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The amateur – the one who loves is an assay about the conditions of existence for

amateur theatre in the region of Västerbotten, Sweden. During the last 20-

something years the number of active amateur theatre-companies has gone from

being a well-established form of cultural expression to being absent in the majority

of the Västerbotten-communities. The purpose of this essay has been to

understand why the people who are still active amateur theatre-performers-and-

(volunteer)workers is interested in this form of art and which kinds of conditions

of existence matters and enables these people to live their amateur theatre-lives.

To be able to answer to this purpose it has been important to meet and speak to

people from different parts of Västerbotten, why the study is multisited with

shorter visits to several different places. By doing so, I have interviewed 12 people

who still are, or used to be, engaged in amateur theatre, and I also visited three

different amateur theatre companies to observe while they were rehearsing.

Theoretically, the starting point has been the term culture and cultural theories

such as a gleaning from Pierre Bourdieu's theories of practice where field,

conditions of existence, habitus and symbolic capital has been identified in the

empirical material and clarified with the help of feeling-work from Erin Hurley

and orientation from Sarah Ahmed. The results have shown that the participants

who has been interviewed all have (or used to have) three things in common: a

great passion and love for the arts, an urge for self-realization and a longing to be

part of a field or community of practise. But depending on where you live and

where you come from, your conditions of existence differ quite a lot - even within

the region of Västerbotten.