Sibiu International Theater Festival '06 featured speech

Cultural capital: migration, identity & heritage

A presentation by Dr. Mike Phillips during the Sibiu International Theatre Festival (SITF) 2006
Sunday, 4 June 2006, Thalia Hall

Mike Phillips:
The ideas I’m going to talk about and some of the ideas which emerged in this festival are also things to be talked about not only in Britain but across Europe.

I teach and give lectures in Italy, Poland, Germany and Denmark, and I am based in Britain. So I have some idea of the critical ideas we are dealing with at this moment in Europe. And, in fact, Europe and the collision of cultures in Europe is probably one of the most interesting things going on in the world at the moment, intellectually and culturally.

We are at the eve of the accession of Romania in the EU. We are also at the eve of a unique moment for Sibiu, when it becomes the 2007 cultural capital of Europe, together with Luxembourg.

One interesting problem is that we talk generally about this meeting of nations, and meeting of cultures, in terms of economy. Back in Britain people talk often about bureaucracy, about regulations, in conversations about culture, without gaining a very firm idea of what is it for, what it means, what people are talking about when they talk about culture.

Cultural collision
And it’s also the case when I hear people here talking about the accession. You can hear people talking about economy and the whole shape of things. You can’t actually hear people here debating about the details of what this cultural collision – which will take place, begin to take place in a very serious way next year – you can’t hear anyone talking about what that means in detail. What is a culture, who owns it, how do you preserve it, what you do with it? Not only that, but also what the use of a culture also means in other terms.

So, around this spectacle of techniques that you have observed in this festival – as I said, you could hear people talking all the time about trading, about exchange, about wanting to get back to the country. All these processes are part of what’s meant by culture and its operations. But, as I said, it’s hard to understand what people think when they talk about this. It is equally hard to find out what people mean when they talk about preserving culture, when they talk about identity and so on.

There’s one interesting statistic we’ve been hearing a lot about across Europe, which is that when accession happens, there’s going to be 300,000 Romanians working abroad and moving abroad every year. Now, that is an interesting and peculiar phenomenon, which again we need to talk about the meaning of that phenomenon in terms of culture. So, let’s talk about it a little.

Let me tell you a little bit about my current life, because I’m accustomed to talking about cultural capital as a way of exploring an idea, theorizing a network of behaviours and to my surprise, when I said ’cultural capital’ here, everyone assumed I was talking about Sibiu. So, let me distinguish what I mean.

My mistake has been to forget that in English the word capital means a number of different things, that is capital meaning a bank of resources, what you would translate as ‘capital’, and capital meaning a major city in a country, like London or Paris, and I think you would translate this as ‘capitala’ – ‘capitala culturala’.

Cultural capital
Let me make it clear: at this moment, I am talking about cultural capital as this bank of cultural resources. Cultural resources not as a place, instead I mean cultural capital as a collection of cultural resources that an individual or a nation, or a group has. Now, you can think about capital in three different important ways.

You can think about it as economic capital, you can think about it as social capital, or you can think about the one that I’m interested in at the moment: cultural capital. I don’t want you to think about these, as separate and distinct, but before we make the connections, let’s discuss cultural capital. And we can talk about it in several different ways.

For instance, your cultural capital might be having certain customs, or the ability to theorize about cultural events, or the ability to make connections between things, or the qualifications you require when you take your examinations. At the simplest level, it might be the way that you live.

I was very much struck last night at the play, ‘Electra’ directed by Mihai Maniutiu, by realising afterwards that I do not possess the cultural capital to completely understand it. When I got into a discussion about it afterwards, I understood a number of elements that I hadn’t grasped while I was watching it. Here was an instance of the use of cultural capital and what it meant, in order to create a particular kind of social value, but also in order to open up the aesthetic to you.

Of course, Constantin Chiriac and Bogdan Pastaca (I’m talking about the rapper from ‘Parazitii’) might have different ideas of what cultural capital you possess as a nation. But, at the same time, you have to have that bank of resources which means something to you.

Another way of thinking about cultural capital might be to do with objects, pictures, pottery, weapons, stories. I remember the very first time I came to Romania, a long time ago, being walked through the museum of military history by a nice gentleman from the Ministry of Interior, and he showed me the flint arrow-heads, and Mihai Viteazul, and Vlad Tepes, and all the archaeological evidence of Dacian culture.

