Keywords

Prologue

Maarit, 37, lives alone in a studio in a laid-back, diverse and heavily gentrified urban area of Helsinki. We meet at a seaside café, and Maarit orders a piece of raw cake. Maarit is a willing and reflexive interviewee who laughs a lot at her own cultural practices.

After finishing high school, Maarit first worked abroad as an au pair for some years. After returning to Finland, she worked for several years in a warehouse while trying to make it into the polytechnic university and the university, but as those doors never opened for her, she studied to become a practical nurse. She has now started to study physiotherapy at a polytechnic university outside of Helsinki and works some hours every week as a personal assistant.

Maarit’s free time is characterised by activities such as yoga, hydrospinning and going to concerts (mostly of different kinds of spiritual artists, but occasionally even rap). Although she very little money, Maarit sees it as a conscious choice that she left the well-paid warehouse job and settled for a life with less money but more quality (‘Now that I consciously work very little, I’ve had very little money to have holidays or travel anywhere’). Maarit is extremely social both with family and friends—she tells an anecdote about becoming good friends with a neighbour after losing the key to her flat when wearing only a bathrobe in her staircase. Currently, studying and working have made her time very scarce, so she also needs winding down (‘I need lots of time to load my batteries’). On many occasions, Maarit speaks of ‘resetting herself to zero’: she likes to do things that require minimum effort and that relax her. A good example is that she reads a lot, but admits mostly reading the same books over and over again, namely, the Harry Potter series and Jane Austen’s works, which she calls ‘comfort reading’ (‘I know beforehand how it is, it’s so relaxing because I don’t have to even concentrate when I read’). After occasionally going outside of a certain emotional safe space, for instance, when trying to read author Sofi Oksanen’s prize-winning novel Purge on the Soviet occupation of Estonia, Maarit came to the conclusion that she does not want to force herself beyond her comfort zone (‘I had to leave it unfinished, because it was so disturbing, I felt so bad … It might be a book that everyone should read, but I don’t have to… I consciously don’t want to cause myself that’).

Maarit describes her whole cultural practices as being traversed by a demand for easy choices and feelgood (‘I am this kind of instant gratification kind of person. So, I guess that affects my choices’). For instance, when listening to music, Maarit mostly chooses things that fit her mood (‘I think that with the help of music you can… for instance, dismantle aggressivity; if for some reason you feel aggressive, then you listen to aggressive music. But mostly I like to use music in a way that I soften the feeling by listening to music that makes you feel good, for instance something really sunny… That inevitably makes you smile’). When she cannot sleep, she calms herself down with kundalini music and stresses the importance of not being able to follow the lyrics: ‘The lyrics are in a language that I don’t understand, which relaxes me’.

The few boundaries Maarit draws are directed downwards towards things such as horror movies and violence, which make her feel bad, reality television (‘I think they are a bit of empty entertainment that stem from other peoples’ stupidities’) and the yellow press (‘I hate clickbait headlines’). She conceives them all as not fitting her—that is, someone else might find them interesting or useful.

Maarit’s lifestyle is probably a very typical example of a young and urban cultural practices palette: very little highbrow-oriented participation, some popular and everyday participation and, in general, a highly open-minded and tolerant attitude towards others’ cultural practices. What makes her case a good introduction to the functionality discourse is that she speaks of all of her cultural participation in a self-referential manner: she consumes things that makes her feel good and lift her mood as needed. This is a way of breaking free from the bonds of cultural capital—in short, of making cultural participation a question of functionality.

Escapes from Reality

Maarit’s case above is a good example of the functionality discourse, first of all because cultural participation (or the ‘lack’ of it) is not presented as a factor that could enable distinction or the accumulation of cultural capital and, second, because functionality takes place in the interviews typically as an emphasis on individuality. In other words, cultural participation is not a game that is played on a common field, but an individual process in which certain items are cherry-picked for oneself in order to cater to some specific need or material condition. Different from the affirmation discourse, in which the importance of cultural participation was considered to have intrinsic value, in the functionality discourse the material side of cultural participation is always present. Most typically it has to do with the difficult integration of cultural participation and work. The finding of Miles and Sullivan (2012) that shift workers are typically shut out from cultural participation is recurrent in my data: many interviewees with difficult working hours found themselves permanently tired and exhausted, due to both physically strenuous work and family obligations. For instance, Mimosa, a 37-year-old cleaner who only works night shifts, is permanently so tired that after going to the gym and having a shower in the morning after her shift is over, she is only able to rest:

I rest, I listen to music, if my boyfriend is not home, I enjoy the feeling of silence around me. Sometimes I have days in which I only want to be in that bubble of silence, I won’t turn anything on, not even the television.

