of Eeva, a 65-year-old retired nurse who describes her relationship with reading as an obsession that prevents her from doing anything else before a certain book is finished:
Reading has always been for me kind of a passion. (…) Since I was young I’ve liked reading and have read a lot. Probably it was the mother tongue teacher at school, at middle school, who kind of opened these doors of literature. But I remember, from the times when the children were small, that I sometimes received some book for Mother’s Day, and that I read that book during Mother’s Day and over the evening, it might have been two o’clock in the morning, and I would still be lying on my back on the sofa and reading the book, I just had to finish it. (…) I still have this thing that if I go to the library and borrow books, if there is a book that… like I said, that just really captivates me, I can’t do anything before I have finished that book, even if I’m not able anymore to read it non-stop. But well, then I rest my eyes for a moment and then I read again. When I have a book at hand, all other tasks remain undone.
A similar kind of passionate yearning for highbrow-oriented legitimate culture can be found also in the realm of physical participation, as attested, for instance, by stories of Eki, a 53-year-old unemployed carpenter interviewed as part of Focus Group 5 regarding his time as an amateur musician, and Karla, a 40-year-old masseuse on maternity leave about her visits to the highly legitimate Kaustinen Folk Music Festival:
Eki: Yeah, it brings a smile to my face (…) if start dancing, and if by dancing I make other folks dance unasked, that’s so much fun. When that feeling rises… Making the feeling rise is the best thing. You don’t think, like, ‘what am I doing here’, it’s just that you manage to unite the group and you get this communal feeling that damn, this is a hell of a lot of fun.
Karla: That feeling is really so nice. There are marvellous performances, it can happen that first a live orchestra plays, then a choir sings and dancers dance these kind of folk dances (…) then there are community concerts, I was looking with my mouth open, like, ‘Is this real?’, as I thought there are only community singing events. Then there is a community concert in which you go with your instrument, they tell you what song they are playing, you have the notes there and then you just join in with your own instrument, it has all these kinds of nice things.
Highbrow-Oriented Cultural Participation in Surprising Places: Case Henrik
Henrik, 68, has agreed to talk to me in the meeting space of the main library of his town after seriously considering cancelling the interview, because he feared he would have ‘nothing to say about culture’. Henrik has lots of free time now that he is retired—he has worked long years and long hours as a traffic contractor and a bus driver, a job that has taken him all over Europe. Both his parents were farmers.
Henrik is somewhat difficult to interview because he spontaneously jumps from one conversation topic to another: he clearly has the intention of demonstrating to me the breadth of his cultural participation patterns, which are undoubtedly very varied. Although his career has been strenuous both physically and economically, he has found the time and energy to pursue his favourite leisure activity, photography, and to drive around Europe accompanying his two children—both of whom actively play classical music since a very young age—to concerts.
After retiring, Henrik has been highly active in several associations, which mostly have to do with either vehicles or his personal health condition, and has organised several events and met many people. He also volunteers in a helpline for people with problems and participates in a certain kind of local resident activism that opposes changes in his neighbourhood. Henrik also loves going to flea markets and finding rare collectors’ items: he is after certain extremely rare scale model cars as well as some poetry books that are still missing in his collection. This surprising turn leads him to speak eloquently about classical literature: he is, for instance, a deep admirer of the classical Finnish poets Aleksis Kivi and Eino Leino, and he starts reciting Leino’s poem Hymyilevä Apollo in the middle of the interview. Regarding classical cultural participation, Henrik has actively visited museums, theatres, art exhibitions and operas, mostly through his work as an organised tour bus driver but also out of interest. He regularly listens to classical music and the concerts of the Radio Symphonic Orchestra.
Henrik is a great example of the strong foothold that the Finnish working classes have in at least some traditional highbrow cultural activities and of a certain sense of ownership of legitimate culture in general. Although Henrik comes from a thoroughly working-class milieu, he does not feel particularly out of place in opera houses or theatres and skilfully navigates the cultural milieus of both bus drivers and museumgoers. In this sense, Henrik could be considered a good example of the perseverance of egalitarianism in the Finnish society. Like the working-class people interviewed by Skarpenes (2021), he feels a certain ownership of the Nordic model, clearly considers the culture of the middle or upper classes anti-hierarchical and refrains from drawing boundaries ‘towards others based on culture, education, and status’ (2021, 169).
