Whose Culture(S)?

WHOSE CULTURE(S)? Proceedings of the Second Annual Conference of the University Network of European Capitals of Culture Liverpool 16/17 October 2008 Editor: Wim Coudenys UNeECC Forum vol. 1 1 ISSN 20682123 2 Table of contents Wim Coudenys Whose culture are we talking about? ....................................................... 5 Spyros Mercouris Europe's cultural & political voice - the role of European Capitals of Culture ................................................................................ 8 Marc Delbarge The European Capitals of Culture, their past, the future of Europe and the actual European awareness policy: the cases of Salamanca and Bruges .............................................................................................. 15 AnaKarina Schneider Minorities, margins, peripheries and the discourse of Cultural Capital ........ 25 Simona Romano Global material culture and design ........................................................ 35 Péter P. Müller Paradoxes in the mediation of culture for foreigners................................ 47 Çiğdem Kurt A mirror of culture: how the centers of European culture have affected its periphery the example of French literature’s impact on Turkish literature ................................................................................ 55 Mindaugas Šapoka Essen, Cracow and Vilnius in comparative perspective: contributing to a truly European history .................................................................. 63 Jürgen Mittag, Kathrin Oerters European Capitals of Culture as incentives for local transformation and creative economies: tendencies − examples − assessments .............. 70 John Bennett Answering to the audience: Opportunities and tensions in popular theatre programming with particular reference to the Royal Court Liverpool and the European Capital of Culture ............................................................ 98 Helen Churchill, Mike Homfray European Capital of Culture: whose culture? Lesbian and gay culture in Liverpool ..........................................................................................112 Vishwas Maheshwari, Ian Vandewalle, David Bamber Place branding and the Liverpool’08 brand campaign in 'City of Liverpool'..........................................................................................119 Sarah Louisa Phythian-Adams, David Sapsford Capturing public value: an experimental economist's approach to the impact of Liverpool European Capital of Culture 2008.............................127 3 Tomke Lask Local cultural habitus on the map: evaluation methods for cultural policy ...............................................................................................146 Özlem Etus Fostering intercultural understanding in pre-service language teacher education programmes.......................................................................158 Timea Németh, András Trócsányi, Balázs Sütı The need for a study to measure the intercultural impact of mobility programmes among health care students in Hungary .............................175 About the authors..............................................................................183 4 WHOSE CULTURES ARE WE TALKING ABOUT? WIM COUDENYS - LESSIUS UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, ANTWERP The present volume contains a selection of papers that were presented during the second annual conference of the University Network of European Capitals of Cultures. The conference took place on 16 and 17 October 2008 and was jointly organized by Liverpool Hope University and the University of Liverpool. The setting of the conference – Liverpool Tate Gallery in the reconstructed Albert Dock and Liverpool Hope University’s Hope Park campus – already illustrated the complexity of the conference theme ‘Whose culture(s)?’ On the one hand both locations refer to ‘high culture’: a fine arts museum and a university campus. On the other hand they also refer to the transience of culture and the conflicts between different cultures. Before Albert Dock became the tourist attraction it is nowadays, it had been the place where dockworkers toiled, and afterwards, a dump of derelict warehouses. Could there be a bigger contrast between these grey docks and a university campus in lavish green surroundings? As the present collection of articles proves, the Question of ‘whose culture’ is intrinsically linked to a more fundamental one: what is culture? There are roughly four approaches to culture: 1. Culture as ‘Fine Arts’; 2. Culture as a socio-ethnic stratification (identity); 3. Culture as a personal experience (development); 4. Culture as a set of rules within an organization (corporate culture). Obviously, there is an overlap between these different approaches, as the articles in the