A highly similar case is that of 54-year-old ward domestic Kaisa, who has all the potential to be a heavy user of culture (‘I’m an avid reader, I’m a large-scale consumer of the library, and also I go the cultural house for concerts’): she admits being so tired that she is not able to do much during the weekends:

Now I am dreaming of starting a job alternation leave at the end of the year. I have been asking for permission and I have been conceded a leave, they have found someone to cover for me. Now that I am beginning to feel my age, I want to do something that I really wish, because weekends just go by with me feeling like… Nowadays, I get really tired at work because it’s all the time this kind of physical lifting and so on. So now I have this dream. Of course I have enough free time, evenings and so on, but if you are tired, you just don’t have the energy.

What links this permanent exhaustion of the unprivileged groups to the functionality discourse is their presentation of cultural participation as an alternative or as an escape from the tedious routine and the hardships of everyday life. For instance, Minna, the 38-year-old manual worker we met in the previous chapter, is permanently dreaming of going away to a hotel just to be in peace for a while. She thoroughly explains why she loves reality television so much: for her, it represents a means of getting away from her own problems for a while. A very similar account, perhaps more from a male perspective, is provided by the 29-year-old Aleksi, a sport instructor on parental leave:

Minna: Temptation Island is on today. I like it because when I look at those nonsense series I can relax completely. I forget my own worries, I just live in it completely, I kind of live with those people. It’s so funny, sometimes it bugs you; if people start to fight in one of those series, I get annoyed. (…) It’s my thing, I watch it for one hour or one and a half hours or whatever each programme takes… that’s a way for me to relax completely. It’s nice.

Aleksi: You put kind of a series or movie on the television, and as I’m interested in rums, I poor myself a drink to accompany, and some nice evening snack, then you just sit and lie on the sofa and reset yourself to zero and allow your brain to be completely empty, doing nothing. Somehow I’ve always been a person who is really active and has many different hobbies, so in some way I’ve learned to notice it in myself that sometimes I have to reset myself to zero, reset my brain so it does not get overloaded.

Finding Shelter from the Everyday: Case Iina

Iina is a 45-year-old retail dealer in a small town in the north of Finland. She has invited me to the back room of her shop to do the interview and is a willing interviewee.

Iina has had a vivid educational and professional path: she is a high school dropout (‘I was kind of a rough adolescent, one day I just decided that I’ve had enough and will break even’) who left home early, worked at a restaurant, studied restauration at a polytechnic, worked at a farm after marrying a farmer (‘Then I moved to the backwoods to become a farmer’s wife… for fifteen years I was milking cows [laughs]’) and, after divorcing, worked in network marketing and later decided to establish her own shop. This has given Iina a certain amount of freedom: although she works a lot, she has hired some employees and can go on vacation from time to time. At the moment of the interview, she had just spent one month in Vietnam with a friend. After her divorce, she has formed a reconstituted family with her current husband who works as a guard.

Iina is very sporty and goes to the gym (‘four times a week, also I try to do two or three aerobic workouts’). In addition, she knits a lot (‘absolutely everything, from jumpers to socks’). She listens to music all the time, mostly nineties pop (‘I listen to music whenever possible, and I like to listen to it alone, you know, with earbuds in my ears. At the gym I get to be in peace as I listen to music… I listen to music in the car and at home mostly to Spotify. That allows me to listen to the exact music I want’). Other than that, Iina has very few activities outside of work: she used to be active in associations, but has left this activity behind. The only newspaper she follows is Fit, a magazine concentrating on sports and well-being.

When discussing cultural items that she does not like, Iina seems to discover the axis of her cultural practices: she distances herself from fiction deemed too realistic, documentaries and so on, because she demands a full immersion, something that helps forget daily worries and suffering: ‘And if we speak of books and TV programmes and this kind of stuff, I can’t take it if it’s based on reality, that sucks. It needs to have something that helps you escape this ordinary misery [laughs]’. During her recent trip to Vietnam, she saw a documentary on the Nazis, which helped her crystallise what, according to her, was wrong with documentaries: ‘They are always somehow sad. Documentaries are always kind of, you know, they make you cry. On my trip I watched a documentary on the Nazis and concentration camps, it was quite interesting anyway… Maybe the thing was to see how crazy those people actually were. How was it possible that they were brainwashed to do that?’ Iina reads relatively little, but mentions, for instance, Dan Brown as a writer she likes, for the same reason: ‘I like Dan Brown, he is able to bind the fiction so well into the existing framework… You get this feeling that it would be actually true even if it’s not. It is kind of comforting that it is not true’.