A logical next step after discussing the ideal of activity is to talk about everyday participation. As we saw in Chap. 3, the debates over everyday participation depart from the idea that our perceptions of culture are, in general, too narrow and that different kinds of common, ordinary, local and mundane phenomena should be recognised as belonging to the sphere of culture (Back 2015; Ebrey 2016; Miles and Gibson 2016; Williams 1963/1971). In my data, there is indeed plenty of talk on different forms of everyday participation—such as meeting friends, socialising with neighbours, taking care of grandchildren, going to the pub, playing cards or puzzles, joining associations and so on. While large amounts of cultural and everyday participation often tend to go hand in hand (as we have seen in the cases of, for instance, Alma and Henrik), even the interviewees with very little traditional cultural participation engage in everyday participation, such as in the cases of 56-year-old unemployed Lasse and 34-year-old truck driver Petteri:
Lasse: I almost always join these community labour events in the yard and that kind of things, and then I hang out with the blokes in the parking lot (…) I’m not overly social anymore; at some point I was the president of the committee, and then I was a bit too social, there was actually no joy in that.
Petteri (talking about what he would typically do on a free day): Maybe I would drive around on my motorcycle, I usually always drive around a bit. Then I tinker around, I often like to tinker around in the garage and do all kinds of things, my own things. If it’s really a moment when I have nothing to do and I can do what I want, then I will definitely tinker around in the garage and maybe ride on my motorbike.
Everyday participation is typically considered to be composed of informal leisure pursuits beyond narrowly defined culture (see Miles and Gibson 2016). Moreover, everyday participation was an essential part of all the tree discourses identified (affirmation, functionality and resistance): basically all interviewees engaged in activities that could be considered everyday participation. What distinguishes the everyday participation of the affirmation discourse from all others is its heavy emphasis on the importance of being active.
Specialisations
A recurring finding in the data was that many people had enormous expertise in relatively small and specialised fields of culture. Interviewees willingly told me about sometimes extremely detailed cultural practices, such as where to buy the best vendace and how to fry it, how to differentiate between the many different subgenres of heavy metal based on their bottom melodies, how to understand the finesses of certain video games, or how to disassemble a vintage Chevrolet and put it back together again. These narratives are sometimes framed as a savvy way of saving money or as valuable skills in certain social circles, but mostly as an inherent pleasure of being intelligent and worthy. I interpret this as a certain ‘knowing mode of cultural capital’ (Prieur and Savage 2013) in which knowing something—instead of merely consuming it—becomes an important part of the appropriation of culture. Blasius and Friedrichs (2003) have argued that different kinds of practical skills, or ‘a knowledge of practical life’ (2003, 6), such as child-minding, gardening or fixing cars, could be understood as forms of cultural capital simply because, in theory, they could be converted into social or economic capital.
A good example of an enormously specialised form of cultural knowledge that is partly converted into social and economic capital comes from the 37-year-old cook Sami who has, in addition to his job and many other hobbies, started brewing different types of then fashionable beers such as IPAs, APAs and saisons, which have been largely unavailable in the pubs and bars of the eastern Finland city in which he lives. At the time of the interview, Sami even sells some batches of his beer to a local pub. It is noteworthy that he draws fine boundaries downwards towards ‘ordinary tap lager’ and takes credit for his difficult and scientific pursuit:
Maybe it started with the fact that I myself like to try different things. When I understood that the basic lager on tap is nothing special and started to make my own stuff, I learned that you really get what you want to do, you can obtain your own aromas and hops and all that. (…) It is, it’s actually a kind of a rocket science with all this stuff of growing the yeast and all that.
Another good example of highly specialised knowledge also convertible into economic capital is Marko, a farmer who lives in a small countryside village. Even though he has a highly hostile attitude towards highbrow culture, he has brought with him to the interview a photo album with pictures of his main hobby, fixing broken cars. Marko gives me a detailed account of how the process usually goes—he buys a car that someone has deemed impossible to fix, starts investigating the case, gets spare parts through his various networks in the fields (‘we borrow and sell and donate parts to each other, and help each other in renovations’) and finally restores cars to their original condition. He proudly shows photos of the processes and final results:
Yeah. Then I made here this kind of adjustment thing… (..) You put here these kinds of adjustment pieces and then you have continuously variable transmission to adjust ground clearance. You can raise or lower it. You are not allowed to do this yourself because the structures of the chassis are not allowed to be welded. Our local car inspector asked me, ‘Oh yeah, you have this regulation shaft here, did you buy it ready-made or did you do it yourself?’. I said, ‘Well what do you think’. In those times, a ready-made regulation shaft cost 1300 markkas, but with one hundred markkas you could get these adjustment pieces. It took me (…) one hour and something. So, of course, I did it, it was easy. (…) Then I sold it, a good five years ago, I sold it. (…) Everything worked. After standing there for nine years, I put the battery in place and filled the tank. The car started. Everything worked. Even the old radio started to sing.
