Keywords

Prologue

I meet Marko at the restaurant of the practically only hotel in his small home village. Marko is 47 years old, has no formal education and works as a farmer on his own farm. His work is highly seasonal—I am interviewing him in wintertime when he has lots of free time. He has a wife and one teenage child.

Marko is one of the most curious interviewees of the entire sample: he is verbally highly talented and witty and converts the interview situation into an opportunity to crack jokes, to tell shocking details about his life and even to make fun at the expense of the ‘formal’ interview situation. For instance, he states that his favourite food is ‘anything that makes me fart’, constantly mentions watching pornography and making illegal moonshine and brags about his boisterous drinking habits. He tells stories of how he sometimes attends concerts just for the joy of getting drunk or how he once had rolled down the incredibly long stairs of the hotel in which the interview is held (‘It was just like in a movie… I shot the rapids but they were dry, like they say’). He knows the personnel of the hotel and shouts something to them from time to time.

Marko is opposed to highbrow culture tooth and nail and mocks it throughout the interview. Although he might sometimes read books on military issues or hunting, he rarely touches anything else. He explains his hate in graphic detail: ‘Some sort of unnecessary dragged-out biography with 1600 pages will certainly remain unfinished – if I ever manage to even start. I don’t have the energy to sit absorbed in that. (…) Blah blah blah, fiddle-faddle, the same drag from cover to cover. No. Who could ever examine all that. If you don’t have a migraine before you start, you will certainly have it afterwards’. Of the local arts and crafts museum, he says: ‘I have any number of that same rubbish at home. There is no point to go to marvel them at the museum’.

Marko’s cultural practices mostly revolve around popular cultural participation. He has gone to the circus with his child (‘Even though I’m pretty much a clown myself, so it was not so much needed’). He watches TV, mostly reality shows and quizzes (‘Do you want to be a millionaire… Well, of course I do. I’ve tried out poverty, and this is nothing to shout about, so I could be a millionaire for a change’). In movies, he likes action, especially Arnold Schwarzenegger. He says he is ‘pretty omnivorous’ regarding music: he listens to classical musical sometimes, but more commonly to pop, rock, heavy music and speed metal. His all-time favourite band is Rammstein, which he has even seen live (‘Went to see them with a friend just to be able to get really drunk – we did succeed’).

Marko is also highly active in things that are perfect examples of everyday participation. His main hobby is fixing written-off cars and finding spare parts through his networks. He also attends kettlebell classes and goes to the gym; belongs to a vintage car association, a Volkswagen fans’ association and a hunting association; and has often acted as treasurer or secretary. He picks berries and mushrooms, and when the season starts, he goes elk hunting. He uses internet daily (‘I do watch also things that are not pornography’) and belongs to many WhatsApp groups of different vehicle associations. He travels abroad for vacations from time to time (‘Canary Islands, pretty much. This traditional favourite destination of Finns. You go to the Canary Islands and get smashed’).

Marko draws many upward moral boundaries; for instance, he is annoyed by an early #MeToo case in Finland, in which film director Aku Louhimies was accused by female actresses of using questionable methods in his work (‘You should let the man be in peace, he has asked for forgiveness’). He appreciates unpretentiousness and dislikes people who get upset too easily (‘What does it matter if you sometimes take the piss out of somebody? That will just refresh them. (…) People whine about everything these days’).

A Different ‘Everyday Participation’

Marko is an excellent example of the resistance discourse: he maintains a hostile attitude towards highbrow-oriented cultural practices, but at the same time, he has lots of both popular and everyday participation. In other words, when observed superficially, the resistance discourse has similar cultural participation patterns as the functionality discourse—and even the affirmation discourse, even if the affirmation discourse also includes highbrow-oriented cultural participation. What distinguishes the resistance discourse from the two other discourses is the heavily defiant and critical tone, which is sometimes even mocking and rebellious, as clearly revealed by Marko’s interview. While traditional highbrow-oriented cultural participation is seen as something positive and desirable for the affirmation discourse and a possible or tolerable option—at most, ‘not my thing’—in the functionality discourse, for the resistance discourse, anything close to highbrow culture is seen as directly repellent.

Therefore, it is not surprising to find this kind of hostility towards established cultural practices among the lower classes. Bourdieu famously considered the lower classes to be passive and willing to accept the ‘taste of necessity’. He argued that as the lower classes had few economic resources, their practically oriented cultural practices could be interpreted as a surrender to the surrounding conditions, which the lower classes themselves explained as supposedly their own choice (Bourdieu 1984/1979, 380). This view of a submissive lower class has been heavily criticised later: scholars of many different contexts have shown that, on the contrary, there are feelings of resentment and anger among the lower classes (Hochschild 2016; Lamont 2018). Unlike the somewhat docile image painted by Bourdieu, subsequent scholars have argued that the lower classes are aware of being exploited (De Keere 2020; Savage et al. 2015), perceiving themselves as judged and their cultural practices as devalued (Skeggs and Loveday 2012). The most precarious groups often perceive living under a stigma (Savage et al. 2015) which is further corroborated through discriminatory labels, such as ‘chav’ (Jones 2016) or ‘underclass’ (Tyler 2013).