Iina embodies well the spirit of the functionality discourse; she is highly concerned with what fits her personally rather than what counts as good or bad taste or desirable or vulgar cultural practices. Iina’s attitude could perhaps be best understood as an example of cultural practices that have only superficial ties to structural factors, such as class, and are presented as personal and individualistic (Bauman 1991; Featherstone 1991).

The approach to cultural participation as ‘escapes from reality’ that was shared by many interviewees can be put into context through understanding the role of entertainment in cultural participation. Levine (1988) has written that before the nineteenth century, both upper and lower classes shared a similar repertoire of available cultural items. During the nineteenth century, the elites managed to distinguish their cultural practices as ‘higher’ than those of the ‘masses’, which led to the ‘sacralization of culture’ (Levine 1988, 83), the process of separating high culture from entertainment. The functionality discourse involves a heavy emphasis on entertainment-oriented cultural participation, and it is framed around a conscious choice of a perfect fit and counterpoint for an active yet rough working life.

Practicality

In the functionality discourse, one interesting phenomenon is the inclusion of sports in the sphere of cultural participation. Sport is typically motivated as a practical alternative for highbrow-oriented participation—in most of the functionality discourse, sports and physical exercise are something that one does ‘of course’ and teaches the children to do, in a very similar way to how traditional culture was spoken about in the affirmation discourse. For instance, truck driver Petteri, 34, emphasises the value of teaching the children to do sports and explains that ‘indeed we have gone skating and this kind of thing regularly, we have practiced skiing regularly’.

Although there is large variation regarding the choice of sport, practising sports has become a middle-class activity rather than a pastime of the lower-status groups, also in Finland (Kahma 2012), and the interviewees seemed to sense that mentioning being physically active would be interpreted as something positive in the interviews. In some cases, it was a shorthand for having and demonstrating resources or worth, especially in small towns with limited highbrow-oriented offerings. In some cases, practising sports through the rough seas is presented as something heroic:

Even if it was 20 degrees minus Celsius we would go to the field to play ice bandy. There were no dressing rooms. You would put your skates on in the snow, and off you went.

(Jarmo, 67, retired)

Sports seemed in general to provide a means of showing off capitals among the interviewees: in a milieu of popular and mundane cultural practices that the interviewees probably recognised as de-legitimised by the classes above them in the hierarchy (see Skeggs and Loveday 2012), practising sports was linked in the interviews to values such as perseverance, activity and self-maintenance, something many interviewees saw as a viable alternatives to simply lying around or ‘staring at too many screens’. For instance, Karla, a 40-year-old masseuse on maternity leave living in a small village in the north of Finland, has very few possibilities for traditional cultural participation due to time and location restraints, at least, but she seems to compensate for this lack with a sporty attitude that resembles multitasking:

Karla: I do as versatile sports as I can (…) Well we do a little bit of gymnastics on the floor, and then I do pram jogging, which makes me leave the house. The baby sleeps really well outside, so I purposely do a longer jog to get more oxygen. When there was less snow in the autumn, I did circuit training and checked on the baby, who was sleeping outside. If she would wake up, I would grab the pram and go jogging, and then I would continue my exercise outdoors.

The interviews include many references to the normative ideal about the many ‘benefits’ of cultural participation. Most interviewees recognise the positive characteristics associated with highbrow-oriented cultural participation: they mention that they would like to listen more to classical music or to do more sports because it supposedly ‘relaxes you’. However, in the functionality discourse, the idea is to use cultural participation in an instrumental way for direct pleasure or fun or to get into the right kind of mood. Listening to music, in general, seems to be the one of the main outlets of the functionality of cultural participation:

If you need a kind of boost – for instance, when you go jogging – you can play something, or if you want something relaxing, you can put one of those, I guess they call it motivational music or whatever. I’ve listened to music since I was a kid (…) Pink Floyd and this kind of thing (…) Queen and Moody Blues and so on, I’ve grown up with that.

