Co-author Nasser-Philippe Michaëlene Gabryel
Introduction
In the last fifty years, cultural institutions have been questioned from various points of view, as producing purely nationalist narratives, as controlling the interpretation of icons and texts through symbolic violence, as reproducing social and cultural inequalities instead of reducing them, and, even worse, excluding the minorities from the cultural feast. The relative inefficiency of democratizing cultural policies is well documented now, and new initiatives have been developed to answer part of the questions raised by social critique. It is too early to come to conclusions concerning the outcomes of the first institutional devices aiming to produce an inclusive European cultural community. In this paper, that is still inchoative and awkward, we would like to delineate what we call the new landscape of cultural legitimacy in Europe. The assault on dominant forms of culture has not put an end to the claim for recognition. If the dividing line between dominant culture and other forms of expression has been moved and sometimes been blurred, this does not mean that we have constructed an equalitarian cultural public sphere. Our further contribution to the project will address this issue more concretely. For the time being, we need to explore the conceptual frameworks through which we think of cultural meanings, and assess their recent transformations. In our paper, we will move constantly from concrete examples to more theoretical assertions. Our aim is to come to grips to the main topic through case studies and observation.
This is why we start with a concrete example. Budapest, August 2015. Sziget Festival. A cosmopolitan crowd of young people, coming mostly from Europe, rallied in Sziget Island, renamed Island of Freedom for the occasion, with the purpose to enjoy night and day a large offer of international popular music. Small groups waved large national flags or were clad in their country colors. They did not stop waving them during the concerts that could last for ninety minutes or more. Sometimes, regional flags were waved-Brittany was the most present. When asked to interpret the gesture, organizers and older observers answered that it was not a nationalist statement, but rather the display of a sense of belonging and a way of being identified by others in a friendly way. They noted that the phenomenon was rather recent and was less significant in the first years of the festival. No need to say that no European flag was waved in what remains one of the most important gatherings of European youth, Eastern and Western. In the meantime, the migrant (or more appositely refugee) crisis intensified and the Hungarian government decided to erect a wall made of barbed wire to stop the influx of migrants from Serbia. As the young and well-groomed young people were warmly welcomed at the festival gate, the government subsidized huge posters along the highways expressing their discontent with the migrants. The conflation of those two images is an apposite symbol of what might be called the present cultural situation of Europe. On the one hand globalized cultural industries provide the public with a cosmopolitan offer that pleases Bretons as well as Bulgarians. The claim for roots, quite present in the World music section of the festival, is clearly less important than the production of a homogeneous soundtrack, based on heavy percussions, a constant binary rhythm and a huge amplification system, the lyrics being mostly in English. On the other hand we have a country that, though having been a member of European Union since May 2004, has developed a heavy nationalist rhetoric based on references to Christianity and to strong identity claims.
How to go further in order to make sense of those contradictory pictures? Things are not easy since identity, cosmopolitanism and culture are not simple notions to handle, and since we do not want, as social scientists, to reproduce neither bureaucratic language nor activist discourse on identity and culture, just adding a little bit of sophistication to the new mainstream discourse on diversity. This does not mean that we must stick to a “deconstructionist” mood or a mere critical stance, aiming to unmask interests and ideologies. Social critique and critical sociology have shaken the grounds of the previously established forms that distributed and guaranteed symbolic contents in society. As we put it in our proposal, the “entire cultural ecosystem has changed, which has radically altered – and at the same time, intensified – the relationship between cultural identity, cultural heritage and cultural expression”.
In this paper we seek to develop analytical tools that will allow us to deal with these transformations This implies that many sociological categories developed either before those changes or during the time of their emergence are no longer fitted to give an precise account of the current cultural shaping of societies. If we take as a major reference the standard survey Enquête nationale sur les pratiques culturelles des Français, started in 1973 and undoubtedly a model of large-scale analysis of cultural behavior (Donnat 2010), we are doomed to overlook a significant part of the phenomena that we want to shed light on. The survey cannot grasp anything related to minorities, for instance. This is largely due to the peculiarities of the French statistical system that is itself dependent on an abstract and universal vision of the Republican contract. But the debates, that have frequently taken a true dimension of cultural war, are far from being reserved to France. If France seems constantly reluctant to “multiculturalism”, a confused notion that should be deconstructed, cultural conflicts arise in societies that have for a long time circumscribed a form of social space for “minorities”. Many of the debates are now transnational: this is largely due to the flows of communication initiated by the digitization of symbolic products, but also to the facts that major cultural struggles are no longer limited by national settings but tend to become globalized: in order to understand cultural changes, we must refer to emerging forms of collective action that are based on the rapid circulation of symbolic models, structures of meaning and processes of “framing”. The best example remains the Occupy movement in recent years, based on the borrowing of cultural forms from one country to another. Thus the usual comparative work that distinguishes between national traditions to account for different treatments of minority cultures is slowly losing its explanatory power: think of the widely used opposition between France and Britain, the latter being labeled more open to the acceptance of minorities. Both countries experience the same type of claims and of protests, and do not provide significantly different answers. Generally speaking, we are ill-equipped to deal with those issues in routinized sociological terms. The foundations of the sociology of culture have been seriously shaken in the last thirty years, but no alternative analytical frame has been developed either. The legitimacy theory (so central in Bourdieu’s Distinction) has undergone a legitimacy crisis (Bourdieu 1984). But this does not mean that forms of symbolic domination have vanished in the air. One can assume that they exist in different ways. Gramsci’s concept of hegemony may have resisted better, but it is so universally used that it tends to lose its sharpness. The omnivorous hypothesis, developed mainly by Richard Peterson, is a promising one, but it has led to “aporetic” conclusions. One might say the same about Bernard Lahire’s profuse attempts to revise Bourdieu’s theory by showing dissonant appropriations of culture at the individual level (Lahire 2004). The huge success of the notion of “creative society”, although it has been criticized and challenged from various standpoints, as added to the general confusion. Creative society deserves our attention as a social phenomenon and as a cultural mythology (in Barthes’ sense) but should not be welcomed by the “Hallelujah chorus” of the social scientists, as Philip Schlesinger appositely wrote (Schlesinger 2008).