A considerable difference from the other discourses is that in the resistance discourse, there seems to be no inherent idea about that cultural participation—or even leisure activities—should be particularly enjoyable, a vehicle for learning new things or a means of relaxing, as in the affirmation and functionality discourses. Many interviewees shunned the idea of ‘free time’ altogether and dedicated it to working in the house, walking the dog or minding the children. For instance, Marketta, a 69-year-old pensioner who worked as a guard and was a single mother, becomes offended when asked about hobbies which she considers a luxury out of her reach: ‘Work, work, and the brats, that’s all I had’. Many other accounts show that cultural participation, although it exists, is not necessarily linked to personal enjoyment or fulfilment:

RH: What do you do if you have a moment before you go to sleep yourself?

Olli: Well, I probably browse my phone, for a couple of days I’ve been playing web poker just for fun, and I noticed already yesterday night that, well, this is starting to get really boring, so…

RH: Is it captivating?

Olli: It’s not captivating at all. Maybe, if the stakes were thousands of euros instead of just a couple of euros, that could bring on some excitement, but now it’s not interesting at all.

(Olli, 41, machine operator)

RH: How much do you use the internet?

Emma: Well at this moment I don’t have a computer, my only internet access is through the phone.

RH: OK. And do you use it daily?

Emma: Well, yes, there is nothing else to do, so I scroll Facebook up and down [laughs].

RH: Anything else that you do at home, is there anything, crosswords or handwork…?

Emma: Not nowadays, I just watch the telly and try to entertain myself in some way. But when I have more energy, I do a hell of a lot of handicrafts.

(Emma, 34, unemployed)

In the resistance discourse, in addition to hostility, there is also considerable cultural activity. Thus, it would be wrong to say that the resistance discourse is devoid of participation; rather, participation falls outside of the categories typically considered in different surveys. Side by side with the resistance discourse there are practices such as hunting, berry-picking, building computers out of spare parts, geocaching, collecting old coins and so on, many of which are stellar examples of items that rarely make it onto different surveys measuring cultural participation (Flemmen et al. 2018; Savage et al. 2015).

In the summer I like to go running. Right now there’s not really that possibility yet. But mainly I like to be on my own. (…) I fix computers, I build computers for my friends (…) or displays for phones. That kind of handiwork has been a counterbalance for the typical thing (…) I speak to people so much that I can’t do so much handiwork. So it’s a nice counterbalance for that.

(Eero, 30, kiosk worker)

Lasse: Actually there are not many things I like… well, my hobby is to follow football through the website of Veikkaus…

RH: Do you bet money yourself?

Lasse: Yeah, always a couple of euros a day. Well, in the long run, I am, of course, losing money, but lately, it’s been plus or minus zero. That’s it. I also surf a little bit on social media and watch different kinds of videos.

(Lasse, 56, unemployed)

Lack of Legitimate Cultural Practices Does Not Equal to Passivity: Case Olli

I meet Olli at the same shopping mall café that I used earlier for meeting Olli’s wife, Minna (see Chap. 5). Minna has been keen to find me more interviewees and has persuaded her husband, a 41-year-old machine operator in a factory, to be interviewed. This is probably why Olli initially has a positive attitude: he asks me in advance whether he needs to take something with him to the interview, and his considered responses reveal that he has clearly thought about the interview topics in advance. Olli speaks openly about his many worries connected to the structural factors of life: the fact that he might become fired due to outsourcing plans in the factory in which he works and the family’s current difficulties with selling a flat.

Olli’s cultural practices are those of a stereotypical working-class male. He engages in practically no highbrow-oriented participation. He never reads anything—in fact he does not remember ever having read a book, and he never reads any newspapers or magazines, except for a commercial leaflet of a retail store selling tools (‘something like a Biltema catalogue could be something that I might browse a little bit’). He listens to the Hitmix radio channel and sometimes to heavy metal and considers himself, music-wise, ‘pretty much an omnivore, with the exception of opera, jazz and classical music’. He does not recognise any of the paintings shown to him, but he likes them and connects them to memories (‘this picture of the crow reminds me of last summer with my own son, when he chased crows out of the tree, that’s what makes me feel good about the painting’). Although Olli never goes to classical music concerts, he has gone to the ballet once because his wife insisted—but like we know from Minna’s account, they felt out of place (‘we were not ourselves at all… I think I even fell asleep a bit’).

However, Olli engages in many other activities and is highly active in practices that fall both under popular and everyday participation. He is a fervent enthusiast of shooting: in his family, there is a long tradition of hunting, and lately Olli has joined a shooting club. He speaks at length about the many bureaucratic issues surrounding gun permits. He likes to go out to eat at American and Mexican chain restaurants (‘basic places, nothing too fine’) and remembers with horror some of the times he ended up at a restaurant that he considered too fancy (‘the waiters were really surprised and the food was some kind of greasy duck tenderloin, my god, we just hid it, it was too fine for us’). Olli is also a devoted father who spends lots of time with his toddler child and wishes to take him to a combat sports activity later on (‘in order to take care of himself and his self-esteem’) and asks me, after the interview, about my ideas and best tips regarding potty training.

Olli is a good example of the fact that a striking lack of highbrow-oriented cultural participation does not mean a lack of activity in general (see Heikkilä 2021). In fact, profiles such as Olli’s are easily labelled with ‘morally derogative terms’ (Flemmen et al. 2018, 23) simply because their activities do not match with what is asked in most quantitative surveys measuring cultural participation.