(Anniina, 39, unemployed salesperson)

Jarkko: For me, music has always been a way of dealing with feelings – for instance, when I was a teenager. I listened to heavy music, if I would listen to those songs now I would be like, Oh my god [laughs]. It’s good music, but it’s kind of hard to listen to, because of course it’s connected to those specific teenage feelings, so in a way, I don’t want to feel them again, in a way I cannot listen to it. I kind of always connect music to a specific state of mind, that’s how it is.

Milla: And of course, if I start to vacuum clean, I will put some music on.

(Focus Group 4: Jarkko, 27, engineer, and Milla, 26, student at a vocational school)

In some way, music has been, for me, since the teenage years, a kind of way of relaxing or working through feelings – for instance, when I do sports, I put my earphones on my ears before an important match and listen carefully to certain songs. At home, if I’m stressed or annoyed, I listen to a certain kind of music, or if I have the feeling that I just want to enjoy the moment and listen to something good, I just lie on the floor and stare at the ceiling and listen to some specific songs.

(Aleksi, 29, sports instructor on parental leave)

One of the most concrete tokens of functionality was in this discourse related to money. In general, most of my interviewees lamented their poor economic situation—which was only logical given their background profiles. Although using the lack of money as a reason not to participate was more common in the affirmation discourse, the functionality discourse drew strongly on an idea of consuming culture in clever and crafty ways—making intelligent choices while also saving money and, in this way, demonstrating ‘worth’ in a scenario of scarcity. The Focus Group 5 with unemployed men was a clear demonstration of people’s ability to adapt their cultural practices to prevailing structural constraints: the men spoke at length about their inability to order the local newspapers, the impossibility of attending concerts (‘in my circles, there is often a lack of money’) and their necessity to buy food with a red discount tag (‘anything goes when you are hungry’). Accounts of surviving with very little money are sometimes framed as stories of resourcefulness wit, as in the following excerpt from a focus group:

Santeri: A couple of years ago I found in the paper recycling bin this kind of a meter-high pile of all kinds of books. I was taking rubbish there, I peeked in and ran quickly home to get plastic bags. Then I took them all home, and that was 50 books.

RH: What kinds of books were they?

Santeri: There were all kinds of real books. Also paperbacks, I think they call them like that. But it was nice to read them.

(Focus Group 5: Santeri, 58, unemployed teacher)

An example of a very similar discourse is found in Focus Group 4 with a young working-class couple: the entire interview revolves around the wife’s stories of the different bargains she has made; even the couple’s wedding rings were bought during a 50% sale, which they found to be a fantastic bargain. Many other interviewees reveal that saving money can be made an art or at least a meaningful form of cultural participation in itself:

Mimosa: Oh yeah, we will have an Easter ham, we won’t be making lamb.

RH: You will have ham?

Mimosa: After Christmas ham was so cheap in Lidl that we bought three hams and put them in the freezer: that makes for an Easter ham, a May Day ham and a Midsummer ham.

(Mimosa, 37, cleaner)

Melissa: Yeah, sometimes in the summer, we might have gone to the park as the music is carried there.

RH: OK, so you go outside the festival to listen to it?

Melissa: Yeah, with my friend we sit in the park.

RH: Do you sit outside for saving money?

Melissa: Well, what’s the point of paying the entrance fee? The drinks cost a lot, everything costs a lot, there is no point, you rather sit outside with some nice guys and talk and listen to the music at the same time.

(Melissa, NA, disability pensioneer)

I go jogging pretty much alone because I am a passionate saver of money. I always go to a certain shop if I see that OK, there is that kind of offer there, I go and collect it and walk at the same time, two hours is the usual thing, but, well, it’s not as if I have sweat running down my forehead or anything. Then, I walk and check flea markets.

(Julia, 68, pensioner)

The demand expressed by many of my interviewees that cultural participation should perform some kind of function resonates thoroughly with Bourdieu’s (highly contested) idea of the ‘taste of necessity’ which was originally coined as the inability of the lower classes to create proper tastes. Bourdieu held that in a scenario of limited economic resources, the cultural practices of the lower classes are always a mere ‘resignation to necessity’ (Bourdieu 1984/1979, 380)—this is what makes them adopt functional and useful cultural items and shun things that they consider unpractical or needless and therefore ostentatious. Blasius and Friedrichs go on to empirically assess Bourdieu’s claim that members of the lower classes cannot convert economic capital into cultural capital and, in fact, find firm support for Bourdieu’s original thesis (Blasius and Friedrichs 2008). Thus, the lower classes seem to be doomed to a position of low overall capitals, which makes it impossible for them to climb upwards on either the economic or the cultural ladder. What perhaps introduces an extra nuance to this version of the taste of necessity argument is that in the functionality discourse, there is a fervent belief that saving money does not only mean choosing the only option available; it can also be equated to a resourceful and ingenious way of engaging in cultural participation. In general, the functionality discourse makes it clear that cultural participation can occur even at the recycling bin or by going to sales.