It might also mean patterns of fabric. For instance, when I look at the television and I see folkloric singing, I see women standing like that (Ed. - taking a proud and firm posture) and little girls looking like this. And it strikes me very strongly that this is a sense of cultural capital.

I have to tell you one thing that strikes me about that. It’s to do with dancing, the different ways that is natural for people to dance. I’ll show you. Well, I don’t go to discos, but when I’m at a party and the sound comes on I feel like moving my hands and I go like that (Ed. - does a dance move). When they do Romanian folklore they do like that (Ed. - sketches a different movement).

I was struck by this sense in which we’re talking here about a basic cultural capital, something that you use in order to outline your own identity. But, cultural capital can also refer to the institution in which these things are housed. So, if you want to talk about, I suppose, the cultural capital contained in Sibiu, which is very complex, you go the Bruckental Museum and see certain things which I suppose might be described as the cultural capital of the city. But I will deal with that in a different way.

The point is that all this constitutes the cultural capital that any person, or any group, or any community, or any nations has at its disposal. So what’s the point of these things these days? Why is it important?

Well, if you think about the business of art and culture, one of the things that strikes me again and again, repeatedly, working in my business – as you know, as you heard, I am an academic, a novelist, I work as a curator in a gallery of contemporary art. In fact, the significance of the gallery that I work for is that it is the national collection of modern British art, and I work within the framework of an international art market, which has particular kinds of values, and I’m going to talk about them a bit later, but I want to make a comparison between the different ways in which we need cultural capital and the different ways in which we use it.

I want to illustrate this by giving you one example of both cultural capital and the way it might be used. In the last year or so, I think the last year, I was involved in the purchase of a painting which the director and curators of our national gallery said was a fundamental part of our cultural capital. What was interesting was that this painting was not by an English master, it was a painting by Raphael. The only reason they claimed it as part of our cultural capital was that it has been in Britain for a long time.

We have any number of things we stole, or kidnapped from different parts of the world, such as the Elgin Marbles which we kidnapped from Greece. We even have people’s dead bones lined up in basements all over London. One of the arguments that we’re going through at this moment is how suitable it is to return things. But that’s an argument which need not concern you. The point is that this particular painting was on sale, for £33 million. And the process we’ve been through is a constant transference of cultural objects, cultural artefacts, from private hands to state control. The reason for that, I will go into later.

Here’s one level of argument about cultural capital, cultural capital of the nation, which comes from a very specific background and means certain things.

The other extreme that I want you to consider is the roof-tops along the road here in Sibiu, the tiles. I was looking at a gang of seven men working yesterday, and a friend of mine told me it’s the first time he sees an operation going on in Romania where all the seven men were working at the same time – I didn’t believe that. They were repairing the roof tiles, and I remember walking down with Constantin and Nicolae Ratiu about two years ago, and they were telling me about the apprenticeship creating a particular style of tiles, restoring and so on. That is another example of a kind of cultural capital which comes out of a very different background and has a very different meaning. I want to look at the question of who needs these things, why, and what they have in common, and what the differences between them mean.

So, let’s step back a little back and talk about the relationship between various elements in this idea of cultural capital, and its relationship with other forms of capital. In order, if you like, to put flesh on these differences we talked about, between different forms of cultural capital, I want to refer to the words of the French sociologist Bourdieu, who worked in the middle of the last century.

Cultural capital (le capital culturel) is a sociological term used by Pierre Bourdieu. In ‘The Forms of Capital’ (1986), Bourdieu distinguishes between three types of capital:
Economic capital: command over economic resources;
Social capital: resources based on group membership, relationships, networks of influence and support.
Cultural capital: forms of knowledge; skill; education; any advantages a person has which give them a higher status in society, including high expectations.

Bourdieu did a great project by which we are still haunted in the cultural field. Bourdieu looked at the institutions in France and he looked at their audiences, and he looked at the relationship between institutions and the audiences, and he came to the conclusion – I’m putting this very crudely because we don’t have time to deal with Bourdieu’s words – Bourdieu came to the conclusion that there was this thing that he called cultural capital, and this cultural capital led to the development what he called social capital.