We need to reassess the concepts that we use in order to account for the emergence, stabilization and decline of cultural forms. Writing this paper in the summer of 2015, we are confronted with a major cultural and political crisis of Europe that should force us to be cautious about providing quick answers to the question: to what extent are minorities and the migration process becoming a part of the European heritage? First, because the process is ongoing and fierce cultural attitudes are developing all over Europe concerning the definition of traditions or the reclaiming of cultural rights. There is a growing confusion between citizenship issues and religious claims, slowly undoing a long historical process of disentanglement between the modern individual as an autonomous unit and her religious ascription. Thus, what would have been considered in the past as the integration of the less-skilled segments of the working class is now defined as the “Muslim question in Europe”. Analysts, even when they show a link to a “leftist” tradition, tend to define increasingly social groups in terms of ethnicity or religion. Although we do not claim that we should go back to Marxian basics, as we acknowledge that the symbolic level is not the mere reflection of a structural base, we do not want to lose sight of the social elements that continue to play a part in cultural disputes. Whatever Bourdieu’s weaknesses, particularly when it comes to the legitimacy theory, he gave us some keys to avoid the dissociation between a material and a symbolic level. In some ways all struggles are symbolic or at least fueled by symbols. Domination is produced through the belief in the efficiency of some symbols over others. Symbolic domination is a truly relational property. It can exist if, and only if, symbols are sustained by beliefs. In the last half century, and particularly since the end of the 1960s, a growing gap has developed between the promises of representative democracy and the different brands of critical discourse, sociology being central in the process since Alvin Gouldner’s pioneering book The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (Gouldner 1970). Cultural and social claims have been most of the time linked to the emergence of new fields of scholarship (black studies, gender studies and the like). Critical knowledge is undoubtedly one of the legitimizing tools of cultural movements. Fabo Rojas has brilliantly shown how black power and black studies were closely knitted together (Rojas 2010)
The instant disenchantment that followed the end of existing socialism has added a new weight to the phenomenon and increased what we may call the symbolic crisis of Europe. This discrepancy between institutional discourse and “popular” feelings and resentment is now a major dimension of our symbolic world. More than the critique of the radical left, that remains to a large extent a middle class phenomenon (dominated by white and educated people), the main outcome of the political-symbolic crisis is the emergence of new types of conservative discourse, either the neo-nationalism of white dominated classes or the neo-religious claims of a part (seemingly expanding) of the migrant workforce and their inheritors. Cultural clashes develop along these lines rather than about the stratified tastes that Bourdieu identified in Distinction. It is not easy to give a precise picture of the situation, since statistical apparatuses are not fit for making those new cleavages visible and since sociological observers may be misled by some actors who are more vociferous than others and whose weight is overestimated.
Our contribution to the project will be twofold: the first goal is to unpack various cultural contents, either produced by recognized cultural institutions or delivered by cultural industries out of any legitimate claim. The issues related to minorities (and to migration too) can be taken up from an institutional perspective: how cultural agencies, museums and theaters deal with the problem constitutes a necessary step. But we should not forget in future work less visible phenomena that appear in cultural habits as well as in religious claims. In this respect, we want to analyze processes rather than entities. This paper is undoubtedly a first step and its construction makes sense only if it can trigger reactions from the stake holders. Our second objective is to revisit sociological and political theories that deal with the rise of minority cultural claims. How is the cultural public sphere reconfigured by those claims? Where is the locus of legitimacy and recognition in a fragmented world? Knowing that cultural institutions as we know (and sometimes cherish them) are the outcome of nation-building processes, what is the main building force of current cultural constructions? How can we live together, equal and different, as Alain Touraine once put it (Touraine 2000) ? What type of cultural covenant is possible? Are we doomed to the cultural war of all against all (culturale bellum omnium contra omnes)? How can we insert into the frame a type of cultural and emotional experience that is more and more central, largely due to the circulation of images, namely a new form of banality of evil, terrorism in everyday life? The globalization of everyday life is experienced through the blind killings that affect every day large parts of the world and quite frequently Europe now. European construction was justified by providing peace and abundance to all citizens. The Charlie and Hyper Cacher killings in Paris last January clearly illustrates the phenomenon, coming after other cases in London, Madrid and other places. Gérôme Truc has recently analyzed, in his dissertation, what he calls “concernment” about deaths that do not occur in our neighborhood but strongly affect our structure of feelings (Truc 2014). They have obviously very different symbolic and political weights, as the comparison between the emotion triggered by the bombings in London and Madrid and the reaction to the mass drowning of migrants in the Mediterranean clearly shows.
We do consider that a reassessment of the concetp of legitimacy is a necessary step to reconstruct a valid set of analytical tools for analyzing cultural dynamics. The first part of our paper is devoted to this issue. It might look a little bit abstact at first sight but it is made clearer by a set of concrete examples taken from heritage or cultural consumption issues. The concept of legitimacy is to a large extent obsolete and in the mean time continues to frame a large part of the debate, that deals with the recognition of forms of expression. Another way of presenting the question we want to raise is the following: from legitimacy to recognition. Thus, in the second part, we will try to identify the new paths of recognition by which previously dominated culture come to institutional existence.
- Beyond cultural legitimacy
1a. Culture, symbol, belief
The history of cultural sociology shows clearly that attempting to develop a unified field of research is an impossible task. We would like to clarify the meanings of culture, at least tentatively. If we stay close to classical anthropology, we have to take into account the fact that culture means all the symbolic devices which allow us to acknowledge the coherence of a social group through all the signs and the practices it uses in an organized and somewhat homogeneous space. We need then to focus on the proceedings which guarantee a stabilized meaning, through varied, but coherent means in a given culture, to rituals, practices or objects. Culture is here the other name of a universal symbolic ability (Sperber 1974), about which social sciences must describe variations in space and time: there is a permanent tension involved between the transhistorical symbolic capacity and the inhexaustible diversity of local cultures, which is the result of the infinite combination of cultural objects by which a culture is actualized. The notion of symbolic system is located at the crossing of those two dimensions : it allows to decode a culture, which means that a systematic encoding is presupposed, even if there is no real anthropological interest in code construction.
The attention paid to an encoding process raises the question of the historical constitution and the non genetic transmission of symbolic systems, but also the question of their possible obsolescence and of the reroutings and reappropriations they undergo through time, whatever the systemic level of stability. All the symbolic orderings are simultaneously historical and cultural : they exist only if members develop beliefs about them and if they adhere to them, which does not mean that they are fully submitted to them or complete fools. Studying the modes of belief must be included in the analysis of symbolic systems. The relationships that we develop to cultural objects and institutions in contemporary societies clearly illustrate the variability of modes of belief. In a survey of the Avignon Festival we have shown that a cultural institution could be at the crossing point of different ways of believing, and could include, from many of its members (actors as well as spectators), a role-distance that did not prevent them to adhere to the Avignon cultural agenda. The criticisms of the founding myth (popular theatre as a fictional construct of a “national community”) as well as the indifference concerning the justifications of such a massive symbolic mobilization do not threat the institution : a cultural object allows multiple holds and thus multiple meanings within a single meaningful space (Fabiani 2002). Cultural objects never exist in a separate space : they are necessarily framed into institutions that, as Gérard Lenclud shows, after Searle, exist only if they are susceptible of beliefs, which actualize and stabilize them (Lenclud 2003, Lenclud 2014). The decline of institutions by lack of belief leads to the waning of cultural objects inasmuch as they are meaningful. If they survive to “cultures” as institutional proceedings grounded on a definite type of coherence and cohesion that actualized them in a given time as supports of belief, it is because they are reinvested by different acts of belief which reenact them in a new symbolic ordering : this appears clearly in the diversity of revivals, reuses and inventions of tradition.
If the central goal of empirical sociology is to give an accurate account of the forms of existence of cultural objects, it changes the locus of the questioning: instead of postulating the primacy of a systemic analytical grid focusing on symbolic coherence within a given social space (either a traditional society, or an ethnic group, a social class or a complex society), it considers as a prerequisite the attribution of a central place to non-coherence, misunderstandings, anachronisms and multiple appropriations of cultural items. One can object that such a standpoint belongs to a time prone to be doubtful about symbolic coherence as such. It is not necessary to give an ontological privilege to plurality or to dissipation and to consider that all cultural objects can be described as “open works” as Umberto Eco coined them more than fifty years ago (Eco 1962). Special attention paid by interactionist sociology to misunderstanding, ambivalence and ordinary mistakes shows much less an interest for micro-social pathologies than for the description of how meanings are constructed and may last, most of the time in an equivocal mode. Systems of relation between symbolic forms are never as transparent and univocal as structural analyses claim it. Cultural objects exist only if they are objects of belief or institution. That is the reason why sociology of cultural objects has to be grounded on a full historicization of its objects and on the pragmatic dimension of culture is really taken into account in the research program. Since Max Weber, conflict and domination have been at the core of sociological questioning, and widely used in the analysis of symbolic forms. However, the notion of symbolic domination, or symbolic power has been largely disconnected from the pragmatist aspects of symbolic efficiency. Thus the presupposed legitimate hierarchy of cultural objects is never analyzed from a standpoint were belief is taken into account. Besides, the postulation of a legitimate hierarchy leads to a sort of realist illusion that makes the “System des Beaux-Arts” the model of cultural ordering. We must say that culture is neither a material reality, nor a real symbolic reality, but a set of pragmatic acts. The analyses using the notion of material culture (Poulot 1997) or, more generally, the interest shown for objects in social sciences (Appadurai 1986) have been fruitful, as they increase knowledge about formal orderings that condition symbolic functioning, but they may lead to realistic illusions and, even worse, to the anthropomorphizing of objects.
How can we describe the coexistence of the different cultural forms present simultaneously in a given society (whether broached from the production or the reception of works) ?Above all, we have to reconsider the interpretative systems that we have resorted to in order to analyze the diversity of cultural products and their corresponding consumption styles by relating them to a theory of symbolic domination based on the observation of the existence of a legitimacy scale. Intended for showing the existence of a cultural scale, several (non-equivalent) pairs of terms exist: high/low, elite/masses, learned/popular, legitimate/illegitimate (sometimes, “free”), limited production/widespread production, and though more rarely, noble/common.
The increasing number of these pairs is sufficient to show that there are several uses for the principle of cultural hierarchization: strong uses (linked to a legitimacy theory that groups all cultural consumption significations into a single domination issue) and, more often, weak uses, limited to exploiting the usual empirical observations regarding social characterization of cultural frequentations (Fabiani 2003, Fabiani 2007)
In fact, we often forget that social agents perceive in a variety of ways (and as a rule indistinctly) the cultural hierarchies to which sociologists assign very precise social ranking functions. Many hasty conclusions concerning cultural preferences are the simple result of the misunderstanding that sets in between the sociologist whose job consists of standardizing the cultural corpuses, at the cost of a true takeover by force (in order to be able to scale them, to assign to them a coefficient of symbolic productivity that presupposes the setting up of a general equivalent), and social agents who are confronted in actual life with both the considerable heterogeneity and the incommensurability of cultural objects. Moreover, a fair mastery of practical knowledge concerning the hierarchy of genres is not necessarily to give rise to the internalization of norms conferring a particular price on works labeled as “legitimate”. This appears clearly through a research on reading in the particular world of prison: knowledge of correct reading criteria does not automatically lead those surveyed to hide their tastes or to express them in the form of denial or self shame. A female prisoner, recounting in detail her ability to read Harlequin series books successively, replied to the investigator who asked her if she had been a serious reader before her imprisonment: “Oh come on, reading Harlequins isn’t serious reading!” (Fabiani 1995)
The overlapping of terms referring to a cultural legitimacy also contributes to the confusion. Products can be legitimate – in the sense that they belong to the dominant culture – without necessarily being “learned”. In his historical sociology of opera, Emmanuel Pedler
shows that “learned cultures do not constitute the dominant cultures of the elite” (Pedler 2003). Thus, the huge number of degree-holders among operagoers is not contradictory with their choice of favoring Italian opera, the least “learned” segment of the repertoire. The relationship between a culturally dominant position and an appetency for “learned” products is not a simple one. It may happen that we have trouble making a distinction between the issue of historical transformations that characterize cultural production and consumption, and the theoretical and methodological criticism of the principle of cultural hierarchy.
1b. Under what conditions can we talk about cultural legitimacy?