Openness and Tolerance

A recurring theme in the functionality discourse includes expressions of openness and tolerance. Instead of discussing them at a more general level, the interviewees usually presented them as practical corollaries of their own practices: whatever cultural participation worked for them was considered good and valuable and was defended as such. This attitude went hand in hand with an idea of a somewhat superficial openness and tolerance: whatever is considered ‘my thing’ is OK, whereas someone else has ‘their thing’, which I cannot object to. In the interviews, this sometimes led to denials of any kind of negative distinctions in relation to other peoples’ cultural practices: people were keen to say that they unpleasant culture did not exist simply because they never came across any. Like the retired hairdresser Julia put it when asked about what she considered unpleasant reading: ‘In my life, there is nothing repulsive. You have to have a positive attitude’.

The concept of ‘my thing’ and of respecting the others’ cultural practices was recurrent throughout the data. One could perhaps see this as a Finnish version of the Law of Jante, made famous by the Danish-Norwegian author Aksel Sandemose in his 1933 satirical novel A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks, in which he presents ten rules or codes of conduct of the fictitious Danish village of Jante, often summarised as ‘You should not think you are anyone special, or better than us’. The Law of Jante is often seen as the backbone of Nordic egalitarianism: society is put ahead of the individual, and self-praise is criticised. In this context, portraying unfamiliar and unpleasant cultural products simply as ‘not my thing’ can be seen as a way of conveniently avoiding boundary-drawing and putting perceived others ahead of oneself:

Anniina: Yeah, so war books are not kind of my thing, I can’t stand it. Also, I don’t watch war movies because they are not my thing in that way, but if there is history in it, if it’s not only war, then I’m interested.

RH: OK. Regarding newspapers and magazines, is there anything revolting that you would not read?

Anniina: No, I read so little that whatever I read, I’m interested in it. It could be something like Kauneus & Terveys and Fit and SPORT [fitness magazines]. I don’t really know, I read too few magazines that if I sit somewhere waiting, I might maybe read something. It’s not kind of my thing [laughs].

RH: And about music, what’s close to your heart?

Anniina: Oh damn… I am, like, kind of anything goes, it depends so much on my state of mind. The only thing that is not quite my thing is this real death-thrash-metal, I cannot stand that growling.

(Anniina, 39, unemployed salesperson)

RH (showing the art elicitation photos): What about number five?

Maarit: I like its colours but… It’s nice. This… I am not sure. That one might make it to my wall, but I’m not sure. That angularity is somehow not quite my thing. It has something weirdly dark. But something mysterious too, in a nice way.

(Maarit, 37, student)

RH: You like museums?

Melissa: Well no.

RH: What’s the thing about them?

Melissa: I don’t know, they just somehow are not my thing.

(Melissa, NA, disability pensioner)

The idea of ‘my thing’ being as valuable as anyone else’s in the field of cultural participation comes together with a potential openness to and tolerance of new things—which, again, is well documented in the scholarly literature in relation to resource-rich rather than resource-poor societal groups (Lindblom 2022; Peterson and Kern 1996). The particularity or the functionality discourse lies in highlighting that one is not bothered by certain unpleasant cultural practices:

Tuomo (speaking about repulsive music): Well, I don’t know, there is a button on TV for getting rid of it. It does not bother me in that way, even though I would not listen to it.

(Tuomo, 77, retired engineer)

RH: Do you go to classical music concerts?

Joni: In high school I think I once attended, it was part of a course that you would have to listen to a concert and write a review.

RH: Oh. Did you like it?

Joni: Well, it was OK. As a rare experience it was just fine.