What he said was that there was an elite which ran the institutions, an elite that had kidnapped, more or less, the cultural capital of the nation, and then sold it more or less – not sold it back to them, because the nation can’t afford it anymore – have given them a minor access to the things that they (the audience) owned in the first place. The consequence of that was that the cultural capital which was locked-up and contained within the museums, the galleries, the theatres, and so on and so forth was a sort of resource which allowed a particular elite to increase the gap between themselves and the people. And the relationship between that cultural capital and economic capital is that cultural capital becomes a marker of economic superiority, it becomes a marker of your ability to protect a particular kind of resources.

I want to draw your attention to something of which you are very conscious in this part of the world, to the sense in which people who might have been, let us say, selling carpets in the street 15 years ago now have become multimillionaires. Also, during those 15 years, they have set out to buy cultural capital. In Britain 3 or 4 of our major football clubs which are important cultural artefacts, are now owned by Russian millionaires. To make matters worse, my club, Arsenal (as we say: come on you Gunners!), is moving into a new stadium which will be called the Emirates Stadium. You can’t imagine what a sort of cultural trauma that thing involves.

Who owns the cultural capital?
It leads us to the question of not only why do we need cultural capital, to which really there’s no answer: the answer really is another question – that is to say: who owns the cultural capital, what claim do we have on it, how can we say what it is, and what should happen to it?

We live in different areas of interest, and I am very much aware (and I’ll come to this in a moment) about the differences in the quality, the meaning, and the content of cultural capital between the areas in which we live. But here’s a peculiarity: one of the interesting phenomena about Europe altogether has been a concept which is called ‘democratic deficit’. ‘Democratic deficit’ simply refers to the ability or inability of Europeans within the EU to affect decisions. That is to say, you vote in a democratic process etc, but having voted, there’s nothing you can do about what happens – a democratic deficit.

One thing that struck me recently is that this deficit has been grown, and it has erected itself, in cultural terms. One of the elements which demonstrates interesting gaps in the ability to collect, to assemble and display cultural capital that truly reflects the position and the nature of the population.

This deficit tends to be, and I am turning back to a discussion we had last year, to be demonstrated and illustrated by the position of migrants. This isn’t an abstract, theoretical discussion. All those formulations that I talked about, in which the culture had been kidnapped and locked-up in institutions, also translated last year into burning buildings in the Paris banlieus. Because when you take away people’s ability to own and use cultural capital, what you get is a very strong sentiment of deprivation.

In that sense, migration has been sort of a Litmus test (Litmus paper - a paper containing dyes which change colour when exposed to acids or bases. Acids turn litmus paper pink or red. Bases turn litmus paper blue.) – a sort of test about the ability of a nation to offer the whole population a network of resources which make them feel a part of the national project. There are implications here for the future, but I don’t want to get hooked on those - on migration, or indeed on those about the ‘capitala culturala’.

It’s really only symptomatic, but here’s a question that for me illustrates the relationships of those things, that is movement across borders and the ability of people to use cultural capital to reflect their identity.

Migration & cultural capital
The question I would like to put to you is to do with the meaning of cultural capital in situations of movement and change. I want to draw your attention to something I noticed as a teacher in universities in Britain, teaching Romanians and meeting Romanians in particular, but this applies to several different peoples. And I am thinking of a particular student I have – I had – two years, three years ago, by the name of Marius.

Marius came from Iasi. He did his degree in London and he’s now a very successful young executive, always wearing a suit, very smart, just about to buy an expensive car. Marius’s attitude to Romania at the moment is total rejection, and as far as he’s concerned that was the place he left some years ago. He comes back to see his family, his mother, but that’s about it.

I want to talk about a different kind of Romanian, who comes from a sort of fairly sophisticated, elegant country and fits right in, to the same sort of level in Britain. For example, when Constantin Chiriac came to London and did a one-man shower Riverside Studios, we were turning away people who knew about him and belonged to the same cultural influences. He’s a figure here in this cultural arena. That was another sort of identity.