Here, we analyze legitimacy in its strongest use: when it is linked to a theory of power. Obviously, it is in Max Weber’s works that we find its first formulation, through a general legitimate violence theory, of which the educational system theory elaborated in La Reproduction in reality constitutes only one particular application (Bourdieu and Passeron 1970). In an explicitly Weber-like affiliation, it is indeed the capacity of legitimate representations to contribute to the maintenance of power that endows the theory with its explanatory potential. The imposition of legitimacy, which is at the root of the operation of symbolic violence, is only effective if, while deploying itself it conceals the “balance of power that is the basis of its force” (Bourdieu 1984). The strength of the legitimacy of an action or a symbolic device is derived, ultimately, from the force of the groups whose interests it expresses. In the case of education (and particularly for the situation in France in the 1960s), the solid character of the inculcation device (demonstrated through pedagogical authority) makes it easy to update the structural affinities between the values of the privileged classes and the particular systems dedicated to the scholastic reproduction of legitimate culture.
Things get complicated when we export the idea of legitimacy towards social universes that can be less easily described in terms of a system. Such is the case with cultural production and consumption, which appear like so many “worlds”, to use Howard Becker’s fruitful notions, characterized by specific histories and codes (Becker 1982, Fabiani 2015). The exclusive (and of course simplistic) definition of the art object as the “objectification of a relationship of distinction” (Bourdieu 1979)is justified only by the fact that “its appropriation supposes dispositions and skills that are not universally distributed”. The opening pages of La Distinction appeal most explicitly to the legitimacy theory: “the more one goes towards the more legitimate domains, like music or art, and, within these universes, ranked according to their modal degree of legitimacy, towards certain genres or certain works, the more differences in scholastic assets are associated with significant differences in both knowledge and preferences”. Thus, a legitimacy gradient does indeed exist.
In the last quarter of the 20th century, sociological work on culture has recently concentrated instead on re-examining the effectiveness of the division between learned and popular culture when this division is dissociated from the historical process of its emergence. Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson (Mukerji and Schudson 1991) observed that work on popular cultures played a central role in the social sciences during the last quarter of the century: the innovative capacity of popular cultures is primarily based on the fact that their rapid development has shaken up the presuppositions that held together the constituted knowledge in this domain, and challenged established disciplinary boundaries. It is true that the spectacular appearance of communication and cultural studies departments, to say nothing of specializations concerning minorities, owes much to the academic observation of the established cultural order – an observation that cannot be dissociated from the morphological upheavals that occurred in the Western academic world-popular culture being synonymous here with subordinate culture, expression of the situation of minorities and offering a choice of ammunition to newcomers in academic competition.
In this respect, most of the numerous studies dealing with the cultural practices of the subordinate have attempted to establish that the subordinate were implementing complex skills in activities where we had only seen the coarsest gestures. The dimension of rehabilitation is incontestable here. It suffices to add that the ideological message of the social sciences since their constitution usually implies the expression of a form of cultural relativism. Sociology has had a central role in this domain: even while the members of the Frankfort School were continuing their fight against mass culture, the empirical sociologists, from David Riesman (Riesman 1951)at the beginning of the fifties to Herbert Gans in the seventies (Gans 1974), have not stopped defending the merits of non-legitimate cultures. As the authors of Rethinking Popular Culture note, the border between the culture of the elite and popular culture is still the subject of patrols and the barriers are maintained, for political and social reasons much more than for purely esthetic reasons. Research in social science has thus been a party to the process of corpus de-hierarchization that has marked cultural life in the last half century.
The reflection on culture lead by Michel de Certeau intersects a certain number of these themes, particularly when it comes to acknowledging the creativity and the invention of anonymous practitioners in their daily actions or when it becomes imperative “to analyze how the cultural operation modulates itself on the different registers of the social repertory and the methods thanks to which this operation can be encouraged” (Certeau 1974). One of the main contributions of Michel de Certeau, whose work has been badly received by the sociologists of cultural legitimacy-undoubtedly because he weakened, without seeming to have taken them as a target, the very foundations of their theory, lies in the disqualification of the conventional uses of the notion of “popular culture”. By posing a radical question: “Where are we other than in learned culture? Or if preferred: Does popular culture exist elsewhere than in the act that suppresses it?, Michel de Certeau associated the learned operation with the decomposition or the “repression” of a culture: “It is when a culture no longer has the means to defend itself that the ethnologist or the archeologist appears”19. More than forty years after its first publication, the article on the “beauty of the dead” offers a still satisfying conceptualization of the process of heritagization: recent history furnishes him with a good number of examples. But Michel de Certeau’s reflection on culture has another merit: it is practically the only one to face head-on the question about what can awkwardly be called the “legitimacy crisis” of legitimate cultures: “the discrediting of authorities is our experience”. This observation can be applied to cultural authorities. In an enlightening analysis of one of the highest practices in the constellation of cultural evenings out (the opera), Emmanuel Pedler affirms that this has become a minority practice: including among the ‘upper’ classes, the distances between the learned arts – particularly musical – have lengthened in a very noticeable way (Pedler 2003). Since Pedler’s pioneering work, many studies have documented the inexorable decline of the taste for learned music. Stéphane Dorin has shown a similar process of aging in the classical music audiences throughout Europe (Dorin 2015).
Basically, the main interest for maintaining the reference to the idea of legitimacy lies in its capacity to explain the selection process of works or genres that transform the social contexts of their consumption and produce new configurations of meaning. Although quite old now, Lawrence Levine’s work shows how Shakespeare, whose works served as a medium for genuine popular entertainment during the nineteenth century in the United States, became at the turn of the 20th century the very example of high culture (Levine 1988). The change of status of Shakespeare’s works is strongly associated with social and cultural transformations: the decline of rhetoric and oratory art in education, for which Shakespeare’s works were a preferred medium, but also in social and political life, cumulated its effects with the progressive segregation process of the audiences; the theatre ceased to be a meeting place for different social groups. Since that period, a growing fragmentation has characterized the cultural offering in the United States. Levine’s work illustrates the fertility of a study of cultural goods in terms of process rather than in terms of a homologous stratification of objects and publics. But it also invites to consider with suspicion the mechanical use of the high/low or learned/popular pairs, which leads to considering culture on a vertical plane, and to being trapped by homologies that dissimulate both the historical production processes regarding the meaningful contexts of works, as well as the multiplicity of forms of relationship to works.