Niche Activities as a Means of Distinction: Case Emilia
Emilia, a 21-year-old unemployed electrician, suggests meeting me at a local landmark bakery in a city in the north of Finland. Determined and witty, she is extremely willing to be interviewed and waits for me at the café well before our scheduled time, ordering tea and a piece of cake when I arrive.
After finishing compulsory education in the south of Finland, Emilia has enrolled in a vocational school to become an electrician. After graduating she moved to the north of Finland to work in a large international manufacturing company but was fired some months ago for reasons related to her agency contract worker status. She maintains contact with her old workmates and wishes that at some moment she could be hired again to the same job, which she really enjoyed.
Emilia likes to read and cook, but besides that she has very few highbrow-oriented activities. She does not claim to directly dislike them, but rather laments that there are very few occasions to go to events such as concerts in the city where she lives. Meanwhile, Emilia has several distinctive niche activities: as a teenager, she became a disco DJ after learning to handle the technology and travelled to many events with her record case to play, actively looking for new music. After getting her driver’s licence and moving to the city in which she now lives, she has become an aficionado of the local practice of cruising with cars and now possesses extreme knowledge of both the social and technical aspects of the practice. There is, for instance, an important choreography in how the cars have to circulate in the local market square and how the cars should be eventually parked when people from a certain car want to open their windows to talk with fellow cruisers. From Emilia’s group of friends, her role is usually to be the driver—she takes pride in not getting drunk and mentions with content the tradition that the passengers of the cruising car always pay the driver’s cover charges at the nightclub. Emilia’s car is the apple of her eye: she tinkers with it often and is especially knowledgeable about its sound system, spending lots of money on expensive materials such as sounding sheets and top-notch subwoofers. She is highly critical of the mass of ignorant people who do not take care to soundproof their cars and explains in meticulous detail how it should be done.
Emilia’s case is a good reminder of the fact that while traditional highbrow cultural participation might be very low, people’s lives can be filled with meaningful activities involving high levels of specialisation and knowledge, and also a large amount of micro boundaries, drawn against people not ‘in the know’. This attitude could be interpreted as a ‘technical capital’ Bourdieu speaks of (2005, 78–81), consisting of both vocational forms of education and the family inheritance of technical and practical skills.
Harnessing and putting into use these kinds of technical skills showcased above are a sign of both affirmation of the legitimacy of culture and the importance of being active, regardless of how activity is defined. In addition to being signs of a ‘technical capital’ (Bourdieu 2005, 78–81), they could be considered a certain kind of ‘artification’ or attempted legitimatisation of initially popular practices. For instance, tattoo-making has been studied from this point of view of procuring cultural legitimacy to a field of culture traditionally understood as lowbrow (Kosut 2014); in the interviewed tattoo artists’ discourses, there was intent to transform the symbolic valuation of tattooing and to introduce into the field fine art ideologies such as creativity and exclusiveness. What is apparent in my interviewees close to the affirmation discourse is their attitude towards participation in practical tasks: they emphasise the ideals of industriousness and devotion, as well as the possibility of some economic provisioning instead of, for instance, leisure or relax—reflecting here, for instance, the work of Moisio et al. (2013), who, comparing different types of DIY work, distinguished between the high-cultural-capital men who emphasised the autotherapeutic and leisurely aspect of housemaking and the low-cultural-capital men who considered themselves work-oriented ‘handymen’ with a highly regarded idea of providing for the family through labour. Finally, these (initially) working-class skills with an emphasis on a sovereign mastery of technical details can also be interpreted as displays of self-reliance, perseverance and skills of adaptation, as well as potentially handy convertibility into labour market value, in short, of a certain work ethic and certainly an attempt to create worth (Lamont 2018).