Savage et al. (2015) argue that there is a strong division between, on the one hand, active participation in the ‘public world’ and, on the other hand, an aversion or dislike of many cultural practices. Moreover, they go on to argue that an active orientation is ‘more socially approved of – more legitimate’ (Savage et al. 2015, 105). This link to social approval is probably the key to understanding properly the resistance discourse. This discourse shuns highbrow-oriented, publicly recognised cultural practices while embracing at least some items from the fields of popular and everyday culture—yet with undertones of resentment and anger towards potentially judgemental upper classes (Skeggs and Loveday 2012). The idea of everyday participation, a possible compensation for ‘lacking’ cultural engagement, as a ‘considerable informal involvement in kin-based and local circles, and in home-based activities’ (Bennett et al. 2009, 64) or as a signal of social capital and social networks (Miles and Gibson 2016) does not fully capture this.

An Unknown Territory

In the affirmation and functionality discourses, there seems to be a shared understanding of the value of highbrow-oriented cultural participation—in short, it is commonly recognised and legitimised (Bourdieu 1984/1979) as something connected to public culture and possible cultural capital. In the resistance discourse, there is nothing of this. Highbrow-oriented culture represents an unfamiliar territory, a no-comfort zone and a sphere of standards that the interviewees felt they were unable to meet.

A typical milieu of discomfort is the educational system—something we know plays an important role in legitimising highbrow culture and making highbrow-oriented cultural practices seem the ‘natural’ skills of middle and upper class children, who have actually inherited these skills from home and are thus able to pursue different forms of capital (Bourdieu 1986; Bourdieu and Darbel 1991; Bourdieu and Passeron 1979). School has traditionally been a place in which the working classes have had to fight harder than the middle classes for educational success (Loveday 2015; Willis 1977/2017). A central part of the resistance discourse is the recollection of school as a forced formality, an institution that tried to impose upon the interviewees the cultural practices they were naturally opposed to. The retired Jarmo, 67, that worked as a car painter, among other jobs, remembers the following words of his schoolteacher: ‘You won’t pass school just by skating and singing’. For many interviewees, reading and writing sadly remain especially traumatic experiences that teachers rubbed in their faces. A member of Focus Group 8 of a pensioners’ association in a small city shares the following memory: ‘If you would write something wrongly, the teacher would ask you to read it out loud and (…) how is it possible to express yourself like this, they would kind of point you out and make a jibe at you. That’s the typical power the teacher has’. The feeling of having been forced to read touches upon also younger interviewees:

How I hated as a kid when in school when you were forced to read something! It has probably remained from there, this feeling that you don’t like to read books.

(Emma, 34, unemployed)

I really don’t like to read at all. When they forced me to read some books in primary school, I did not like them at all, and then it came to nothing. Well, sometimes, I do read something, horror books or something like that.

(Focus Group 1, Sonja, 18, student at a vocational school)

A related phenomenon is that the resistance discourse often conceives of highbrow-oriented cultural practices as ridiculous, something to be openly laughed at. In the sociology of culture, it is well documented that laughing off questions in formal interviews is a way of distancing oneself from the interview situation and showing awareness of possible top-down stereotyping (Heikkilä and Katainen 2021; Savage et al. 2015). In the same vein, humour in itself is strongly linked to symbolic boundary-drawing and to moral judgements (Friedman and Kuipers 2013; Kuipers 2015)—laughing about something is an effective vehicle for class distinctions. Typical examples included the many quasi-classical comments made about the ridiculous features of highbrow-oriented culture:

Anniina (speaking about opera): As an experience I believe it would be absolutely wonderful… If they would not scream and if it had more men, why not! (laughter)

RH: OK, so you would give it a chance.

Anniina: Yes, I would bear it for a little while (laughter)

(Anniina, 39, unemployed)

RH: OK. What about art exhibitions?

Mimosa: Could not interest me less.

RH: Can you tell what it is that does not interest you?

Mimosa: I think it’s silly to stare at some vases or paintings that have a line in the middle or two spots or… Nope.

(Mimosa, 37, cleaner)

Lukas (speaking about why he does not attend museums): Well, in Finland what prevents me is that museums are so anaemic (laughter). If you go to the National Gallery and look at a ‘modern Finn’, you will see people in shell suits and a box of Weetabix in some corner, and you’re like, ‘I can’t believe this is true’ (laughter). You can walk through the whole thing in ten minutes. And, on top of everything, you are expected to pay for it.

(Lukas, 41, unemployed)

Another layer of this discomfort involves mocking the entire topic of the interview—that is, cultural participation and practices more widely. It is well known from previous research that culture can be a touchy subject (Heikkilä and Katainen 2021), and this is why this research intended to capture broadly leisure instead of only ‘culture’ following the model of Ollivier (2008). Still, the resistance discourse emphasised its open dislike of cultural practices considered simply stupid or ‘too fine for us’, in addition to being disgusting and intolerable.

This open dislike was most typically expressed as a feeling of having troubles understanding what (highbrow-oriented) culture is about or having been ‘left behind’ of it, which usually went in tandem with a feeling of being left behind in society more generally. For instance, Lasse, a 56-year-old unemployed man with a long history of performing different manual jobs with their many structural problems throughout the years from recession-related layoffs to organisational changes (‘organisation renewals and that kind of stuff, and automatisation’), describes having gone through so much frustration in his own life that he has lost sympathy for others—a rather typical example of the prototypical working-class male who is in a vicious circle of downward mobility, deprivation and a perceived loss of power (Gest 2016). This pattern is perhaps particularly evident in his media use: he has stopped reading Finland’s by far largest quality newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, and Kansan Uutiset (People’s News, the Left Alliance’s official Finnish-language weekly newspaper). This is how Lasse explains it:

There started to be things that they emphasise a lot that did not speak to me anymore, well, like feminism and this kind of stuff. I don’t have the energy to be sympathetic towards everybody. I have had some issues in my own life, lots of work with it, I don’t have energy for that kind of stuff anymore.