(Joni, 35, disability pensioner)

Unlike in the affirmation discourse discussed in Chap. 5, which emphasised learning and acquiring tastes, the functionality discourse highlights more the potentiality of tolerating new things. For instance, when 33-year-old unemployed salesperson Sara speaks about opera and classical music concerts (which she never attends), she makes a point about the fact that she could go, if the circumstances were right, and even if it was not ‘her thing’. ‘I might go if I got a ticket, I’m usually a kind of person that goes if someone gives me a free ticket and if it fits me, but well, it’s not as I’m too interested (…) it’s not terribly much my thing, but of course I could be surprised. So I am kind of open about these things’. Sara repeats the same idea more in depth when talking about restaurants:

Probably it’s because of all those different spices that I never go to these Nepalese places. It’s not maybe my thing, but I have not gone too much, I have not given them too much of an opportunity. If a friend would ask me to eat there, I would go and try to find something in the menu. Another thing that I have never eaten too much, in fact I have never eaten it in a restaurant, is sushi. (…) In some shop some cook made tasters and I’ve tried it and it’s fine, but I’ve never been to the restaurant having sushi, that’s the thing. But I would give it a chance (…) Somehow, this raw fish and rice and that kind of thing does not attract me, but I would give it a chance. So, I am pretty open-minded about those things.

(Sara, 33, unemployed salesperson)

Some interviewees make it even clearer that complicated or exotic cultural practices are, rather than being directly contested, simply disregarded because they are not even seen as possible for the ‘likes of me’. Like Emma, the 34-year-old unemployed graduate of a commercial institute, puts it when asked whether there are any restaurants that she would not like:

Emma: Perhaps these Chinese places and that kind of stuff, it’s not my style of food. (…) I’m maybe not used to eating them. Although yes, I could eat them.

RH: Does it have to do with the spices, or?

Emma: Maybe yes. I’ve never thought why, I just have an image that they don’t have my type of food.

Tolerance Even When There Is a Lack of Resources: Case Max

I meet Max in a free meeting room at the central library of Helsinki. He apologises for being late; he took a train from the distant suburb where he lives and got mixed up with the public transport zone system, new at the time of the interview.

Max is 39 years old. Since finishing compulsory education, he has completed two different degrees in vocational school—first he became a computer mechanic and, then, a car mechanic. He has worked in different fields, sometimes in several jobs simultaneously: as a car salesperson, as an IT support person and a DJ and karaoke host, as well as working in his family’s service business. At the time of the interview, he has been unemployed for some years but is actively looking for a job.

Losing his job has meant a total paradigm change in Max’s previously very busy life (‘at least what I myself have noticed as a big change is that when you’re unemployed you have free time; you have to invent things to do, previously you would not have to, the agenda would be filled anyway’). Max’s hobbies have all undergone changes because of the lack of money related to being unemployed: instead of going to the gym, he trains at home (‘that has again to do with the expenses, it would swallow too large a share of my monthly budget’), and instead of belonging to many associations related to vehicles and rare plants, he now has to cultivate his garden on his own (‘These activities have pretty much come to a halt with this unemployment, as both would require quite a lot of moving around and taking care of things. So, again the problem is the budget, and how to move around and visit events around Finland and that kind of thing’).

Even with this apparent exclusion factor, Max exhibits some patterns of everyday participation: he likes cooking and mentions that many friends often visit him bringing a plastic bag of ingredients with them, with the idea that Max will cook for everyone. He speaks at length about the importance of avoiding convenience food and finding fresh and high-quality ingredients and has tried to avoid meat for some years now. He loves going to discos (while lamenting that the nineties rave culture has faded away) and on spontaneous road trips.

Although many highbrow-oriented events initially interest Max, he finds it a distant idea to go to, for instance, a classical music concert or the theatre (‘maybe it’s also that in my circle of friends, there’s not that kind of people’). The interesting thing about Max is actually his tolerant attitude towards highbrow culture: even though he never participates in it, he labels his view as ‘neutral’: ‘I do not find it repulsive, but, those are things that I never cross paths with in my everyday life, so I just don’t pay attention to them’. This same tolerance is present when thinking about restaurants that he would not like to eat in: ‘I cannot think of any. Nothing occurs to me. I am kind of quite open-minded about them, probably everywhere there is at least something good and interesting that you can learn from’.

Max is a good example of the increasing importance of the ideals of cultural openness and tolerance in general (Peterson 2005). His case highlights well Ollivier’s argument (2008) that automatically associating openness with privileged groups and closure with unprivileged groups is erroneous; tolerance can be such a salient part of the ethos of especially younger groups that it is necessarily not only part of the repertoires of privileged groups (cf. Lindblom 2022).

