Understandings of culture in nine European countries: Advancing the study of cultural stratification

Abstract

“Culture” is omnipresent in contemporary commercial, media, popular, and scholarly discourses, but how ordinary people from different social and national backgrounds understand the concept’s meaning is largely unknown. Knowing this is crucial, as different understandings may reflect underlying hierarchies, divisions, and conflicts that remain hidden unless systematically unravelled. This chapter adopts a bottom-up approach to map Europeans’ understandings of culture – their patterning, mutual relationships, and wider networks of meanings. Moreover, it investigates how these understandings are associated with major sociodemographic divisions like age, gender, education, place of residence, and religion across nine European countries. Using structural topic modelling on comprehensive survey data, the study finds that Europeans have both narrow (e.g., culture as institutional arts) and broad conceptions of culture (e.g., habits and lifestyles, human activity in general). Some understandings are more openly normative and specific to particular national-geographical contexts than others (e.g., culture as cultivation in France and Spain). The chapter highlights the social correlates of such understandings, arguing that this under-studied dimension of cultural stratification matters socially, politically, and when rethinking cultural policies.