present volume prove. Moreover, there exists a certain degree of ‘competition’ or ‘conflict’ within and between these concepts of culture. ‘Fine Arts’, for instance, are perceived as ‘high culture’ and represent the tastes, interests and preferences of the socially advantaged. Hence, defending the interests of ‘low culture’ has less to do with its intrinsic artistic values, than with ‘social justice’. Similarly there is a conflict of interest between global ‘European culture’ and local identity. Whether European culture is perceived as a canon of highlights of European fine arts or as a anonymous, multicultural amalgam (used to distinguish Europe from, for instance, the US), each time it seems to do injustice to local identities. Moreover, within the European Union there are strong regional differences: whereas in the southern and eastern parts of Europe culture is predominantly seen as a manifestation of (the dominant) local (ethnic) identity, in the European north and west the stress is laid on culture as a representation of all social (and ethnic) subgroups. This debate is reopened every year in 5 every single European Capitals of Culture (ECoC). The third and fourth definitions of culture are less clearly represented in these debates, especially as they refer to individual experiences or sets of rules that apply to particular subgroups. However, they certainly play a role, as culture undoubtedly has an impact on both the artist and the public (consumer of culture), or on subgroups (for instance the gay community, tourist branch etc.). The articles in the present volume bear witness to the diversity of approaches of culture and hence, give different answers to the Question of ‘whose culture(s)?’ Spyros Mercouris and Marc Delbarge address the concept of European culture as such, whereas Ana Karina Schnieder, Simona Romano and Peter Müller focus on conceptual and methodological aspects of culture. Çiğdem Kurt and Mindaugas Šapoka, on the other hand, place European culture in a historical context, either as a set of (sub)cultures that influence each other (Kurt) or as a series of local cultures with identical substrata (Šapoka). The majority of the contributions deal with culture(s) in European Capitals of Culture. Jürgen Mittag and Kathrin Oerters give an overview of how the concept of ECoC has changed since 1985, notably how it has moved from an event that ‘(re)presents culture’ to one that ‘changes (local) culture’ and by doing so puts it on the European cultural map. John Bennett, Helen Churchill, Mike Homfray, Vishwas Maheshwari, Ian Vandewalle, David Bamber, Sarah Louisa Phythian-Adams, David Sapsford and Tomke Lask focus on Liverpool as European Capital of Culture: what it did to local culture, i.e. popular theatres (Bennett) and the gay community (Churchill and Homfray); how it can be assessed economically (Maheshwari, Vandewalle and Bamber; Phythian-Adams and Sapsford) or in terms of social habitus (Lask). The two last contributions approach culture from a didactical point of view: can you ‘learn’ about other cultures (Özlem Etus) or has learning mobility an intercultural impact and if so, can you measure it? (Timea Németh, András Trócsányi and Balázs Sütı) Whereas the diversity of articles in this collection is proof in itself of the diverse meanings (and owners) culture can have, it also brings to mind that their authors are also indebted to the culture they are living in. Although several authors try to come up with ‘universal’ patterns of dealing with cultural phenomena (e.g. Šapoka, Müller, Phythian-Adams & Sapsford, Lask), they all focus on a local situation or restrict themselves to one or two of the possible concepts of culture. This is by no means an inadeQuacy of the authors, but evidence of the fact that culture is rather elusive and difficult to grasp. This, of course, does not mean that we cannot try to come up with alternative definitions of 6 (European) culture.1 But this, undoubtedly, will be the subject of another conference. Literature cited Coudenys, W. 2007. Frontiers and Limits of European Culture. (Town and Gown. First Annual Conference of the European Capitals of Culture, Sibiu, 25-26 October 2007 (http://www.uneecc.org/htmls/town_and_gown_presentations.html) 1 See, for instance, my attempt during the First Annual Conference of UNeECC (Coudenys 2007). 7 EUROPE'S CULTURAL & POLITICAL VOICE – THE ROLE OF EUROPEAN CAPITALS OF CULTURE SPYROS MERCOURIS I am very glad to be here with you today because the University Network of European Capitals of Culture is a magnificent idea and a tool for helping culture to be properly understood and be therefore of immense benefit to the young people. Our times are dominated by the pursuit of money, cynicism, corruption, mistrust, fanaticism, racism,

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