Finally, the resistance discourse includes a common understanding of the fact that normative highbrow-oriented cultural participation is simply too difficult to be properly understood. For instance, Sonja, an 18-year-old vocational school student from a city in the north of Finland, aptly summarises that she does not go to art exhibitions: ‘I don’t understand anything about art [laughs] it sure looks fine, but deeper down, I know nothing about it’. Olli, the 41-year-old machine operator, speaks about his many embarrassing moments in restaurants when he has not known how to act: ‘We did not know the purpose of all that cutlery, so we looked at other tables to see in which order you have to use them’. The farmer Marko, whom we already know from the prologue of this chapter, gives a telling reason for why he dislikes many newspapers and magazines, among them the investigative journalism magazine Suomen Kuvalehti (lit. Finland’s Picture Magazine, a classical magazine founded in 1873 focusing on national and international politics and culture from a centre-right stance) whose readership is linked to high education and highbrow-oriented cultural practices (Purhonen et al. 2014): ‘Well for instance Suomen Kuvalehti (…) most of it is so tedious and impenetrable and complicated’.

These accounts reflect well Bourdieu’s idea that access to arts or high culture can never refer only to physical accessibility; rather, access to arts is intrinsically linked to the capacity of deciphering and finally understanding them (Bourdieu 1993). Cultural capital can be seen here as a form of information, as an internalised code, that helps people (or not) to understand cultural items. Bourdieu holds that without knowledge and recognition, cultural items do not even exist in a value system: ‘(W)orks of arts exist as symbolic objects only if they are known and recognized, that is, socially instituted as works of art and received by spectators capable of knowing and recognizing them as such’ (Bourdieu 1993, 37). It has become clear that within the resistance discourse, there is not (enough) of this knowledge and recognition, and consequently normative highbrow-oriented cultural participation feels alienating and boring, even humiliating. However, this bold and straightforward attitude associated with this discourse is highly different from Bourdieu’s image of the passive lower classes who simply accept their ‘taste of necessity’. In the following subchapters, we will investigate more deeply the kinds of symbolic boundaries drawn in the resistance discourse.

Hostility: Aesthetical Upward Boundaries

We have seen that the affirmation discourse mostly draws downward boundaries, both aesthetical (against lowbrow cultural practices) and moral (against laziness and not doing anything). The functionality discourse draws only upward boundaries which were exclusively aesthetical (against impractical and non-functional cultural practices—always presented under the tolerant umbrella of ‘not my thing’). Meanwhile, the resistance discourse draws only upward boundaries (like the functionality discourse), both aesthetical and moral ones. The aesthetical upward boundaries mainly involve highbrow-oriented cultural practices (opera, ballet, classical music, museums and so on), presented as ridiculous, disgusting or directly intolerable. This, of course, is unsurprising in the light of the existing literature, most famously Bourdieu’s idea of aesthetic intolerance as a violent force: ‘Aversion to different life-styles is perhaps one of the strongest barriers between the classes’ (Bourdieu 1984/1979, 56). In the resistance discourse, there is clearly a strong aversion against high culture, which most commonly manifests itself in relation to the most obvious items of highbrow-oriented culture: ballet, opera, high art and so on. Here, the art photo elicitation part of the interviews was very fruitful, with the findings supporting the argument of Vassenden and Jonvik (2021) according to which different cultural areas bring out highly different interview speech.

Although all art photos were perhaps not considered ‘high art’ by the interviewees (there was, for instance, one piece of art that could be considered a part of a cartoon and one photograph), they all were part of the Finnish National Gallery’s collections. Some pieces, such as Ferdinand von Wright’s Taistelevat metsot (The Fighting Grouses) (1886), are so iconic and well known that it is nearly impossible for any Finn not to have seen it—it appears on t-shirts, magnets, posters and so on. The resistance discourse was full of different kinds of critical jokes and ‘pleasantries’ regarding the art photos. In Focus Group 7 with regulars of a local bar in a small city in the north of Finland, the interviewees said that they would only hang Taistelevat metsot on the toilet wall. Marko, the 47-year-old farmer, describes Matti Sainio’s black-and-white photograph Suru ilman mustia vaatteita (Sorrow without Black Clothes) (1961), a somewhat melancholic picture of a grandfather and a granddaughter in a small boat of the northern Lake Inarinjärvi, in the following way: ‘If that isn’t a boat for smuggling moonshine! The motor is fuelled up, now come on and hurry up to Estonia to collect the cargo. Great picture. I would not put it on the wall’. In addition to the art photos, another channel for aversion is opera, mentioned by many interviewees and aptly summarised by Mimosa:

RH: What feels repulsive about it?

Mimosa: That crowing sound.

RH: It’s only the singing that annoys you?

Mimosa: Yeah.

RH: So those costumes and so on…?

Mimosa: I could watch the theatre, usually they have that theatre part, I could watch it in silence mode, or if it would have classical music in the background, but when they start crowing in there, I’m like, I can’t tolerate it.

(Mimosa, 37, cleaner)

In fact, some of the aesthetical boundaries are so strong that they remind of destruction fantasies. The farmer Marko is very upset that an acquaintance of his often brings and recommends him books: ‘Helena often rams all these books down my throat and (…) I just bin them. I don’t do anything with them’. A very similar discourse is found in Focus Group 2 with the vocational school male students, when asked whether they receive any magazines at home:

Otso: I don’t even open it, I just always throw it into the sauna stove.

