What does culture mean to Europeans? : report on the diverse notions of culture. INVENT report D3.1

This report provides an overview on the diversity of the notions of culture among people in presentday Europe. It adopts a “bottom-up” perspective to the conceptions and understandings of culture, which means that instead of starting from some pre-defined notions, it presents an inductive and exploratory investigation into the notions of culture held by people in and across different European sociodemographic groups and geographical locations. The report opens with a brief discussion of the diverse conceptions of culture, the current “cultural abundance” and how the manifold societal megatrends in Europe and the western world since the latter part of the 20th century have affected both the cultural environment in which we live, and the conceptual “baggage” associated with the term culture. The empirical parts that follow are based on wide-ranging and nationally representative survey datasets collected by INVENT in 2021 in its nine countries: Croatia, Denmark, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Serbia, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK.