The Representation of One’s Cultural Role

What do we presuppose when we speak of “audiences distant from culture”? The AMF survey, read as an anthropological document, unveils the unexamined assumptions of a cultural policy struggling to become democratic.

The good news of a survey

The Association of French Mayors (AMF) published in November 2025 the results of its first major survey devoted to the cultural action of municipalities and inter-municipal bodies. Distributed to all members between 5 and 22 June 2025, the questionnaire received 5,244 responses, of which 1,983 complete responses were retained for analysis. These responses came from 1,881 municipalities and 102 inter-municipal bodies, with a clear predominance of small municipalities: 70% of responses came from municipalities with fewer than 2,000 inhabitants.

This survey presents itself as a dialogue tool between the AMF, the Ministry of Culture, and institutional partners, with the stated objective of having a detailed overview of actions undertaken, difficulties encountered, and resources mobilised. Beyond the statistical data it produces, this survey constitutes remarkable anthropological material for anyone interested in the underlying representations of what culture means for those who fund it with taxpayers’ money.

For a questionnaire survey is never neutral. As sociologist Barbara Olszewska showed in her work on survey data (2012), the way a survey is conducted almost entirely determines its results. The questions asked delimit a framework of thought, and the questions not asked perhaps reveal even more the unexamined assumptions of their authors. This is the anthropological reading I propose here: not a journalistic or statistical summary of the survey, but an analysis of the representations it reveals, both among the questionnaire’s authors and among the respondents.

What the questionnaire presupposes

The very structure of the AMF questionnaire outlines the contours of a particular cultural imaginary. The questions address facilities, budgets, institutional partnerships, obstacles encountered in “organising cultural provision,” barriers to “access to culture.” This vocabulary is not insignificant: it presupposes that culture is a pre-existing, constituted thing, to which one provides access or whose provision one organises.

In this conception, local authorities are operators who have facilities (multipurpose halls, media libraries, museums), who programme actions (live performances, exhibitions, screenings), who maintain partnerships with institutions (DRAC, department, associations), and who face constraints (lack of resources, staff, premises). All this is perfectly consistent with what I call a “supply logic”: a system where a professional caste (elected officials, cultural officers, artists) offers to others what it defines as culture.

What immediately strikes one in the structure of the questionnaire is the complete absence of questions about the people to whom this provision is addressed. Local authorities are not asked how many of their inhabitants frequent cultural facilities, what proportion of the population participates in events, whether children brought to cultural venues return there as adults, whether people who come to see a performance retain any memory of it, whether their lives are transformed by it. No questions either about what are sometimes called “non-audiences,” those citizens who fund culture through their taxes but never benefit from it.

Even more significant: cultural rights, inscribed in French law since 2015, are mentioned only once (in a single question, with 25% of respondents indicating that taking inhabitants’ needs into account is among their objectives). But not a single question about respecting people’s cultural dignity, about recognising their own practices, about their participation in defining the policies that concern them. The inhabitant, the citizen as a person, appears in this questionnaire only in the euphemised form of “inhabitants’ participation,” in the same question as cultural rights, cited as part of cultural policy by therefore only 25% of local authorities. And even this “participation” is vague: participate in what? In defining orientations? In programming? Or simply in consuming the provision offered?

Culture as facility and event

Now, one might object that this is not the subject of this survey and that my criticism is easy, since the survey takes stock of resources for culture. The survey’s title is “The commitment of municipalities and their inter-municipal bodies to culture in 2025.” Precisely, what I am talking about is exactly this: what resources are we talking about, for what commitments? In my view, this survey’s framework of observation is far too narrow for us to have an accurate vision of the political changes that need to be made.

The analysis of responses confirms and deepens my observation. Culture, as it is represented in the imaginary of local authorities, is thus defined first and foremost by infrastructure. Multipurpose halls are present in 73% of municipalities, libraries or media libraries in 63%, heritage facilities in 61%. Then come music schools (27%), performance venues (21%), exhibition halls (20%), cinemas (17%), museums (15%).