Vilho: Same here—happens with that newspaper of the Electrical Workers’ Union, my mom always says something like, ‘Hey, this arrived’. My only thought is, hey, it’s a great firelighter.

(Focus Group 2, male students at a vocational school)

Aesthetical Upward Boundaries: Case Marketta

Marketta is a nearly 70-year-old pensioner who lives in the working-class suburbs of Helsinki. Her profile (urban and with little education) has been especially difficult to recruit, so she is recruited through a research agency. Marketta is very interested in receiving the compensation (a gift card for a local supermarket chain) and much less interested in the interview itself, which she openly shows. We meet at a free meeting space at the central library of Helsinki.

Marketta has had a tumultuous life: she grew up in the countryside with farmer parents and, after completing the (very short at the time) compulsory education, moved to the capital, finished some courses and worked in a number of miscellaneous low-skilled jobs: in a restaurant, in a hospital, in an elderly home, as a security guard at a supermarket and later as a home assistant, a job from which she had to retire early because she had a severe work injury. Marketta’s personal life has been equally turbulent: she was a single mother of five children and had to support them all by working seven days a week in random jobs. She became annoyed when asked about the children’s hobbies (‘who knows what they were doing, they were just at home all the time’). Perhaps the most dramatic feature in her life is that she does not have proper meals unless there happens to be a socially provided meal somewhere that day. On other days, at home, she eats whatever there is in the cupboard (‘I eat what I eat. Buns, bread, sausage’).

Marketta answers almost all questions curtly, without elaborating on anything even when asked to, and is clearly annoyed by any mention of high culture. Opera reminds her of ‘a lady screaming the iron up her ass’, and the violins of classical music feel as if they were ‘scraping’ her ears. Reading books for her is like ‘drinking tar’; as did many others, she hated being forced to read at school. When asked what reading she would choose from the library we are in, she says: ‘Listen, I have no idea what they have here, and I could not be bothered’. Her standard answer to nearly all the questions is ‘not interested’.

Marketta withdraws from almost any cultural participation. She does not go to pubs (‘No’), museums (‘Not interested’), sports events (‘No thanks’), marketplaces (‘No money, everything is too expensive there’) or cafés (‘I get my coffee at home, no need to buy it anywhere’). Nevertheless, being on pension, she has been able to afford some leisure pursuits: she has joined a pensioners’ association that offers highly discounted prices for events. She has also gone on some organised bus trips around the world, but always looking for bargains and bringing her own dried food with her.

Marketta’s case represents well the extremely heavy aesthetical boundaries present in the resistance discourse. Her attitude is an example par excellence of a nearly physical aesthetic intolerance of and aversion towards other tastes—as Bourdieu famously formulated it, ‘tastes are perhaps first and foremost distastes, disgust provoked by horror or visceral intolerance (“sick-making”) of the tastes of others’ (Bourdieu 1984/1979, 56).

Many scholars have argued that morality is a key dimension in cultural boundaries and that moral and cultural boundaries are often entangled (Harrits and Pedersen 2019; Jarness and Flemmen 2019; Vassenden and Jonvik 2021) In their interviews with Norwegian people low in the class hierarchy, Jarness and Flemmen (2019) noticed that upward boundary-drawing was mostly linked to moral criteria of evaluation and that aesthetical criteria were more related to downward boundary-drawing. In my data, downward aesthetical boundaries were only drawn in the affirmation discourse. Meanwhile, upward moral boundaries were very common, and as in the case of Jarness and Flemmen (2019), they were often mixed with aesthetical upward boundaries, creating a category of ‘pretentious snobbery’ that was first and foremost aesthetically unpleasant (ugly, disgusting) but also morally dubious (expensive, unnecessary). A typical example was eating, perhaps because it is such a concrete everyday cultural practice:

RH: Any other foods you dislike?

Melissa: Well, maybe these kinds of pretentious things, clams and spinal cords whatever thing it is or squids or this kind of ethnic stuff, no. (…)

RH: What makes you dislike them especially?

Melissa: Perhaps the fact that they have not been made… that you kind of don’t know how they have been made and what they have. So no. It’s best to make your food yourself, so you know what it has and what you are eating.

(Melissa, NA, disability pension)

Anniina (talking about what restaurants she would not visit): Well the kind of places that only have lots of seafood, those I can’t… (…) I’m definitely not going to eat any kind of slimy clams [laughs]. (…) I’ve tried, and nothing went down and came back up as quickly as when I tried that slimy oyster or what the hell it was (makes a vomiting sound)

RH: Where have you tried that kind of food?

Anniina: Well, when I went to cook training it was part of the thing (…) I tell you nothing has ever gone down and come back up as quickly (makes a spitting sound). They are not my thing, why pay a billion of euros without any reason for this kind of clams and disgusting snails and other things, I just can’t do it. Those kinds of places – I can avoid them, I don’t need them.

(Anniina, 39, unemployed)

In sum, upward aesthetical boundaries are a central part of the resistance discourse—harsh boundaries are drawn against a cultural-aesthetical milieu that mainly consists of the usual suspects of highbrow culture (opera, ballet, fine dining and so on), which are considered revolting and even physically intolerable. The aversion was displayed very openly throughout the interviews via physical imitations of vomiting, which again comes very close to Bourdieu’s notion of ‘visceral intolerance’ towards other classes’ tastes (Bourdieu 1984/1979, 56). In any case, aesthetical boundaries are not enough to understand the intensity of the upward boundaries drawn in the resistance discourse. That is why the next subchapter will deepen our understanding by scrutinising the upward moral boundaries.

