Ordinary People Doing Culture: Symbolic Boundary-Making and Ethnically-Marked Heritages in Three Provincial Cities in Northern Germany

The proposed poster will give an overview of my Ph.D. research on processes of symbolic boundary-making in the ethnically-marked cultural arenas of three provincial cities in northern Germany. Special attention is paid to preliminary research outcomes, which I would like to discuss with fellow conference contributors and visitors. Employing perspectives from cultural sociology and critical heritage studies, my project reconstructs the diverse, situated, and context-specific ways in which heritage is employed as a cultural repertoire of valuation (Lamont & Thévenot, 2000) to produce membership formations. The comparative situational analysis (Clarke, 2005) is based on three case studies: A city with a significant number of inhabitants with a Portuguese family history, a former Dutch garrison city, and a city in the rural region of East Frisia. In all cases, I engage with a range of festivals and (ethnic) volunteer associations. The category of cultural heritage is one of the main drivers of national and supranational cultural policies promoting social cohesion, cultural diversity and economic development (i.e. (European Commission. Directorate General for Research and Innovation., 2015) Some critics see such heritage regimes (Bendix et al., 2012) as mere vehicles for a capitalist accumulation of symbolic resources and for the installation of cultural hegemony. Certainly, the influence of such regimes goes beyond the reach of policies and associated bureaucratic apparatuses towards everyday modes of life. Starting from within the latter realm, heritage understood as a cultural repertoire serves as a resource people draw on to make sense of their world. While the effects of heritage regimes on local communities of practice have been thoroughly studied in the emerging field of critical heritage studies, this project further explores “the social side” of heritage-making. I, thereby, engage in the messiness and multi-directionality of multiple logics of heritage-making “on the ground”. The preliminary research outcomes discuss forms of symbolic-boundary-making and different logics of valuation in relation to, firstly, the operation of political and bureaucratic heritage regime institutions. Secondly, I unpack the gendered motivations of engaged volunteers, which are driven by the logics of sociability and care, and thirdly, I engage with a range of other, often more relevant cultural repertoires employed by actors in the cities’ cultural arenas. All these aspects raise broader questions about the limits of heritagization, about conflicting relations of everyday cultural productions to cultural policy regimes and about the category of heritage itself. Bendix, R., Eggert, A., & Peselmann, A. (Hrsg.). (2012). Heritage regimes and the state. Universitätsverlag Göttingen. Clarke, A. E. (2005). Situational Analysis: Grounded Theory After the Postmodern Turn. SAGE. European Commission. Directorate General for Research and Innovation. (2015). Getting cultural heritage to work for Europe: Report of the Horizon 2020 expert group on cultural heritage. Publications Office. https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2777/745666 Lamont, M., & Thévenot, L. (Hrsg.). (2000). Rethinking comparative cultural sociology: Repertoires of evaluation in France and the United States. Cambridge University Press.