Getting There: Cultural Goodwill
Bourdieu famously coined his concept of cultural goodwill as an attitude born from the concern of the resource-low lower middle classes to hide their cultural ignorance and to show their docile attitudes and, at the same time, to distinguish themselves from the lower classes perceived as vulgar. As Bourdieu formulates it in the chapter on cultural goodwill in Distinction, ‘(O)ne of the surest indications of the recognition of legitimacy is the tendency of the most deprived respondents to disguise their ignorance or their indifference and to pay homage to the cultural legitimacy which the interviewer possesses in their eyes’ (Bourdieu 1984/1979, 318). Later he goes on to define different forms of cultural goodwill: ‘Cultural goodwill is expressed, inter alia, in a particularly frequent choice of the most unconditional testimonies of cultural docility (the choice of “well-bred” friends, a taste for “educational” or “instructive” entertainments), often combined with a sense of unworthiness (“paintings are nice but difficult”)’ (Bourdieu 1984/1979, 321).
Echoes of this kind of cultural goodwill were plentiful in the data, and they constituted a central part of the affirmation discourse. In the face of a ‘lack’ of a more codified or highbrow-oriented cultural participation from the point of view of the interviewees themselves, the core of the affirmation discourse was a lamentation of not participating in highbrow-oriented culture. Typically no specific reasons were offered; it seems that an essential part of the discourse was to simply recognise a ‘fault’ and to express interest in participating while consciously maintaining the status quo. There was also a clear hierarchy of cultural practices: the consumption of TV and the use of the internet and mobile phones was typically discussed as ‘excessive’, while reading and attending highbrow cultural events was something to be done ‘more’. A good example regarding reading comes from 28-year-old Laura, a bus driver and a single mother of a small child:
When I was a child and an adolescent I read a lot, I always received lots of books for Christmas. In some way, it’s a pity that it was left behind, I should just become more active in that field (…) I don’t find enough time for that, I would like to read, but I can honestly say that I only read at most two books per year (…) it’s regrettable. Last year we went to Greece with my kid, he knows how to swim and knew already then, there was a rather small pool, he was swimming and I was on the poolside reading a book and that was wonderful, I find that it empties the mind much better than browsing the phone. I would like to read, but I just can’t find the moment.
The 28-year-old Sebastian, who has no formal education nor job, does not participate in highbrow culture much, but he does not oppose to it in any way, on the contrary: ‘I don’t go to the theatre, but I would like to. The same goes for museums, I am interested.’ Maria, a 47-year-old nurse, is interested in almost anything that is mentioned in the interview: she would like to go to more classical music concerts or to furnish her house a little better. She would also like to retake the piano studies she started as a child and to study something new in general:
I have been dreaming that it would be nice to learn. (…) One could go somewhere still as an adult, somewhere to study. But it would mean a regular thing that you attend on a regular basis. (…) I have masses of daydreams about all kinds of hobbies that I would like to take up and learn.
A very similar case is Heidi, a 26-year-old practical nurse:
RH: What about opera?
Heidi: I would like to go but I have not kind of gotten around to doing it, I would be incredibly interested, but…
RH: What interests you especially?
Heidi: Probably it’s because I’ve never been, I don’t know how the story proceeds and how they move the story along using their own voices. So kind of, I am very curious to know how the opera, how it proceeds.
According to Bourdieu’s formulation, ‘(t)aste is an acquired disposition to “differentiate” and “appreciate”’ (Bourdieu 1984/1979, 466). In relation to Heidi’s argument above, a recurrent finding related to cultural capital is the enormous will of many interviewees to ‘learn’ more about (again, highbrow-oriented) cultural participation. In general, the affirmation discourse is laden with different kinds of attempts to adopt to ‘new’ or ‘difficult’ kinds of cultural practices which are typically discussed in an excited and docile manner. A good example is 39-year-old Ester who left her studies at the university after getting married to a medical doctor and who has since then worked in a local store. Throughout the interview, Ester describes how profoundly her husband has moulded her cultural practices regarding, for instance, music (the husband has introduced her to new genres and takes care of the children’s musical education), books (the husband’s father provides books), visual arts (the husband’s brother is an artist) and television (the husband lightly criticises the reality shows that Ester and the children watch). Ester does recognise that the differences in their cultural practices stem from inequal social positions (‘one thing is that Hannu has read his whole life, we have pretty different starting points, while we were rooting out carrots [laughs] he was reading and playing the oboe’). These differences are perhaps best crystallised in Ester’s account of eating, in which she portrays herself as a picky and difficult person and the husband, along with the children, as the ones doing the right things:
RH: Any foods you hate?