This enumeration sketches a cultural geography made of specialised places, dedicated buildings, spaces separated from daily life. Culture, in this representation, is what happens in specific places, designed for it, managed by professionals. It is not what runs through inhabitants’ lives, what is practised in homes, in informal associations, in digital spaces, in spontaneous collective rituals. The word “amateur,” meaning what concerns spontaneous artistic and cultural practices, or not, is mentioned in no question and does not exist in the report.

The same logic prevails in the description of actions. Live performance comes first (67%), followed by exhibitions (54%), heritage activities (38%), film screenings (31%). Participatory workshops are mentioned by only 27% of local authorities, mediation activities by only 15%. This imbalance is eloquent: culture is first and foremost what is shown to spectators, well before what is done with participants, and even less what they do by themselves and for themselves.

Artist residencies, which could constitute a space for encounter and shared creation, for example, even if only partially, concern only 20% of local authorities. As for “popular education projects in connection with the associative fabric,” they appear for only 10% of respondents. Arts and cultural education, that ambition promoted for decades by public policies, directly involves only 13% of local authorities; the others delegate it to partners or participate only occasionally.

The “distant audience”: a revealing formulation

The survey asks local authorities about the “main barriers to access to culture.” The very formulation of this question deserves attention. It presupposes that culture is a good from which some people are distant, as one might be distant from a shop or a public service. The problem would thus be one of access, that is to say, of the distance to travel to reach a provision that, in itself, would be intrinsically relevant.

The first response from local authorities is striking: 45% cite the “audience distant from culture” as the main barrier. Not the inadequacy of provision to inhabitants’ expectations, not the ignorance of local cultural practices, not the exclusionary nature of certain offerings. It is the audience that is “distant,” as if this were an intrinsic characteristic of certain people rather than an effect of the cultural apparatus itself.

This formulation is politically heavy with meaning. It naturalises the gap between certain citizens and cultural provision, making this gap an attribute of people rather than a consequence of institutional choices. It implicitly exonerates professionals from any responsibility: if the audience is “distant,” it is because they lack something — education, taste, habit — and not because the provision is unsuited to their own cultural references.

The other barriers cited reinforce this representation: geographical isolation (37%), lack of facilities (35%), mobility and transport problems (31%), the presence of a low-income population (30%), the digital divide (25%). All these barriers are external to the very nature of cultural provision. At no point does the hypothesis appear that this provision could itself constitute a barrier, because it would not recognise inhabitants’ cultural practices, because it would impose codes and norms that exclude, because it would convey representations of the world alien to those of the majority of citizens.

The absence of evaluation as symptom

Another eloquent silence in this survey concerns the evaluation of cultural policies. Not a single question about the evaluation mechanisms put in place by local authorities, about the indicators they use to measure the impact of their actions, about the processes of questioning and adjusting their projects. Evaluation simply does not exist in the imaginary of this survey.

This absence is consistent with the supply logic. If culture is defined by those who produce it, if its quality is measured against aesthetic or professional criteria internal to the cultural field, then evaluating its social impact makes no sense. One can count the number of spectators, add up the subsidies, list the partnerships, but one cannot question the very relevance of the apparatus.

Yet sincere evaluation of cultural projects — not promotional valorisation, but voluntary questioning — would constitute a major lever for transformation, for its development, and for local authorities’ commitment. Documenting processes, taking an interest in individuals’ trajectories (and not abstract “audiences”), identifying what fundamentally distinguishes public offerings from private or autonomous cultural practices: it is through this work that the cultural sector could refound its legitimacy and its democratic meaning.

Primary funder, but of what?

The survey reveals that 67% of local authorities consider themselves the primary funders of culture in their territory. This feeling of being at the heart of the cultural apparatus is interesting to analyse. It testifies to a strong appropriation of cultural responsibility by local elected officials, which is rather encouraging, but it also testifies to a particular conception of what culture is.

For if one broadens the definition of culture beyond institutional facilities and events, the observation would be quite different. Citizens’ cultural practices unfold massively in spaces that escape public funding: digital platforms (Netflix, YouTube, TikTok, Spotify, etc.), amateur and self-taught practices, family and community rituals, informal exchanges. These practices represent a considerable share of inhabitants’ cultural time, and they owe nothing to local authority budgets.