Those people who possess it use a particular kind of cultural capital in particular ways. I’ll demonstrate one way which is totally emblematic for me: when, at Easter, I was on holiday. What we usually do then, from Easter Friday to Easter Monday, is watch crap films on television and we buy chocolate rabbits, the Easter Bunny. What is the Easter Bunny? And we buy chocolate eggs because they are chocolate.
One of the things that really hit me last Easter, because I was invited to a Romanian home in London, was the fact that people were celebrating Easter in a way that had a sort of direct cultural link with the notion of Easter, which was clearly traditional. They didn’t buy Easter Bunnies, but they painted their Easter eggs in traditional patterns. And they didn’t go to the supermarket to buy their ready made food, but they cooked their Easter Sunday lamb. I was struck by the sense in which that was a kind of cultural capital for them which said something about their identity.

The question in my mind, which I was discussing with a Romanian student, is that if you live let’s say 22 years in a place like Sibiu or wherever, and then you move to Paris or Berlin, or London, and you live there for the next 25 years. What are you? A Berliner, a Londoner, a Parisian? If you ask a Romanian ‘what is it that makes you a Romanian?’ – this brings us back to the notion of cultural capital and what does it mean.

This is one of the things I wanted to discuss by means of this question of who owns it, what does it mean, and what do we use it for?

I raise these questions because, as I said in the beginning, we are at the eve of an important and significant cultural collision in which you and I become actors, operators within what is supposed to be either a common culture or a culture which has various different elements which can articulate with each other, but which in fact not only do not but are aggressively competing for meaning, for significance, and for ownership of the framework of identity.

I want to go back, very briefly, to what I said about the art market that I work in. As I came to from London to Sibiu, through Bucharest, a friend took me to the Peasant Museum, which I have long wanted to see, but never managed to. What struck me about it was that the artefacts in the Peasant Museum were by and large things that you could see if you go to any village in Romania. And to me that was quite remarkable, because if you live in a village in Sussex or near Doncaster and you want to know about the history and the culture which that village had 20 years ago you have to go to a museum. Here it seems, as with the example of the tiles and the roof, that people still have managed to preserve their artefacts and skills, the institutions have not managed to be strong or ruthless enough to kidnap the cultural artefacts and habitats. It appears to me that it is still the case here that cultural capital defines a particular kind of individuality and certain kinds of group identity, in a way that actually the alienated, post-modern forms with which certainly I live don’t allow people to enter into this business of ownership.

I suppose that the interesting question is what happens when those two forms meet.

About the author:

DR MIKE PHILLIPS, FRSL, FRSA
Writer Mike Phillips was born in Georgetown, Guyana. He came to Britain as a child and grew up in London. He was educated at the University of London (English), the University of Essex (politics), and at Goldsmiths College London (education).

He worked for the BBC as a journalist and broadcaster between 1972 and 1983 on radio and television programmes including The Late Show and Omnibus, before becoming a lecturer in media studies at the University of Westminster. He has written full-time since 1992. He is best known for his crime fiction, including four novels featuring black journalist Sam Dean: Blood Rights (1989), which was adapted for BBC television, The Late Candidate (1990), winner of the Crime Writers' Association Silver Dagger Award, Point of Darkness (1994) and An Image to Die For (1995). The Dancing Face (1998) is a thriller centred on a priceless Benin mask. His most recent novel, A Shadow of Myself (2000), is a thriller about a black documentary filmmaker working in Prague and a man who claims to be his brother.

Mike Phillips co-wrote Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain (1998) to accompany a BBC television series telling the story of the Caribbean migrant workers who settled in post-war Britain. His latest book, London Crossings: A Biography of Black Britain (2001), is a series of interlinked essays and stories, a portrait of the city seen from locations as diverse as New York and Nairobi, London and Lodz, Washington and Warsaw.

Mike’s play ‘You Think You Know Me But You Don’t’ was published in Romanian in the cultural magazine ‘Timpul’ from Iasi (nr.7-8, July-August 2005) after being presented at the Sibiu International Theatre Festival 2005.

Mike writes for the Guardian, is a trustee of the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Heritage Lottery Fund, and is a Curator of Cross Cultural Programmes at Tate, the gallery and museum which houses the United Kingdom's national collections of modern and contemporary art. Mike’s most recent exhibition at Tate Britain is ‘Seeing Africa’, 22 July – 29 October 2006.