Alexander Vander Stichele
Cultural omnivore
It is said that the prototypical cultural omnivore is young and highly educated. Due to societal changes which took place from the second half of last century on, these young and highly educated people are brought up differently than the age cohorts preceding them, who were very often raised according to the humanistic ideal of Bildung. As a consequence the post-war generations are supposed to have a more relativistic view concerning culture and the traditional distinction between high culture and low culture. That's why they participate in high cultural activities as well as in activities that used to be considered as low or popular. In contrast to the 'Highbrow Bildungburgers' the omnivores do not participate in order to reach a prototypical image of 'the developed individual'. They rather participate because they are longing for authentic experiences through which they can develop their own and true identity. It's not really the kind of cultural activity that counts for them, but first of all the potential experience a specific activity can offer. During my presentation, I want to elaborate on this idea. In the first stage of my research I constructed a typology of the cultural participants in Flanders, using statistical techniques. One of the groups of cultural participants I discerned could be labelled as 'cultural omnivores'. Selecting people from this group, qualitative in-depth interviews took place in the second stage of my research. During these interviews, special attention was given to the experience cultural activities offer to an individual and to their possible search for authentic experiences. I will present the first results of these in-depth interviews. --http://www.um.es/ESA/Abstracts/Abst_rn2.htm [Jun 2006]
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