Ester: Pretty many. I have some limitations with food (laughs) kind of, when I was a child, we had potatoes and gravy, that kind of basic, countryside… And then Hannu is like, ‘Don’t you have the courage to try?’ (…) Take for instance roe, they say that there is nothing better than roe; well, if it looks like it does [laughs] unfortunately I just cannot eat it. So, regarding bravery, I am the loser of the family (…) I’m like, maybe I could practice a bit. It’s just such a strong feeling, I’m afraid that it’s like… But these guys, Hannu and the children, they even taste escargots and munch wasabi nuts straight from the pack. They are like that, open-minded.
Aiming to Understand the Highbrow Sphere: Case Minna
I recruit the 38-year-old Minna through a Facebook group of family mothers, and we meet at a café of a big shopping mall by one of the ring roads of Helsinki. She refuses to have anything I offer from the café menu because she says she is on a strict diet.
Minna is an extremely talkative interviewee and is, in fact, so enthusiastic about the interview that she wants me to interview her machine operator husband as well. Minna willingly shares her life story with me: after finishing compulsory education, she quit high school and started working in different kinds of manual jobs: supermarkets, storehouses and so on. She is currently on parental leave from her factory work in a large company that forces her to be in contact with employees much higher in the hierarchy; the often-demeaning attitude of the personnel above her annoys Minna, and recently she has started dreaming of studying something else to get a different job.
Despite the many background factors predicting low cultural participation, Minna is rather active: she has had many hobbies as a child (dancing and ice skating), and currently she is busy with, for instance, American vintage cars (she and her husband often dress up, prepare their 1950s’ vehicle and meet other enthusiasts) and with taking her child to different activities (music, painting and swimming). In addition, she loves museums, rock concerts and fairs. What is interesting in Minna’s story is that although she does not regularly attend the most highbrow forms of cultural participation, such as opera or ballet, she would really like to—in fact, she and her husband have actively tried to attend such events in order to understand more about them. Minna’s explanation is worth quoting at length:
I told my husband that in the name of general education: should we go once to the ballet and once to the opera? We went to the ballet… It was many years ago, but we dressed nicely and got ourselves a box and all that and well, my husband fell asleep and I tried, I really tried, I had like opened all of my senses to the ballet, but I could not get a grip of it. (…RH: What was it, why couldn’t you get a grip?) I don’t understand. It just did not address me. They danced so nicely, but… I could not get a hold of it, I was as open as I could, I concentrated, I listened, I really sensitised myself to the performance, but it was not my thing at all. I could not get a grip of it at all.
Minna’s attitude reflects well that participating in (highbrow) culture is not just a question of will or the right attitude: it is also a question of long-term exposure, familiarity and education, in short, of an embodied capacity to extract meaning or pleasure from cultural participation. Her case is a good example of what Bourdieu meant when referring to the cultural disposition of being able to decipher certain forms of culture: ‘Since the information presented by the works exhibited exceeds the deciphering capacities of the beholder, he perceives them as devoid of signification – or, to be more precise, of structuration and organization – because he cannot “decode” them, i.e. reduce them to an intelligible form’ (Bourdieu 1993, 217). Bourdieu continues that the satisfaction extracted from certain cultural practices is attached to the ‘right’ kind of cultural disposition and remains ‘only accessible to those who are disposed to appropriate them because they attribute a value to them’ (1993, 227).
Another aspect of the presence of cultural goodwill in the data and in the affirmation discourse was the emphasis that many interviewees placed on their children ‘inheriting’ desirable patterns of cultural practices. We know from the previous chapters that the intergenerational transmission of cultural practices works in such a way that highly educated parents’ children participate in culture the most (van Hek and Kraaykamp 2013; Kallunki and Purhonen 2017). What is more, different ‘enrichment activities’ for children constitute an important part of nudging children into a middle-class context (Lareau 2011; Vincent and Ball 2007). These many burdens of ensuring that a child is comfortable in middle-class settings were extremely noticeable in the interviews. Linda, a 30-year-old student on maternity leave (who is herself very active both regarding both highbrow-oriented cultural participation and everyday participation), coins this desire well as striving for ‘naturalness’:
(Speaking of museums): …I think it’s anyway a good habit that you know how to visit museums and understand things and in that way gather a bit of information on history. I try to educate in a way that [my child] would know how to… Or that this kind of environment would feel natural even when he grows up.
