Fragmentoituva kulttuuripolitiikka : paikallisen kulttuuripolitiikan tulkintakehykset Ylä-Savossa

Abstract

The aim of this study was to analyse public debates on local cultural policy in the early 1990s. The starting point was the idea of fragmentation: the field of cultural policy is fragmented into several subdivisions and subpolitics, which are independent but might easily come into conflict with each other. Non-institutional action influences more and more the "official" cultural policy, too. The main task of the study was to identify the local cultural political frames: the rhetorical and semiotical interpretation of cultural politics as the political actor's linguistic resource storehouses. The empirical research focussed on 10 local and regional debates on local culture and the municipal cultural policy of Ylä-Savo in the 1990s. The data of the study were collected from the local and regional press, from public documents concerning the case of regional cultural administration in Ylä-Savo, and from a tape recording of "the session of the court of cultural affairs" in Ylä-Savo (Ylä-Savon kulttuurikäräjät). The study adapted two different methods: Perelman's theory of argumentation and Greimas' semiotics. Both theories were utilized in constructing interpretative frames. The field of cultural policy and the play of politics around it were sketched with the aid of Pierre Bourdieu's concept of 'field' and Kari Palonen's Polit-analyse. The study identified two dominant narratives of Finnish cultural policy in the official documents: the prototype of national culture (from the middle of the 1800s to the 1960s) and the cultural policy of the welfare state (from the 1960s to the end of the 1980s). In the 1990s no single dominant 'story' can be indentified. There are many heroes of cultural policy: the cultural entrepreneur, the therapist and the strategist, all of whom have their own narratives. There were five frames of local cultural politics in Ylä-Savo at the beginning of the 1990s: the opponent of public cultural services, the defender of public cultural services, the patron of the arts, the cultural strategist, and the supporter of cultural democracy. The cliques based on personal cultural and political preferences struggle against each other for territory in local cultural life. In this situation it is important to ask how decisions are made in the fragmenting society of minorities.