To claim to be the primary funder of culture is thus to implicitly restrict culture to what institutions define as such. It is to exclude from the cultural field practices that do not pass through official channels, that are not labelled by professionals, that do not take place in dedicated facilities. This restriction is not neutral: it hierarchises practices, it delegitimises those that escape institutional control, it reproduces a form of symbolic domination — in short, it cuts the subsidised cultural sector off from the link with inhabitants, with their own culture. Yet culture is “cultures” in their diversity. This value of cultural diversity is often claimed, but unfortunately with little regard for the cultures and cultural practices of the territory’s inhabitants, which are not even observed or defined, which would be a starting point for creating links, that is to say, for exercising a policy adapted to one’s territory.

The democratic deficit

At the end of this analysis, one can conclude that the AMF survey reveals a fundamentally non-democratic cultural imaginary. Not anti-democratic in the sense that it would explicitly oppose democratic principles, but non-democratic in the sense that the democratic question is simply not raised there.

Yet culture funded by citizens’ taxes should be subject to a democratic obligation. This is not private money, this is not patronage, these are contributions levied on the entire population to fund supposedly general-interest projects. This democratic origin of funding should induce a democratic requirement in the conduct of projects.

This does not mean that everything should be participatory, that professionals would no longer have legitimacy, that artistic creation should submit to majority taste. That would be another form of impoverishment. But it does mean that citizens should be considered as full cultural subjects, whose practices deserve recognition and respect, whose cultural rights (right to cultural identity, right to participation, right to information) should guide public action centrally, and not as one of the marginal criteria of a specialists’ provision.

In a true cultural democracy, cultural policy would not simply be the sum of the programming choices of professionals and elected officials. It would be the collective construction of a space where each person can contribute to cultural life on their own terms, where some people’s cultural references are not systematically considered superior to others’, where public money serves everyone’s emancipation rather than the reproduction of symbolic hierarchies.

Towards a refoundation

I do not wish through this analysis to make an easy criticism of the AMF survey, which is quite interesting and useful to us, if only because it leads us to reflect on data that is partial but real. The people who designed it and the local authorities who responded to it are doing their best within a framework of thought that seems natural to them. It is precisely this “natural” that must be questioned. What seems obvious — culture as provision, facilities as infrastructure, audiences as receivers — is not universal data but a historical and ideological construct.

The French model of cultural democratisation, inherited from Malraux, was based on the idea that humanity’s great works should be made accessible to the greatest number. This model has produced remarkable achievements, but it has also failed to achieve its objective: sixty years later, inequalities in access to institutional culture have not diminished, and the gap between practices legitimised by institutions and citizens’ actual practices has widened.

Moving from cultural democratisation to cultural democracy means effecting a paradigm shift. It means recognising that culture is not a thing to be distributed but a process to be accompanied. It means accepting that professionals are not the sole custodians of cultural legitimacy. It means conceiving of facilities not as temples of legitimate culture but as resources at the service of everyone’s practices. It means evaluating projects not against internal aesthetic criteria but against their contribution to people’s flourishing and to living together.

The Fribourg Declaration on Cultural Rights (2007) offers a valuable framework for this refoundation: “Cultural rights aim to guarantee everyone the freedom to live their cultural identity, understood as the set of cultural references through which a person, alone or in community, defines themselves, constitutes themselves, communicates, and wishes to be recognised in their dignity.” As Jean-Michel Lucas writes, “cultural rights are not rights to consume culture but rights to make humanity together, by recognising each person’s cultural dignity”.

Culture funded by citizens’ contributions could become a laboratory of democracy: a space where new forms of deliberation, collective creation, and mutual recognition are invented. For this, we must first become aware of the representations that unconsciously imprison us. The AMF survey, by revealing the dominant cultural imaginary of local authorities, offers us the opportunity for this awareness. It is up to us to make it the starting point of a transformation.