A similar urge to encourage the cultural participation of children is found also in the most deprivileged social strata of the interviews. For instance, Eeva, the retired nurse cited earlier in this chapter, speaks directly of ‘nudging’ her two children towards musical hobbies (an effort that proved to be successful, as both children went through prestigious musical academies). The 43-year-old Kimmo, who is simultaneously unemployed, on disability pension and going through a process of debt adjustment, describes taking his young child to the musical conservatory as his main priority, discussing the possible future gains of the hobby in what can be interpreted as a middle-class terminology:
I have this outlook that it kind of develops social skills and all kinds of other skills beyond just the playing… It boosts your self-esteem as it now includes live performances and that kind of stuff. So not only for playing the instrument… at least that’s my outlook.
In addition to music, reading was again mentioned as an important asset for the children—children ‘should’ be taken to libraries and read aloud to, and later they should be ‘forced’ to read. For instance, Aleksi, a 29-year-old sports instructor on parental leave, has adopted a quasi-technical attitude towards his toddler’s reading habits; he takes the child to the library once a week to spend two or three hours and reads to him aloud (‘even two and a half hours per day’). A very similar attitude was exhibited by many (especially female) interviewees who lamented that their small children read books or visited the library too seldom:
Minna (talking about library visits): Too seldom, we should go more. I think the boy has never visited the library even if (…) we have it within just a couple of kilometers. We should do it, I just haven’t gotten around to doing it. Even if we read a lot as we have many children’s books, we read them but… (…) I feel now as if I am, not a bad mother or anything, but I mean that I have not taken my child to the library, so what the hell, should I do it? But that’s it, I would like to visit it more (Minna, 38, manual worker)
Laura (talking about her son reading): …I should encourage him that ‘Hey, choose yourself any book’, I don’t mean a hundred-page book, something small, and ‘Now you will read this book during this week’, you know, something like that, I do argue that in the present-day world these mobile phones (…) I should encourage my own boy to do that, like ‘Hey, read’. Probably our brain works differently when we read.
(Laura, 28, bus driver)
In the same style but in a different direction, significant others, such as spouses and other family members, have often altered the interviewees’ cultural participation practices in significant ways; in the affirmation discourse, this is always discussed as an exciting and positive opportunity that broadens one’s horizons, for instance, 34-year-old truck driver Petteri, who has become an avid reader thanks to the books that his cousin provides him, and the 47-year-old nurse Maria, whose adult children have sparked her interest in theatre and musicals and who now loves different live shows: ‘My daughter took me to London to see Les Misérables. That was such an experience that I think nothing will ever thrill me in the same way’. Besides Ester, whom we know from above, the best example of a higher-educated spouse’s effects regarding an increase in a partner’s cultural participation (and knowledge) comes from Aleksi, a 29-year-old sports instructor who is on parental leave—and whose wife has tertiary education. With a genuine smile, Aleksi tells me that his wife has set specific targets to make him participate more in culture. For instance, when they go on trips, they have made an interesting agreement:
Me and my spouse actually have this kind of deal regarding museums as we travel a lot, for instance now we just came home from Prague: we do one museum and then one bar. That makes one museum, one beer, one museum, one beer [laughs]. I’m not a kind of museum person myself, I like this kind of natural history museums and museums that have these kinds of interactive exhibitions. I’ve never been a museum visitor who would have the energy to read any texts. Somehow, I willingly join, I have nothing against it, but if I got to choose, I would not choose going to a museum.
We have seen that the cultural goodwill firmly present in the affirmation discourse is composed of surprisingly similar elements than Bourdieu’s theory of cultural goodwill: it includes an aspiration to accept and adapt to the perceived upper-class cultural practices (classical music, ballet, museums and so on). Many interviewees emphasised their positive attitude towards highbrow-oriented cultural participation and stressed their willingness to learn and to make their possible children acquainted to it. This resonates with Bourdieu’s original idea that ‘the different social classes differ not so much in the extent to which they acknowledge culture as in the extent to which they know it’ (Bourdieu 1984/1979, 318).