At the end of this journey through the flourishing of cultural objects and the multiplicity of their forms of existence, we can measure yet how far we are from a general theory on culture. The preceding remarks have only permitted the illustration of the dangers of hasty theorizations about cultural production and consumption. Nowadays, observations about cultural practices are insufficient for furnishing the necessary effort for conceptualization. It is thus towards the ethnographic approach that we must turn in order to increase our knowledge about forms of relationship to cultural objects, which we know henceforth can no longer be referred to a unique model. The globalized democratic requirement has produced a dominant discourse which associates eclecticism, diversity and identity: but we cannot draw too many fruitful insights from that discourse to improve the anthropological conception of culture. How can we go further? The questioning about the dead ends of the cultural legitimacy theory may have nurtured some kind of crude relativism. The real question does not lie here: how can we think, within a multicultural experience, the reflexive dimension of culture ? We saw that the Avignon audience expressed distance and skepticism while going on believing in the summer ritual efficiency. It is not only in complex, modern or postmodern societies that reflexivity is at work. Gérard Lenclud gets back to the classical example of Azandé studied by Evans-Pritchard in order to show that skepticism about exorcists is common although a world without exorcists is properly unthinkable by them (Lenclud 2003, Lenclud 2013). It is true that modern western art gives a high status to generalized reflexivity, based on a production which is widely self-referential (Fabiani 2007): but a reflexive space is a constituent of every symbolic institution. Although the present condition of humanity gives more importance to reflexivity, it is not specific to it. It would be useful to reorient empirical studies about cultural forms and practices which have constantly privileged their reproductive dimension, by insisting on socio-cognitive aspects of cultural appropriation, and by taking account of reflexive forms present in our relationship to cultural objects. Then culture in its restricted meaning (“cultivating arts”) may offer an easier access to study the reflexive part of any symbolism, since in the simplest, or archaic artistic expressions, a form of self-distance conditions the efficiency of symbols. Without such a distance, without the belief in the possibility of opening a clearing in the forest of symbols and of changing the angle from which we look at constructed objects, we can envisage neither art, nor culture.
- The paths of generalized recognition
It thus seems useful at this point to leave theory aside in order to attempt to describe today’s regimes of production of cultural legitimacy. We will successively deal with four topics. The first is that of the new forms of heritage preservation that have recently invested various spaces. The second is that of the ever widening of the circle of recognized objects. The third is that of the development of communal cultures.We will close this part by examining the process of heritagization of the Other.
2a New conditions for preserving national heritage
If we consider the question of national heritage, we easily see that the legitimate criteria about what should be preserved have been the subject of diverse extensions. It is no longer simply a matter of relics that can “fix”, illustrate and define national history”, according to Jean-Pierre Bady’s commentary about the first development of the historical monuments concept as it appeared in France in 1790 in Aubin Louis Millin’s National Antiquities collection (Bady 1990). Today, everything can be invested with procedures of heritage preservation: chateaux, but also locomotives and menhir statues, as well as the flimsiest relics of the rural world. Chronological limits no longer exist: immediate history is one of the principal domains of protective fervor, and the notion of making everything a place of memory contributes to legitimizing the most apparently unorthodox decisions. The development of untangible heritage is the last step in the direction on the heritagization of everything.
The extension of the objects available for illustrating national memory, or more recently European memory, has been the most striking feature of heritage procedures in various countries. If the nation-state was the first provider of norms of protection and restoration, we are now confronted with the multiplication of agencies devoted to the constitution of heritage lists and with – to the inexhaustible domains of cultural diversities that multiple territorial, professional and other collectivities represent, as well as to diverse historical experiences largely exceeding the strict definition of national history. The Unesco World Heritage List is a case in point: first because it is based on diverse forms of campaigning about a place of interest through the accumulation of symbolic capital, that may be close to a traditional definition of heritage or incorporate elements of identity or historical claims. The nation-stale is no longer detaining the ultimate canons of legitimization. We are witnessing, not always very clearly, the explosion of the taken for granted notion of national history in favor of the diversification of the components of public interest. The partial decentering of procedures of protection, present in various European countries, is the consequence of taking into account the recognition of the multiplicity of viewpoints about national heritage: the state is no longer the only one to speak, even if it still has the last word most of the time. Besides traditional normative speeches, nowadays we also hear different voices impersonating local interest or minority interest. Elected officials and cultural agents are mobilizing various resources so that the urgency or inanity of such and such a measure is recognized. Regarding national heritage, public interest is henceforth defined, partially at least, from a local space of negotiation.
The result can only be the growing heterogeneity of protected heritage, which is none other than the sum of the politico-administrative conjunctures that surroundedthe decision-making process. The multiplication of heritage agencies and agents is undoubtedly a relatively minor matter. More profound is the ambiguity of the message delivered by the new normative process: the prevailing cultural relativism, which leads to believing that all forms of architectural expression are equal, or more exactly, that they all correspond in their way to a specific legitimate order, can only end up in the convulsive multiplication of related to heritage preservation gestures, never allowing a glimpse of a possibility of establishing coherence. In this, policies on national heritage preservation simply translate one of the dominant forms of contemporary cultural sensitivity based on the apparent de-hierarchization of forms of expression and their generalized equivalence.
A contradiction is thus at work in the process of preserving national heritage: cultural heritage is simultaneously the legacy we have received from preceding generations and the bric-a-brac (inevitably sundry) we have decided to keep even though they have no longer have daily use. As Yvon Lamy remarks in his attempt to describe how legitimization authorities function nowadays regarding national heritage decisions, “heritage received is constructed at the same time” (Lamy 1993). The preservation of national heritage cannot be disconnected from the proliferation of learned speeches about the most ordinary objects and practices: the future of this operation is evidently the disappearance of all non-learned culture since all practices susceptible of being conserved must be justified by discursive devices.
For more than forty years we have noticed the flourishing of new initiatives regarding local or minority heritage, whether these are expressed through historiographical devices, collective manifestations (resurrection, readjustment or invention of rituals, diverse expressions of commemorative passion), or through the development of new forms of tourism. If it is evident that all these practices draw another configuration than the one that has characterized the production of local history since the nineteenth century (existence of an appreciable network of learned societies, stabilization of an indisputable demarcation line between the local and the national, the individual and the universal), we nevertheless lack instruments that would permit us to analyze all the implications of this vast movement to “preserve” personages, moments, or territories, and that would permit us to redefine the local.