We have seen that an emphasis on openness and tolerance is a central part of the functionality discourse. However, it should be pointed out that actual cultural participation repertoires represented in the functionality discourse remain limited: although highbrow-oriented cultural participation such as theatre or classical music concerts is initially depicted in a positive and open-minded light—for instance, eating exotic food is considered a possibility—many times, such activities are mentally located far away from everyday life to the point of being invisible.

Modesty

In the interview guidelines, the last question concerned ‘the day of my dreams’. The question was originally intended to contrast the content that I expected to get from the rest of the interviews—the idea was that, with potentially somewhat limited cultural participation or practices being very much restrained by structural factors or a lack of resources, the interviewees would at least have the chance to describe their potential or desired cultural participation—the things that they would do if there were no restraints.

Although I expected to listen to dreams that would, at least in some way, be related to higher resources, I was surprised to find that most people daydreamed of extremely moderate, economically and culturally modest activities—things that probably already formed a part of the interviewees’ realities. For instance, the 77-year-old retired Tuomo dreamed of an outdoor excursion, ‘campfire coffee in an open-air tent, that kind of thing’. Emma, a 34-year-old unemployed graduate of a commercial institute, said that she would like to go to the hairdresser’s and have a facial treatment. Jarmo, 67, a pensioner from the north of Finland like Tuomo, dreamed about visiting Helsinki once in his lifetime with an airplane. The interviewees in Focus Group 7 with three regulars of a bar in a small town said that they would actually like to spend the day of their dreams in the very same bar:

Raisa: I don’t know whether I would really wish for that, but yes, if I had the whole day free (…) and I would not have to go to work or anything like that, I would surely spend that whole day here.

These modest dreams, of course, are a stellar example of what Bourdieu means by his idea of a ‘sense of one’s place’, an unconscious approval of existing hierarchies in which ‘the social order is progressively inscribed in people’s minds (…) objective limits become a sense of limits, a practical anticipation of objective limits acquired by experience of objective limits, a “sense of one’s place” which leads one to exclude oneself from the goods, persons, places and so forth from which one is excluded’ (Bourdieu 1984/1979, 471). Milla and Jarkko, the young couple interviewed in Focus Group 4, state that their absolute dream would be to go to IKEA. Instead of involving pure pleasure, the dream has practical underpinnings:

RH: So what would you buy from IKEA if you could make it there?

Milla: Well probably some clever storage racks for those cupboards, cause now you feel the cutlery swings around when you open the drawer, it doesn’t stay in place. And then for the utility room, I would get some sort of smarter laundry sorting system or a more functional solution. And other than that, probably all kinds of useless decorating stuff from scented candles to artificial flowers [laughs]. Some curtains and rugs that I would probably never use, but at least I would have them.

In the above quotation, Milla’s tone has slight hints of boundary-drawing: smart and functional storage racks and laundry sorting systems are good, but ‘useless decorating stuff’ is something to laugh about. In the functionality discourse, there is, in general, a broad consensus about modest yet well-working cultural practices being valuable and ‘useless’ unpractical cultural practices unvaluable, even ridiculous. This seems to be another way of using one’s modesty as a means of drawing upward boundaries. In the interviews, homes and living spaces were typical examples of exhibiting these kinds of attitudes. Echoing Southerton’s findings on how locally based communities share and confirm the tastes of people ‘round here’, creating class-based distinctions between functional versus individualistic kitchens (Southerton 2001), there were strong statements in the interviews about the superiority of functional choices—always related to small critical upwards boundaries, as evidenced by the interviewees’ talk on their homes:

Well, it’s a detached house, it does not have to be any kind of luxury standard, it’s not as if I would like to live in luxury, that’s what we have.

(Tuomo, 77, retired engineer)

Well, it’s definitely not a house from interior design magazines (…) it has a bit of everything, but it’s a cosy-looking home.

(Laura, 28, bus driver)

(My childhood home) was extremely poor, there was nothing except for that basic furniture… but otherwise it was OK. There were no paintings, no nothing, it had the basic furniture from those days.

(Silja, 64, retired mixed manual worker)

From cultural practices often described as ‘normal’, there is in fact not a long way to drawing boundaries against things considered ‘too fancy’:

Basic home food is what I (like), I’m not (interested) in that kind of terribly fine fancy portions or special things, rather basic home food, that’s maybe more my thing.

(Anniina, 39, unemployed salesperson)

Usually, I seek to buy kind of durable (furniture) and look after them; I don’t usually just buy furniture kind of like, ‘I fancy decorating my house so I’ll go to burn money in Vepsäläinen [quality design furniture shop]’– no way.