Cautious Downward Boundaries
So far, the affirmation discourse has involved mainly positive and docile tones: the consecration of cultural participation as something with intrinsic value, something that ‘should’ be done. This attitude is further reflected in the cautious downward boundaries that are an essential part of the affirmation discourse. The objects of these boundaries are the usual suspects of ‘bad taste’—in other words, entertainment-oriented or extremely commercial television programmes and different kinds of tabloids and scandal newspapers, all associated with lower-class tastes both in the public imaginary and according to existing research (Purhonen et al. 2014; Taylor 2016).
In the affirmation discourse, television in general is criticised as a distraction from more meaningful forms of cultural participation, with most people stating that they watch ‘all too much’. As 30-year-old student Linda coins it: ‘We barely watch TV (…) what somehow disgusts me about TV is that it’s so horribly time-consuming’. When considering in more detail why television is so bad, many interviewees mention particular genres such as comedy (something that ‘comes with the laughs on’, as 59-year-old pensioner Hely puts it) and reality television shows (the truck driver Petteri, 34, is horrified that his wife watches Temptation Island: ‘I cannot understand the idea, I don’t get it. I just don’t understand’).
In some of the critical accounts of television, strong moral boundaries are drawn. The discourses surrounding them remind of the middle-class voices found in the study by Skeggs et al. (2008) that took critical distance to reality television and its ‘inauthentic’ working-class participants. A good example is the discussion in the Focus Group 3 with a retired couple with vocational school education and their adult daughter, a childminder on parental leave:
Malla: My most hated thing are these reality TV shows, whatever dating things they put, paradise islands and hotels and whatever… I never watch them.
RH: What feels repulsive about them?
Malla: Nah, they are in some way so artificial and…
Esko: Yes, they fake it.
Malla: …..yes, it’s a kind of a trivial nonsense, nah, somehow it does not amuse me at all.
Elina: It’s not real in any way.
(…)
Malla: These cooking programmes in particular are so horrible, I’m not interested.
Esko: Some Australian MasterChef, you’re like, ’What the hell’.
Malla: Who is interested in someone that fries a steak there? No, those programmes are never watched in our house. Neither these kinds of Emmerdale and The Bold and the Beautiful… we don’t watch these kinds of soap operas.
A similar but edgier opinion is given by Marko, a farmer with no formal education:
Marko (on bad TV programmes): Nowadays you get at least ten channels all day long, and most of it is pure shit that you can’t even watch. (…) These soap operas are something that I can’t be bothered to watch. The bold and the beautiful and the fat and the ugly and whatever there is.
Another genre treated in the affirmation discourse with nearly the same contempt as television and discussed through downward boundaries involved tabloids and scandal newspapers, sometimes also different light literature genres which were condemned as ‘useless rubbish’. ‘I am not interested in these kinds of nonsense books – I don’t know that literary genre but I can guess more or less what it is about’, says Timo, 51-year-old farmer from Focus Group 9. Regarding gossip magazines, the tip of iceberg for drawing boundaries is found in their morally dubious character:
I don’t understand its stories [laughs], they are kind of… No, no, that’s not my kind of magazine. (…) All this kind of ‘This celebrity did this and this celebrity did that’, I find it unnecessary.
(Kaisa, 54, ward domestic)
RH: What annoys you about it [gossip magazine Seitsemän päivää, or Seven days])?
Sami: Mostly the news. It’s not valid information in any way. If I want to read fictive stuff, I will get myself a book based on that genre. If I want to read articles from the newspaper, I would like them to have some kind of truth to them. I won’t accept them even as humour (Sami, 37, cook)
We have earlier discussed that the affirmation discourse includes a strong ideal of activity: participating in culture, or expressing a willingness to participate, is considered the inherently right thing to do. In the affirmation discourse, this is expressed almost like a norm, which, in turn, offers the opportunity to draw boundaries against inactive people and to consider them lazy, very much as in the discursive subject identity that Stevenson found to be characteristic in the top-down blaming of non-participants as deviant (Stevenson 2019). There were echoes of this same idea throughout the data: many men described their houses or cars as projects requiring an ‘endless’ amount of work, whereas many women concretely drew boundaries against people who did not do anything. Good examples about the distinctive importance attributed to remaining active come from farmer’s wife Salla, 43, and the student Linda, 30:
I don’t know about holidays in the sun… Just lying under the sun, well, we are not really the kind of people that just lie on the beach.