However, interpretation scales exist. Localized social analysis has constituted an attempt to examine the emergence of these phenomena based on the cultural dynamics characteristic to certain social groups (particularly the “middle class”). However, this kind of explanation quickly reaches its limits since it does not rely on attentive observation of the production process of these new national heritage elements. The issue of the “invention of traditions”, particularly as Hobsbawm and Ranger defined it, is useful, even though it has sometimes been tarnished; but it only permits analyzing a part of the considered phenomenon. As for the thematic “places of memory”, it seems to constitute more an element of the object to analyze than it does an explanatory tool (Hobsbawm and Ranger .1983)
It is a common observation that the relationship between “local” (with greatly variable construction principles and scales) and national or universal is in the midst of transformation. The ethnology of the diversified social practices that lead to the preservation of national heritage can contribute to the analysis of the productive styles of the territorial units that are mobilized in order to define a symbolic coherence (these, we know, can have very diverse contours). Today, what we call the demarcation line between the local and the national is completely blurred, and the preservation of national heritage incontestably represents one of the areas of its re-composition.
The social networks from which are organized – or that give rise to – processes for national heritage preservation constitute an essential dimension of the re-composition of “learned” and “popular”. The identification of local heritage in its diverse components occurs, in fact, through the refined description of forms of association on social “stages”. Meeting on these stages are professional historians, with their activities and specific demands; the public “at work”, with activities that question the dividing line between producers and consumers; and symbolic resource centers (archives, libraries, museums), whose forms of constitution and access condition local history while being conditioned by local history. As such, the erudite local is simply a face among others, even if he is central: a member of several learned societies, he crosses affiliations that intersect other types of relationships (kinship, locality, sociability).
But competition logic sets in among different types of producers, and the proper functions of sorting and selection that the different legitimization authorities operate (whether the academic community or those who produce certified forms of national heritage) are sure to affect the recognition and the development of objects. The question of recruitment by associations and learned societies is essential, as is the question of the forms their collective organization takes (communication of information, selection of objects), and conflict situations. Today, heritage represents an essential political object at the local level.
2b. Equalization of expressive forms
The second empirical observation concerns the permanent extension of the circle of recognized cultural forms of expression. It is not just in the academic field that the dividing line between high and low has been questioned. I will take just one example, which also represents a classic case. Jazz, defined in the hierarchy built by Pierre Bourdieu as an art on the path to legitimization, is alternatively qualified today as the most learned of popular music or as the most popular of learned music, while it is perhaps neither one nor the other. It offers the occasion at least to raise the question about the reality of changes in social status of a symbolic form over the course of history. The very idea according to which jazz could have hefted itself, by a series of successive efforts, to the level of learned music is very largely an illusion. In an already dated work (Fabiani 1986), that improvised readers mistakenly took for a contribution to legitimist cultural theory, I had attempted to describe the specificity of jazz in France from the study of the interpretative frameworks that have made it possible to listen to this type of music (the paradoxical combination of the learned and the primitive: “there would be no jazz without the history of learned re-appropriation of the primitivism and exoticism of the pulsed beat”). In the case of France, the analysis in terms of a promotion process that Richard Peterson proposed while distinguishing three phases: folk (traditional form of communal expression) / pop (big commercial production) / fine art (art recognized as such), is perhaps not the best means for understanding the specificity of jazz, “the sum of very different musical practices, social frameworks and consumption styles” (Peterson 1997). This work probably found itself still trapped in the straitjacket of legitimacy, or at least in the obsession of an issue about institutional recognition of cultural objects. Recently, criticism of this interpretative model was taken much further. In a recently published work, Antoine Hennion and Sophie Dubuisson thus affirm concerning design “that traditional history was wrong when it summed up too quickly the evolution of all minor art, as a long effort, seldom successful, to access the status of major art. This relationship is already inadequate since it gives privilege to the desire for consecration and for conforming with a central model: in fact, the minor practices are often defined by the strong sense of their particularity and by the danger that threatens them of blending into the mold of legitimate art. The social sciences must respect at least their strong ambivalence vis-à-vis art with a big ‘A’ Hennion and Dubuisson 1995: 13). This critical point of view is particularly apposite when it comes to minority cultures.
2c. The development of communal cultures
The internationalization of cultural goods markets has favored the development of a cultural object status as identifying and as the vector of a communal identity. This type of association is not new insofar as the mobilization of specific cultural traits, whatever their real age, authenticity or native character, is constitutive of identity construction.
Contemporary styles expressing are no longer associated with a state apparatus understood as a device producing legitimate symbolic violence. The cultural identity demands that have appeared since the sixties rarely have a monopolistic character, with the exception of those understood to be a prelude to constitution of a state. If they do not always escape the temptation of withdrawal, confinement or regression, if they are sometimes lead unconsciously to reactivate reactionary schemes of thought, it nevertheless remains that they very rarely have a monopolistic ambition. Rather, identity appears through these cultural objects as the ambition to practice on an egalitarian stage where old distinctions have disappeared. Cultural objects in this case are much more objects of identification than of distinction. It goes without saying that the production of these differences supposes mutual recognition of a common space in which they can be represented, failing which the specter of “cultural war” can find a reason for renewing itself. One of today’s big cultural stakes lies in the constitution of a genuine multicultural stage, which one can legitimately believe has nothing to do with a world folklore meeting, or with neo-colonialist exploitation of “world cultures” on the stages of northern countries.
While certain sociologists do not hesitate to evoke the inexorable decline of the great models of legitimate culture and the growing powerlessness of “cultural clergies” to recruit followers, we observe that the growing development of expressive forms is explicitly referred to a community or a territory life.