A Quest for Equality: Moral Upward Boundaries

Upward moral boundaries are a significant part of the logic of the resistance discourse. People perceived as ‘higher’ in hierarchies are sometimes described as not only ‘snobs’, but also as ‘queue-jumpers’, ‘hypocritical moralists’ or ‘picky and fastidious’. In general, hierarchies are felt in the flesh, and the people perceived to be rubbing them in the interviewees’ faces were openly despised. This reflects well the literature sharing the view that moral standards can work for the underprivileged groups as alternative ways of building worth when economic and cultural resources are too scarce for this task (Harrits and Pedersen 2019; Lamont 2000). Therefore, the symbolic boundaries drawn by people low in the hierarchies could be interpreted as ‘a defensive need to maintain a sense of dignity and self-worth against the background of one’s low position in the class structure’ (Jarness and Flemmen 2019, 177). In Jarness’ and Flemmen’s interviews with the lower classes in Norway, moral boundaries worked differently when drawn upwards and downwards: upwards, the boundaries were ‘usurpationary’, while downwards, they were ‘exclusionary’, highlighting that the upper classes’ perceived good moral qualities, such as being kind, made them tolerable in the eyes of the lower classes (Jarness and Flemmen 2019).

In the resistance discourse identified in my interviews, the interviewees clearly recognised themselves as belonging to the losing side. This cannot be described simply as a ‘sense of one’s place’ which Bourdieu coins as an unconscious approbation of the existence of hierarchies ‘which leads one to exclude oneself from the goods, persons, places and so forth from which one is excluded’ (Bourdieu 1984/1979, 471). In the case of the resistance discourse, this process is not unconscious but, instead, very conscious indeed. Many interviewees described the feeling of having a lower status than others, which made them uncomfortable, humiliated and angry. For instance, Minna, the manual worker on maternity leave whom we met earlier, is very annoyed by the hierarchies at her workplace: although she thought that the coffee room should be a place in which equality between workers reigns, the people working in the offices of the company automatically expected her, as technical personnel, to make coffee for others. This annoys her tremendously:

Even if I had more education, even if I would be the shopkeeper myself, I would not like it, I would not be like, ‘I am the captain of this ship’, but rather like… ‘If we do this together, everybody does it together’. I don’t like this unequal thing, hierarchy, I don’t like it at all.

(Minna, 38, manual worker)

Eero, a 30-year-old kiosk worker, is permanently irritated with the customers of the kiosk who, in his opinion, treat him like scum, think too much of themselves and take too many liberties. Eero’s day of his dreams is in fact a subversion of the extant state of affairs:

I would like to be (…) a genuine dickhead, a totally genuine dickhead. If it were possible for one day, I would like to park my car in the disabled parking lot, pass everybody in the queue, shout at my mother, be the extreme that I unfortunately have to encounter. (…) I would overdo everything. I might just push a wheelchair into the ground and throw it away. That kind of thing. I would overdo everything, just everything, I would do anything I can just for the joy of being able to do it. No one could do anything. If a car would be parked wrongly, I would make dents into it.

(Eero, 30, kiosk worker)

These depictions are only inches away from upward symbolic moral boundaries. The people ‘higher up’ in the hierarchy from the likes of Minna and Eero are easily described as self-satisfied and smug complainers, the ‘moral police’, picky and fussy and so on. Much of the resistance discourse is based on the idea that cultural participation itself is a luxury that not everyone can afford, which points, again, beyond Bourdieu’s idea of the ‘taste of necessity’ (Bourdieu 1984/1979, 380). For instance, the men interviewed in Focus Group 5 with an association of unemployed people continuously stated that rich people’s cultural practices become picky basically because they can afford to choose. As one of the participants expressed this sentiment: ‘Hunger has basically taught me that if there is a tight situation, life will teach you. That’s how pickiness will go away. But if you are really very hungry, you will definitely become less self-satisfied’. The kiosk worker Eero has a similar tone when describing the restaurants he would not like to visit:

Maybe some kind of vegetarian place. Not because it has vegetarian food but because of the people who go there, because those people boast about how vegetarian they are, and I just cannot tolerate it. (…) It’s because of their self-satisfaction mostly, they cannot enjoy the food, they have to tell that they’ve spent fifteen years eating only sprouts, that ruins my appetite. That self-satisfaction that is included in the whole thing.

Finally, the farmer Marko, whom we know from the prologue of this chapter, is in general critical of fussy people who complain too much. Marko speaks fondly of his many ‘field cars’, unregistered and uninspected cars which are not allowed to be driven on official roads but that some people, mainly in the countryside, use for tinkering and fixing or sometimes driving in closed rally events. What annoys him is the other peoples’ criticism and what he labels as ‘environmental craziness’:

Well, here and there I’ve heard that if they [the field cars] start to accumulate in your yard, your neighbours will start complaining that they leak oil and all that and that they look ugly, nag, nag, nag. It’s this kind of modern environmental craziness, it’s become largely like that nowadays.

