Cultural Competence Effect on European Territorial Identities

Bourdieu argues that acquired cultural competences are used to legitimize social differences. Cultural competence is easily transformed into symbolic capital, which can be utilized as a means in the process of distinction and establishing one’s social position or habitus. The competence of recognizing and interpreting the manifestations of territorial identities is also symbolic capital, even though it might be more difficult to transform into an asset.

The responses in the data indicate, however, that respondents with high cultural competence were not only able but also willing to perceive and interested in perceiving cultural events as manifestations of territorial identities. This can be interpreted as an indication of an aim to distinguish oneself from the less culturally competent respondents. Even if this kind of symbolic capital is not easily transformed into an asset in the structures of Bourdieusian fields, it, however, has an important role in the production of the respondents’ habitus.

Even though the territorial identities are commonly discussed in scholarly literature as discursive, narrative, cultural, and performative practices, studies have rarely deepened their investigation on these identities by analyzing the differences in the notions on them between people representing different social backgrounds. The results indicate that the social structure and the variables on which several scholars have focused in their analyses on ‘cultural capital’ had an impact on the perception and interpretation of territorial cultural identities in the reception of the ECOC events.

The rise in the educational level and in the active participation in cultural events in general increased the diversity of the respondents’ descriptions regarding their interpretations of the representations of territorial cultural identities. In addition, the respondents in higher social positions were able to describe their interpretations in more diverse ways. On the one hand, the results may indicate that the more culturally competent respondents were better able to recognize and were more familiar with the diverse representations of territorial cultural identities manifested in the cultural events. On the other hand, the results may indicate that these respondents were more competent and motivated to verbalize their notions and interpretations on territorial cultural identities.

In light of the results, cultural competence and linguistic habitus seem to reinforce each other. The respondents working in expert positions were more likely to consider that all investigated territorial cultural identities were represented at the ECOC events than the respondents gaining their livelihood from service and clerical positions or primary production and physical work. However, investigating the educational level of the respondents, the results indicate that increase in the educational level did not increase the recognition of representations of the territorial cultural identities, quite the contrary. In the case of Europeanness, the respondents with the highest educational level were, however, more likely to consider it represented at the ECOC events than any other group of respondents.

The study indicates that the respondents with low cultural competence often recognized and described territorial cultural identities as thick identities. Representations of locality, regionality, and national culture were, for example, commonly described through typical and well-known manifestations of cultural traditions, traditional cultural habits, and the involvement of the citizens of the local or regional community or the nation. In addition, respondents with low cultural competence often interpreted well-known works of art and artistic projects as representations of national culture.

In general, these respondents usually described the representations of territorial cultural identities in fairly concrete terms: Recurrently organized local festivals or other big events were often described as representing locality, while the interpretations of national culture and Europeanness were often based on the recognition of common and well-known national or EU symbols and the encounter of national or foreign languages. Thus, the respondents with low cultural competence seemed to interpret the representations of cultural identities from the ECOC events by using what Bourdieu calls the ‘everyday life code’.

In addition, the respondents with low cultural competence often related the representations of territorial cultural identities—particularly locality, regionality, and national culture—to a particular atmosphere or mentality by describing them in emotive terms. The respondents with high cultural competence were able to describe the representations of territorial cultural identities in regards of their traditionality or novelty: that is, whether they thought that the ECOC events aimed to renew or rethink the predominant notions of territorial cultural identities or strengthen them. Their interpretations of cultural identities often relied on special knowledge of arts, cultural phenomena, or history. In addition, the respondents with high cultural competence often discussed the territorial cultural identities on a more conceptual level than the less competent respondents. Thus, the highly competent respondents often brought to the fore the discussions on diverse media representations and advertisement discourses on territorial cultural identities and how they were represented in them.

The interpretation mode of the territorial cultural identities among the respondents with high cultural competence resembles the code Bourdieu calls ‘artistic’. On the one hand, the results, thus, follow Bourdieu’s views on the correspondence between cultural capital and cultural choices and notions. On the other hand, the results cannot simply be explained as reflecting the ‘choice of the necessary’, the ‘cultural good-will’, or the ‘sense of distinction’—the terms Bourdieu (1984) has used in distinguishing the tastes and cultural choices of people belonging to different social classes. Comparing the range of the Cultural Competence Index between the different thematic responses, the results indicate that the range was the smallest in the case of locality, the second smallest in the case of national culture, the second largest in the case of Europeanness, and the largest in the case of regionality.

Compared to other territorial cultural identities, the respondents were the most unanimous about the representations of locality and the least so about regionality, which seemed to be the most abstract territorial scale and the most difficult territorial cultural identity to recognize and describe at the ECOC events. In general, the results indicate that the representations of territorial cultural identities were broadly recognized at the ECOC events and diverse cultural, social, and environmental phenomena were interpreted as representations of them. Territorial cultural identities embody a vast range of meanings and their perception and interpretation are connected to various social determinants of the receivers. Territorial cultural identities are constantly negotiated in discursive, narrative, and cultural practices. Linguistic descriptions of them are performative acts producing the objects the people are describing and talking about.