Despite the long history of debating its meaning and its current unprecedented ubiquity both in scholarly and popular discourses, little is systematically known about how “culture” is conceived by ordinary people. This paper examines how evaluations of the contents and boundaries of expressive culture are patterned among people in and across present-day European societies, and to what degree these evaluations associate with sociodemographic and politico-cultural divisions. Using survey data collected in 2021 in nine European countries and applying latent class and multinomial regression methods, the analysis reconstructs Europeans’ boundaries of the concept of culture – which objects, places and practices they see as belonging or not belonging to culture, and with which objects they remain ambivalent. The results show that the classical distinction between narrow (exclusive) and broad (inclusive) notions still structures Europeans’ evaluations of expressive culture, but it operates in several modes and with national and sociodemographic variations. In contrast to traditional assumptions, the narrow evaluations are associated with lower-status groups, while the upper-status groups embrace broad notions of culture. Moreover, the broad evaluations are associated with factors such as cultural cosmopolitanism and liberal-progressive political attitudes, highlighting the potential of extending cultural stratification research by the “bottom-up” study of patterned evaluations and understandings of the concept of culture itself.

尽管对其含义的争论由来已久，而且目前它在学术和大众话语中空前普遍，但人们对普通人如何构想“文化”却知之甚少。本文探讨了当今欧洲社会中的人们对表达文化的内容和边界的评价是如何形成的，以及这些评价在多大程度上与社会人口和政治文化分歧相关。该分析利用 2021 年在九个欧洲国家收集的调查数据，并应用潜在类别和多项回归方法，重建了欧洲人的文化概念边界——他们认为哪些物体、地点和实践属于或不属于文化，以及他们对对象仍然是矛盾的。结果表明，狭义（排他性）和广义（包容性）概念之间的经典区别仍然构成了欧洲人对表现文化的评价，但它以多种模式运作，并随着国家和社会人口的变化而变化。与传统假设相反，狭隘的评价与地位较低的群体相关，而地位较高的群体则拥护广泛的文化概念。此外，广泛的评价与文化世界主义和自由进步政治态度等因素相关，凸显了通过对文化本身概念的模式化评价和理解的“自下而上”研究来扩展文化分层研究的潜力。