The flipside of these upward moral boundaries is a strong call for equality. There seems to be a consensus in the resistance discourse that hierarchies for the sake of hierarchies are wrong and that no one’s cultural practices should be criticised without reason: in short, what seems to be a certain restoration of the honour of egalitarian values. Many interviewees close to the resistance discourse have rather liberal political values: they actively follow politics online, but they are intolerant of people who loudly dominate the debates. For instance, Max, a 39-year-old unemployed man with a background in many different manual jobs, follows politics both online and by reading magazines and is highly critical of debates that he feels are extreme:

Max (speaking about his reading preferences): I think mostly I like to read these kinds of societal, political, that kind of writings. Politics has started to interest me more.

RH: You ever comment on the writings yourself?

Max: No, I usually don’t comment myself, those questions related to politics become so easily exaggerated that I try to keep myself out of those conversations.

RH: So you just follow?

Max: Yes I mostly do, usually I like to follow factual discussions rather than debates with expressions like ‘libtard’ and ‘rightard’ [laughs], I’m really allergic to that kind of stuff.

Eero, the 30-year-old kiosk worker, takes this position a little further: like Max, he follows political debates online, but he often fights back and comments on debates that he finds stupid. Like he formulates it:

My sense of justice is so strong that I just don’t give in. I have zero tolerance for that kind of stupidity. I cannot just accept that evolution has developed us to this point in which we can build anything, we have technology and all that. (…) I’m just allergic to that stupidity. (…) Well, I can accept that I don’t know things, that’s not stupidity. But if you choose not to accept facts, that’s incomprehensible, that’s real stupidity (…) in my opinion. Sounds bad, but that’s how I see it.

When asked where he thinks all the online hate speech stems from, he says:

Probably it’s because, you have problems, and you must offload them on something else. And well, as we just had this immigration thing, it could be that their culture is so different, and you see such a little bit of it, it’s an easy target as there is so much negative things about it in the media, it’s so easy to jump on that same train.

Finally, an interview excerpt with young women studying at a vocational school is worth quoting at length, as they really are only able to communicate their desire for ‘democratic’ cultural practices after ruling out what they consider morally wrong:

RH: You have any other ideas about what kinds of books or magazines you would hate?

Katja: I don’t know, probably something that is communist…

Sonja: Yeah. [laughs]

RH: OK. What do you mean more specifically?

Katja: I don’t know, kind of, I don’t know if you could call it brainwashing.

Sonja: Yeah.

Katja: But well (…) I don’t understand absolutely anything about politics, but I like more this current model that we have now in Finland, that’s why communism came into my mind. [laughs] This democracy we have in Finland, I like it.

RH: So you dislike something like pamphlets or something like that?

Katja: What’s a pamphlet?

RH: I don’t know, information (…) of the ideological kind.

Katja: Well, I can’t call it brainwashing but I don’t like that they just tell me ‘this is how things are’. I want a really very good argumentation for things.

(Focus Group 1, students at a vocational school)

Upward Moral Boundaries: Case Eero

Eero is a 30-year-old man living in a big city in the north of Finland. I recruit him through a local Facebook group, and he is instantly keen on being interviewed. After negotiating with his boss about what day he could take off from his work at a kiosk, we meet at a cosy Vietnamese café that he has suggested.

Eero has worked in different customer service positions since he was 15: in telemarketing, in cafés and lunch places and in a supermarket. His life is very much defined by his current job at the kiosk. The job makes him so tired that in his free time and holidays he mostly wants to stay at home alone, usually fixing computers (‘if I spend a couple of days on my own and practically lock myself into my apartment (…) I get more energy’). The work is exhausting also mentally, especially because so many people behave badly and Eero feels the need to keep them under control (‘sometimes I’m very close to blowing up and punching someone in the face’).

Eero’s cultural practices are, in general, typical for a young man of his generation, and some are, again, tightly related to his identity in customer service: he likes heavy music (‘I guess it is a counterbalance for all that joyfulness and positivity that they expect from me at work’) and reality TV (‘the previous kiosk owner was an ex-police, I always heard police stories from him’) and is open-minded about food (‘Chili sandwiches or garlic sandwiches or Thai food, I always try something new. Usually, I fail four times, and then I succeed’).

Eero engages little in highbrow-oriented participation. He reads sometimes (his favourites are The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and A Series of Unfortunate Events) but never goes to classical music concerts, to the opera or the ballet (as a child he was often ‘dragged’ to the theatre by his mother). Still, he draws no upward aesthetical boundaries. Instead, he draws strong upward moral boundaries upwards, and even those are linked to Eero’s job. For instance, he finds that he cannot go to bars or be seen drunk as he works in the public eye (‘I don’t like the idea that I would fool around out there drunk, and customers would see me wasted’). He is indignant about the bad behaviours of many customers and has started a one-man ‘restoration of discipline’ at the kiosk: ‘If there is no respect for the salesperson, there is no salesperson’.

This attitude sometimes pours out as hatred of all the hierarchies around Eero. When I ask him about the day of his dreams, he imagines a scene in which he would be ‘in control’: he would take the wheelchairs away from the invalids, slander passers-by (and his mother) and discipline cars for parking wrongly. At the same time, he invests effort in putting people right on various internet forums that he follows (‘there are few extremes in Finland, and there are two possibilities – either you are with them or against them (…) if some people in those organisations try to bring up a point without any point, typically I start to shout about it at them’). In Eero’s case, moral boundaries are predominant at the expense of nearly insignificant aesthetical boundaries. In this sense, Eero is a good example of how moral boundaries can become essential for understanding how cultural distinction works (Lamont 1992). Furthermore, his case exemplifies well how exactly moral standards can become an alternative for showing worth when there is a lack of economic and/or cultural resources (Jarness and Flemmen 2019; Lamont 2000).

We have seen that moral boundaries directed upwards are an essential part of the resistance discourse. The interviewees that felt that highbrow-oriented cultural practices were distant and sometimes even repulsive often considered the ‘upper’ groups morally dubious: picky, fastidious and badly behaved. This echoes well with Jarness and Flemmen’s (2019) findings about the fact that there is a symbolic market for a certain kindness of the upper groups among the lower classes: as long as the upper groups are perceived of as ‘ordinary’ or ‘nice’, the hierarchy is not challenged. My interviewees, even many of the most unprivileged ones, expressed feelings that went even beyond this point: they had strong ideals about abandoning hierarchies and about achieving equality. The kiosk worker Eero happens to quote the famous Jantelagen (Sandemose 1933/1936) almost to the letter when talking about the kiosk customers: ‘Many have started to behave exemplarily when someone has reminded them from time to time that, “hey, you are dealing with people here, you are not more special than anyone else, now try to behave”’.

Conclusion: Resisting Hegemonic Tastes and Lifestyles

The resistance discourse is strongly inclined towards popular and everyday cultural participation. In unison with a resistance towards highbrow-oriented culture (which comes out, as we have seen, through feelings of unfamiliarity and discomfort and especially aesthetical and moral upward boundaries), there is also popular and everyday participation, such as going to popular music concerts, watching television, browsing the internet, hunting, going berry-picking and so on. One might ask: In that case, why was this discourse labelled “resistance’? Because the core of the discourse is based on an opposition and resistance to the norm of highbrow-oriented cultural participation. The affirmation discourse embraces and strives after this norm, the functionality discourse treats it with indifference, and the resistance discourse is opposed to it. This opposition is related to a recognition of one’s own lower standing in the hierarchy and the identification of cultural capital as something of which one is dispossessed. This leads to feelings of being an outsider and being left out—that is, to a modern version of Willis’s ‘caged resentment which always stops just short of outright confrontation’ (1977/2017, 120), a rejection of cultural practices considered middle-class, though always from an underdog’s position.

It is probably only logical that the many methodological challenges of the interviews were especially related to the resistance discourse. The interviewees close to the resistance discourse often expressed their discomfort and resistance, directed both against the formal interview, the topic of the interview—cultural practices—and the interviewer herself. This has been extensively touched upon in a previous paper (Heikkilä and Katainen 2021), but to summarise it should be said that the different forms of counter-talk appearing in the interviews could be interpreted as expressions of resistance to neoliberal accounts of economic and cultural success (Lamont 2000). One can also conclude that paying closer attention to the parts of the interviews that initially appeared failed—‘obscene’ jokes, mocking, deviations from the topic and so on—was key for understanding the different processes of meaning-making, class distinction and boundary-drawing.

The boundaries drawn in the resistance discourse were basically all directed upwards. They were either aesthetical (directed against highbrow-oriented cultural participation and items described as disgusting, intolerable or ridiculous) or moral (directed against people considered snobbish, hypocritical or picky). In the underprivileged groups interviewed by Jarness and Flemmen, all upward boundaries were mostly moral (Jarness and Flemmen 2019). Here, the differences to my study are twofold. First, I found clear and strong aesthetical upward boundaries that seemed to repeat the classical patterns of strong aesthetical intolerance described by Bourdieu (1984/1979). Second, and much more importantly, the Finnish resistance discourse does not draw symbolic boundaries downwards, unlike its Norwegian counterpart. Here, there are no signs that ‘one part of the working class is content to describe another section of the working class as feckless and without taste’ (Bennett et al. 2009, 211) or that lower classes would use the same boundaries that are drawn against them to maintain respectability (Skeggs 1997).

How, then, is the resistance discourse related to egalitarianism? There are clear signs of anti-institutional sentiments and even of anti-establishment ideas (Gest 2016), whereby the ‘system’ has stopped working for underprivileged groups, which is one of the ‘deep stories’ Kantola et al. (2022) identified in their recent study on the Finnish society. Many interviewees felt that their cultural participation was worth nothing in the eyes of the groups higher up in the hierarchy. To summarise, there is a profound awareness of exploitation (Skeggs and Loveday 2012) in the resistance discourse. There is thus a strong pull towards the ‘fatalistic worldview’ that De Keere (2020) describes as dismissive, anti-establishment and non-conformist—therefore, for people close to the resistance discourse, ‘the way to counteract and survive this situation is by not abiding by the rules and instead emphasizing one’s own hedonism, straightforwardness and non-hypocrisy’ (De Keere 2020, 5). However, this is not the whole story. The resistance discourse also expresses a desire to subvert the hierarchy and to establish equality more strongly regarding cultural practices and beyond. People close to the resistance discourse are aware of their low status, but they call for being treated as equals and are not keen to naturalise or legitimise class inequalities through moral judgements (see Jarness and Flemmen 2019). In this sense, they still lean more towards more collective values of egalitarianism, which De Keere (2020) defines using a distinction between the cultural and the economic lower classes, linking the former to egalitarianism and the latter to a fatalistic worldview. This is also corroborated by the finding that there are no downward symbolic boundaries drawn in the resistance discourse. One could thus argue that in the resistance discourse, which clearly is situated the furthest away from normative cultural participation, there is some idea of an intra-class solidarity and a desire for egalitarianism.