(Sami, 37, cook)

Eero, a 30-year-old kiosk worker with a rather hostile attitude to most highbrow-oriented cultural practices, tells me what he considers to be a sad story of having to move houses, when he was a child, to a ‘fancier’ part of town: what he had perceived as a relaxed life of running in the yard and shouting to other neighbours through the balconies was now replaced by ‘rigid’ new neighbours: ‘They were this (…) high living standard kind of people, kind of like “our life is better than yours”’. When Eero later talks about how he would like to live in the future, his dreams involve highly similar tones to what we have encountered earlier:

I would like to make it kind of in a way that it resembles me, nothing ostentatious, rather something that fits a normal Joe Public, something that everyone can afford.

Modesty, as we have seen, is an essential part of the functionality discourse. At first glance, this may seem like a practical example of Bourdieu’s ‘sense of one’s place’ (1984/1979, 417)—interviewees were keen to demonstrate their unpretentiousness and, to a certain degree, voluntary abstention from pursuing expensive or luxurious cultural practices. However, when scrutinised more closely, the emphasis on modesty revealed the symbolic boundaries present in the functionality discourse: here, the interviewees drew mostly aesthetical boundaries upwards, representing ‘unnecessary’ or impractical cultural participation and items, such as fine dining and luxury homes, which were presented under the guise of it not being ‘my thing’. It could perhaps also be speculated that in the functionality discourse, modesty works as a strategy of showing the interviewees’ cultural deference towards the interviewer (see Jarness and Flemmen 2019): a way of securing their dignity and self-worth by emphasising that their cultural practices do match their class position.

Conclusion: A Lack of Boundaries?

Within the functionality discourse, there is mainly popular and everyday participation. What distinguishes cultural participation in this discourse from that of the other two discourses is the emphasis on practical usefulness in a broad sense: reading or listening to music is practised for the relax they offer, sports is a way of staying fit and showing worthiness, and watching television offers a welcome distraction from the difficulties of daily life or hard and tiring work. Cultural participation thus entails a strongly instrumental motivation—it is an area of personal and well-deserved ‘feelgood’.

We have seen that the functionality discourse is marked, first of all, by a strong link between cultural participation and the many structuring factors of life. Cultural participation is presented as something entertaining and amusing that can ease or smooth out everyday hardships by pushing them aside for a while. At the same time, cultural participation is rarely conceived of as something through which it would be possible to create lifestyle distinctions. In this sense, my Finnish interviewees resemble the UK working classes in the sense that their cultural practices involved an ‘orientation towards goods, fun and entertainment’ (Bennett et al. 2009, 205). At the same time, the interviewees strongly emphasised the practicality or rationality of their cultural practices and even framed a certain lack of resources (such as the lack of money) as possible avenues for expressing ingenuity and, eventually, self-worth.

The functionality discourse was also traversed by a stress on openness. Many interviewees cherished, at least superficially, the idea that ‘anything goes’ or that cultural practices are—or are not—‘one’s thing’. It could be interpreted, though, that this apparent openness and tolerance are somewhat superficial. Many interviewees said that they were ‘open to everything’ but, in fact, had limited preferences—resembling here Ollivier’s ‘indifferent openness’ (Ollivier 2008). This superficiality became even more apparent when symbolic boundaries entered the game: in the functionality discourse, there is an emphasis on modesty and a certain acceptance of one’s low position in the social hierarchy, but the discourse hides the boundaries drawn upwards. The boundaries are mostly aesthetical and directed upwards towards impractical, non-functional cultural participation and items (fine dining, luxury homes, etc. portrayed as ‘not my thing’). This is a clear difference from the affirmation discourse, which only drew downward aesthetical boundaries. In other words, in the functionality discourse, there are delicate traces of anti-elitism.

Here, cultural participation played a mainly practical role, and the interviewees did not link it with the possibility of accumulating cultural capital, unlike in the affirmation discourse—they took cultural participation with a certain laxness and indifference. This resembles the finding of Vassenden and Jonvik (2019), whereby interviewees with a low position in the social hierarchy showed ‘little deference to the tastes and culture of the more educated’ and did not ‘express feelings of subordination, of being looked down on for their tastes or lack of education’ (Vassenden and Jonvik 2019, 38). In this sense, the indifferent and at the same time self-assured attitude towards cultural participation that characterises the functionality discourse could perfectly be a version of egalitarianism.