2d. The heritagization of the internal Other
The recognition of multiple memories in a single society that are equally worth preserving are to some extent the consequence of the weakening of a central normative discourse. Cultural policies “avant la lettre” accompanied the building of the nation-state and offered a coherent picture of the cultural order: on the one hand, the national culture, conveyed by great institutions and embodied in heroic figures and in great works, forming a pantheon; on the other hand the folklore as a way of dealing with the residual symbolic matters, always anonymous, anti-heroic and doomed to be mute unless accounted for by a learned interpretive frame. The folkloric model was exported to the colonies in order to produce a cohesive image of the colonized as bearer of an anonymous set of traditions which were made meaningful if the colonial administrator, officer or anthropologist provided a symbolic grid. This process has been described after the end of formal colonialism in a book that triggered a controversy almost as heated as the one that Max Weber launched with his Protestant Ethic. Edward Said’ s Orientalism made explicit the process of construction of otherness as a mode of domination and brought in a form of suspicion concerning all the cultural devices developed along modern history to give an account of the non-Western symbolic and life forms. Preceded by anti-colonialist accounts such as Fanon’s violent attack on colonial violence and followed by subaltern, feminist and queer studies, Orientalism has become the central part of a now dominant narrative about the forms of European cultural domination over the rest of the World. Clearly more attention is paid to the wrongdoings of European imperialism, particularly British and French, rather than to the expansion of new ones. Of course, historical analysis can be exported or reemployed to account for the current situation: but most of the time, European history, from the Enlightenment on, is blamed first. It comes as no surprise then that the Charlie killings in January 2015 were explained by prominent US leftist intellectuals as the consequence of “French cultural arrogance”.
The popularization of post-colonialist theses has had important consequences on the public management of memories. Nations or social groups within nations continue to bear the crimes of their ancestors and they must be accountable for them. The clearest case is slavery. There is no time lapse for crimes against humanity. Thus in France the CRAN (representative council of black associations) accuses baron Ernest-Antoine Sellière, the former president of the Wendel group and former leader of the French “patronat”, of having “benefited” from slave trade, want him to be sued in court and to repair for the crime that was perpetrated by his ancestors. He is not guilty, the Cran says, but a large part of his inherited fortune is based on the slave trade and he should be prosecuted for this reason. Although not guilty, he can be accused of crime against humanity. We need at this point to clarify the notion of social guilt. Guilt is a complex social construction that creates a space for alternate instruments of measurement, reciprocity, jurisdiction and individualization, but also for the legacy of guilt. We should keep in mind that there are specific social uses of guilt. There is a management of guilt too, that aims to produce effects that amount to the production of a counter-hegemony through the use of a form of counter-symbolic violence. What is at stake is to make the other guilty and to maintain her in a stable state of guilt. The right to forget, that Yehuda Elkana theorized in a controversial but courageous text, is thus made impossible. A fair amount of the globalized ethical game consists in charging one’s enemy with guilt about his present actions or his ancestors’ behavior. In the present social and political uses of guilt, denunciation is the main impulse and becomes an usual tool in the public sphere as well as the permanent comparison of various forms of social suffering. Cultural issues are mixed with processes of legitimization and de-legitimization of claims dealing with wounded identities. Contrary to former conceptions of guilt in society, it does not seem that the dimension of renunciation that Paul Ricoeur identified as a key element to settle the case is present (Ricoeur 1953). There is no possibility of settlement, no possible end of the dispute. The past is an inexhaustible reservoir of claims. In Xavier Beauvois’ movie Des dieux et des hommes, that recalls the murder of Tibehirine catholic monks in Medeah (Algeria), the Wali (governor) of the city attributes the Islamic insurgency to the consequences of French colonization. Social guilt is associated with a process of collectivization: every member of the community is supposed guilty, even if she has not personally taken part in action; guilt is not extinct with the death of original perpetrators (Fabiani 2015). The politics of reparation is based on that assumption.
Most of the repairs are situated at the memory level and they may be materialized in terms of museums, cultural centers or monuments. As the state has no longer the monopoly of public memory, a competition develops between groups unequally equipped with symbolic resources. As the memory of the extermination of European Jews has been the object of an intense memory work since the late 1940s, it stands out as an exemplar of cultural and political recognition and is frequently taken as a standard for different mobilization. This attitude ignores the exceptionality of Shoah and the peculiarities of the post-war political context, particularly, but not only, in Germany. The production of a public memory dealing with the extermination of Jews- inscribed in cultural or educational institutions was precisely linked to the reconstruction of nation-states and to the emergence of a new European public conscience. Armenian and Palestinian claims are the most frequent examples of the quest for what might be called “a Shoah equivalent”, but less tragic historical conjunctures may be the object of analogous justifications too. The public sphere tends to become a huge forum for minority claims, as the frame of the nation state is less and less able to cope with the issues. More than that: the global public sphere is increasingly constituted by these types of claims, as the study of transnational mobilizations clearly show (Tarrow). This means that contrary to more “traditional” claims (workplace disputes, territorial mobilizations) minority cultural claims exceed by nature the limits of the nation state: first, because they challenge the nation-state which, in the construction of a national narrative has neglected the minorities and they need to find external resources to be fully recognized; second, because symbolic mobilizations tend to be increasingly transnational, through the action of NGOs or international networks devoted to a cause (Armenia and Palestine . This does not mean that the state disappears from the stage. Most of the institutions devoted to the cultivation of minority memories are still public ones and they are likely to be initiated or guaranteed by the state. The privatization of culture has not touched them yet: the minority or the migration museums do not have blockbuster exhibitions and they do not attract many sponsors, at least for the time being. Cultural institutions that organize the public display of minority groups are still taken in the frame of the nation state: as such, they represent the updating of the national narrative. This is particularly the case in France where the weight of immigration had been downplayed or sometimes hidden (Noiriel 1988). The development of the Cité de l’immigration in Paris or the MUCEM in Marseilles does not imply a multiculturalist turn, but a form of limited correction of national history.
