Lokal översättning av svenskhet och symboliskt kapital : Det svenska rummet i Madrid 1915-1998

Sammanfattning: The main ambition in this study is to explore new perspectives on the relationship between ethnicity and symbolic capital, that is how different forms of ethnicity around a migrant group can be recognised and valued in the host society. At the same time, it is a case study that offers an opportunity to verify theories on local translations of transnational cultural forms by an empirical and historical analysis. These two fields of interest are addressed through a case study of Swedish residents and their organisations in Madrid between 1915 and 1998. Four historical periods are differentiated, based on the changing dynamics between macroeconomic conditions and different phases of the Swedish social room in Madrid. In each period the analysis focuses on how the agents in the Swedish room in Madrid construct and utilise social institutions, their relations to both the Spanish and the Swedish nationstates and the dialectics with local translations of swedishness. Both quantitative and qualitative empirical sources are used. Throughout the four historical periods, several local translations of swedishness emerge and evolve in the framework of the cultural forms of modernity. They imply a change in sign, form or signification in a spectrum between the extremes of pure local reproduction and innovative local cultural construction. Many of these local translations, but not all, enjoy symbolic capital. Several interrelated forces lay behind the relation between ethnicity and symbolic capital: dominant cultural and social forms in the context of reception, the structure behind and institutionalisation of bilateral relations backed up by the nationstates, the social integration of the Swedish room in Madrid and the social work of the Swedish agents to accumulate economic, social and cultural capital.