A person has to have hobbies! If there are people who never go anywhere, I’m like, what are you doing?
It appears as if the downward boundaries drawn in the affirmation discourse are tied, apart from representing an orientation of cultural goodwill, into a vague idea of middle-class respectability (Skeggs 2005): being respectable, in the mindset of these interviewees, entails adhering to the norms of appreciating and valuing highbrow-oriented cultural participation (though not necessarily participating in it) and maintaining a certain activeness in life but while shunning obvious lowbrow practices, such as watching lowbrow television.
Conclusion: Everyday Cultural Goodwill?
We have seen that the affirmation discourse is, in fact, a discourse of activity. When observed at the level of participation practices, peoples’ accounts reveal that there is plenty of both traditional highbrow-oriented participation and different kinds of everyday participation. This seems to echo the scholarly finding that active participation in culture is not necessarily differentiated (only) through ‘highbrow’ and ‘everyday’ modes of participation, but that it is at least partly a question of the same people participating in both highbrow and different kinds of more mundane forms of culture (Heikkilä and Lindblom 2022).
In the affirmation discourse, the idea that participating in culture is ‘good for you’ is taken very seriously. Culture is attributed to an unquestionable intrinsic value: it is largely thought that participating in culture will bring about well-being and social integration (see Milling 2019). It could be interpreted that the affirmation discourse still has confidence in the power of cultural participation to function as a mechanism for providing cultural capital (Lamont and Lareau 1988).
In the affirmation discourse, the only boundaries drawn are drawn downwards. They basically only have aesthetic content and touch upon the most classical items of popular lowbrow taste, such as reality television, the yellow press and so on (cf. Skeggs et al. 2008). These few careful moral downward boundaries are directed against ‘laziness’ or people ‘not doing anything’; in other words, in the affirmation discourse, there seems to be an inherent idea of adjusting to the hegemonic discourse whereby one must participate in culture.
The affirmation discourse is marked by significant affinity, excitement, favourableness and positivity towards cultural participation: a certain ‘reflexive appropriation’ ‘in a spirit of openness’ (Bennett et al. 2009, 194). In other words, this discourse reflects in many ways many middle-class values and ideals—a ‘desire to pass as middle class’ (Skeggs 1997, 91). Bourdieu himself argued that the cultural goodwill project of the (lower) middle classes is doomed to fail due to the misrecognition of cultural products as ‘higher’ than they actually are—this is why people would accept ‘“sparkling white wine” for champagne, imitation leather for real leather, reproductions for paintings’ and so on (Bourdieu 1984/1979, 386). In the case of the affirmation discourse, instead of the cultural goodwill coined by Bourdieu, we could perhaps speak of an ‘everyday cultural goodwill’—the affirmation discourse approaches general activity, made up of both highbrow-oriented and everyday participation, as a token of their compliant and submissive attitudes, as well as a means of distinguishing oneself from the groups perceived as vulgar and located lower on the social ladder, not only due to their lowbrow cultural practices but also because of a deplorable and non-distinctive ‘laziness’, a logical opposition to the vigorous and perky self-image offered by the affirmation discourse.
How does all this translate into an egalitarian context such as Finland? De Keere (2020) has argued that when moral positions are studied as both class and status markers and endeavours to gain worth, egalitarianism is actually found in the area of low overall resources and an emphasis on cultural (instead of economic) capital. In this sense, the affirmation discourse thoroughly characterises the egalitarian worldviews of conformity and ideals of high collective interference. It could be argued that it is a certain sign of egalitarianism that people from rather unprivileged backgrounds so strongly take ‘ownership’ of highbrow-oriented cultural participation, feel at ease reading books or visiting theatres and museums, and in general consider themselves able and willing to participate in culture, even if, in the end, they would not do so. We have also seen couples with diverging ‘cultural baggage’, which was seen not as a source of conflict but rather as a challenge with a solution. However, this is not the whole story considering the data involving unprivileged people and groups. The next empirical chapters will put these findings into context.
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Heikkilä, R. (2022). Affirmation. In: Understanding Cultural Non-Participation in an Egalitarian Context. Palgrave Studies in Cultural Participation . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18865-7_5
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