The theoretical basis of the process is undoubtedly the concept of multiculturalism. Although it is seldom acknowledged as a legal frame of action, it has become a frequent way of dealing with the multiple problems that arise from cultural and religious diversity. Established forms of treatment of those issues, such as toleration and equal rights in terms of voting or access to social benefits are considered insufficient. Advocates of multiculturalism plead for “group-differentiated rights”, according to Will Kymlicka ‘s well-known definition (Kymlicka 1995). The basic unit is no longer the individual, but the group, that is presupposed as homogeneous and non-stratified: the condition of possibility of the minority claims is based on the sameness of the members of the group. Collective identity is strong, and it transcends other differences. There is a well noted paradox here: in a time when the identity of the individual has been challenged by literature and the social sciences, collective identity is more and more taken for granted, as if minorities were less individualized than majorities. Indigenous people and immigrants have been the best example of these groups. There is an implicit assumption here, that is not always noted as much as it should be. The minorities are less differentiated than the dominant categories. The individual’s identity is predicated on her belonging to a collective through the sharing of ethnic, social or religious characteristics. Economic, political or cultural handicaps are always seen through the lens of the group and not as the effects of class domination or the division of labor. Another striking point: the group is never defined as a transitory reality, susceptible of being changed through collective action. The equalization of objective conditions should lead to the disappearance of the group claims and consequently the group as “truly disadvantaged” (Wilson 1992). But things are not so clear, since groups are duly essentialized in the process. Multiculturalism has turned culture into a political concept. Cultural claims are central political claims, perhaps the only legitimate ones. Of course, the concept of culture remains vague and its manifestations are more religious, ethnic and linguistic than strictly cultural. But culture must be understood in an anthropological sense here, and multiculturalism can be viewed as an anthropologization of politics. Claims are both about the present, aiming to establish derogatory practices for the members of the group, but also about the past, as collective memory is a form of negative social capital that can be turned into positive through the public recognition of ancient sufferings through museums and educational devices, according to the powerful logics of stigma inversion. One must mention that the spectacular display of cultural issues has been a powerful tool in the past sixty years. In the United States, the civil-rights movement in his traditional, non- violent form devoted to legal issues, has been superseded by more active types of claims based on multicultural rights. The political stage has become a cultural stage, stricto sensu: collective action is more and more analyzed in terms of performance, and cultural elements are usual weapons in struggles. This is an illustration of the very concept of CulturalBase: cultural conflict has become the core of social conflict, as the notion of “cultural war” shows. Multiculturalism is an explicit critique of liberalism and contractualism. Even when it is not clearly communitarian, multiculturalism does not envisage the individual as the basic unit of society. This function is devoted to the group. This is the reason why liberal critiques of multiculturalism have developed, stressing that its claims were a regression to pre-modern vision of society, where the individuals’ rights were discarded or simply constrained. Anti-multiculturalist claims are now almost as vocal as their opponents, and the debate is not closed yet. As multicultural rights are not recognized in illiberal societies, one can say that their most favorable political system remains liberalism, although they challenge its foundations. Albeit obvious, this paradox is not clearly seen by the diverse actors onstage. What do the politics of recognition mean really (Taylor)? If the recognized are easy to identify, who is the recognizer? Is the recognizer changed in the process, as in Hegel’s concept of recognition? It seems that the critique of liberalism borne by multiculturalism necessitates a liberal frame to make sense, at least for now. This contradiction is central in the cultural debate now, and should be an object of our discussion in the near future.
In this respect, migration museums are worth examining, since they offer, within national frames, a tentative response to the accommodation of some dose of multiculturalism.
Joachim Baur has shown the importance of migration museums in « recentering » the nation in a more multicultural dimension in Australia, Canada and the United States (Baur 2009: 20). Of course, the practical effects of this form of display have not been fully measured yet and we can just assess their institutional presence in society and their legitimizing capacity. Recent migration museums have changed the point of view on the nation-building process in a direction more sympathetic to the immigrant. This position as clearly been easier to defend in the “new world” where immigration was inbuilt in the national narrative. It has been less simple in Europe, particularly in France: we have more difficulties imagining ourselves as the product of successive migratory waves, although we are too. Gérard Noiriel ‘s pioneering work has brought back the migrant in French history, as a major component of the industrial working class, where Italians, Polish and more recently Arabs have been so important (Noiriel). The relative failure of the Cité de l’immigration in Paris, that President Sarkozy refused to inaugurate, is an excellent example of this reluctance, close to a form of psychoanalytic repression. Here he discourse of assimilation presupposes the negation of the migratory process, as integrated citizens must forget their past in order to become true French people. New Museums that deal with the Other, such as the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris or the Mucem (Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations) in Marseille are characterized by a strong aesthetic focus, that has been fiercely contested by many anthropologists, who would prefer a discourse centered on domination and social conflicts. Other European countries, where colonialism was not as central in political life, have succeeded in opening new spaces for the migratory fact. Claire Sutherland’s analysis of the Museu d’Historia de Catalunya sheds light on this process: “The exhibition features the theme of migration throughout; it emphasizes Catalonia’s Mediterranean and to a lesser extent, European context; it presents Catalonia in contrast to a range of Others; it acknowledges Catalonia’s cultural expansionism…These features serve to highlight the changing, porous nature of territorial borders and the impact of immigration, trade and conquest throughout history…” (Sutherland 2014:122). In the museum narrative, Catalonia is constantly oriented toward the sea and very seldom towards Spain. Thus migrants flow are considered as “constituents components of Catalan national identity” (Sutherland 2014: 123). The acknowledgement of migration as a key-part of Catalan history is undoubtedly commanded by the new national narrative that tends to ignore Spain and to stress the peripheral elements in the construction of a new country. This example shows how the dynamics of neo-nationalism in Europe can make some room for multicultural components. However, it should not be considered as a general rule: in other cases, for instance in Corsica, the reality of migration is not acknowledged and the Other does not play any significant part in the narrative. It is to early to come to conclusions concerning the effects of migration and minority museums on the development of a polyphonic narrative about populations. The Jewish museums that may be the most successful examples of minority museums remain an exceptional case. One can say that the migration or indigenous institutions have known a greater development in the new world, for to reasons: first, the process is never a hidden part of the “imagined community” (Anderson) but a strong component of the founding myth of a nation; second, the indigenous people are no longer a significant actor onstage, and it is much easier to deal with what de Certeau, Julia and Revel called “the beauty of the dead”. In Europe, things are most difficult since the migratory dimension is seldom a component of the national founding myth. On the contrary, the process of unification presupposes a form of ethnic homogeneity, even when it is defined at a very abstract level. Second, the issues related to post WW2 immigration, are still very hot and one of the main resources of the neo-nationalist far right movements that prosper in Europe now. New museology is a very interesting sub-discipline, but it lacks the dimension of reception studies on a broad scale: not much can be said concerning the symbolic and political effects of these new cultural institutions, at least for the time being.
This paper is a just of point of departure. We aim to start a fresh discussion with the stake-holders of the program. We have decided, for methodological reasons, to break away from stereotyped visions of Europe that are the natural consequence of the bureaucratic development of the Union. We wish to maintain the conditions of a critical discourse that should not be a dismissal of the European construction, but on the contrary, a way of advancing together.
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