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Seeking to better understand what it means to grow older in contemporary Britain from the perspective of older people themselves, this richly detailed ethnographic study engages in debates over selfhood and people’s relationships with time. Based on research conducted in an English former coal mining village, the book focuses on the everyday experiences of older people living there. It explores how the category of old age comes to be assigned and experienced in daily life through multiple registers of interaction. These include ‘memory work’ about people, places and webs of relations in a postindustrial setting that has undergone profound social transformation. Challenging both the notion of a homogenous relationship with time across generations and the idea of a universalised middle-aged self, the author argues that the complex interplay of social, cultural and physical attributes of ageing means that older people can come to occupy a different position in relation to time and to the self than younger people. This account provides fascinating insight into what is at stake for the ageing self in regards to how people come to know, experience and dwell in the world. It describes the ways in which these distinctive forms of temporality and narrativity also come to be used against older people, denigrated socially in some contexts as ‘less-than-fully adult’. This text will be of great interest to researchers and students in anthropology, sociology, human geography and social gerontology working on interests in selfhood, time, memory, the anthropology of Britain and the lived experience of social change.
Iraqi women in Denmark is an ethnographic study of ritual performance and place-making among Shi‘a Muslim Iraqi women in Copenhagen. The book explores how Iraqi women construct a sense of belonging to Danish society through ritual performances, and it investigates how this process is interrelated with their experiences of inclusion and exclusion in Denmark. The findings of the book refute the all too simplistic assumptions of general debates on Islam and immigration in Europe that tend to frame religious practice as an obstacle to integration in the host society. In sharp contrast to the fact that Iraqi women’s religious activities in many ways contribute to categorizing them as outsiders to Danish society, their participation in religious events also localizes them in Copenhagen. Drawing on anthropological theories of ritual, relatedness and place-making, the analysis underscores the necessity of investigating migrants’ notions of belonging not just as a phenomenon of identity, but also with regard to the social relations and practices through which belonging is constructed and negotiated in everyday life.The Iraqi women’s religious engagement is related to their social positions in Danish society, and the study particularly highlights how social class relations intersect with issues of gender and ethnicity in the Danish welfare state, linking women’s religious practices to questions of social mobility. The book contextualizes this analysis by describing women’s previous lives in Iraq and their current experiences with return visits to a post-war society.
Living with water brings together sociologists, geographers, anthropologists, artists, writers and poets to explore the ways in which water binds, immerses and supports us. Drawing from international research on river crossings, boat dwelling, wild swimming, sea fishing, and draught impacts, and navigating urban waters, glacial lagoons, barrier reefs and disappearing tarns, the collection illuminates the ways that we live with and without water, and explores how we can think and write with water on land. Water offers a way of attending to emerging and enduring social and ecological concerns and making sense of them in lively and creative ways. By approaching Living with water from different disciplinary and methodological perspectives, and drawing on research from around the world, this collection opens up discussions that reinvigorate and renew previously landlocked debates.
that they suffer from an occupational disease – which can be incurable and fatal – one is found to encounter “new” situations which overthrew one’s old thinking-as-usual in everyday life. But, the “new” situations here in question are not akin to a migrant coming to live in an unfamiliar culture; rather sick workers find themselves to be “strangers” in an environment they used to be familiar with. Therefore, the estranged experience of sick workers should be more accurately understood in terms of another of Schutz’s concepts, that of “homecoming” (such as a sailor
9 ‘Don’t call the police on me, I won’t call them on you’: self-policing as ethical development in North Manchester Katherine Smith Introduction This chapter explores the relationship between experiences of poverty, the penalisation of poverty through state and bureaucratic disciplinary measures, and ethical decision making in everyday life in one of the poorest areas of Britain – Harpurhey, Manchester. It addresses the ethical dimensions of social life by exploring the everyday practice of self-policing in Harpurhey as a practice of evaluation and judgment of
year after Lefebvre's death and in English in 2004 as Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life . This short book is widely considered as the fourth and final volume of Lefebvre's hitherto three-volume Critique of Everyday Life (Lefebvre, 2014 ) and has attracted considerable interest in the twenty-first century. It adds a temporal dimension to Lefebvre's long-standing analyses of space and attempts to think time and space together. As the instances I described above suggest, rhythmanalysis is helpful as a means of sensing and making sense of rhythm
and Goodwin ( 2014 : 926) note, the everyday is ‘a notoriously difficult term to define, … we can generalise that it is an arena of social life that includes repetitive daily cycles and routines that we learn but eventually take for granted’. This academic interest in everyday life, while not an especially new phenomenon, can contemporaneously be traced back to the ‘cultural turn’ within the social sciences, from around the early 1970s, when engagements between cultural studies and philosophical traditions were raising questions about ‘how we make sense of the world
people in place, the physical landscape in which everyday life occurs is much more than a mere backdrop. The physicality of place is an important interpretive lens through which everyday life is accomplished. Landscapes themselves play a core role in constructing the fabric of social life. Place is the ‘cause’ as well as the ‘outcome’ of social action (Tickmayer, 2000 ). It is an agentic player in the construction
;’ she perceives only a weak connection to an imagined homeland in Nigeria. It is to the perspectives, experiences and available horizons of members of the younger generation that we now turn – herein, we wish to explore emergent forms of life. Thus far, our attention to everyday life has been inspired by the works of Jackson (1988; 2002; 2009) and, especially, Das (1998; 2007). In her ethnographic work on violence in South Asia, Das is interested in how large-scale events come to be folded into ongoing social relationships. She frames her approach by drawing on Ludwig
Introduction Since the material turn in the social sciences, researchers have been exploring new ways to engage with the objects and materials of everyday life. Such methods aim to overcome subject–object binaries, placing the very substance of materials at the core of their inquiry (Gregson and Crewe, 1998 ). This chapter takes one such approach – object interviews – to explore how objects and materials structure our everyday lives and relationships. This method involves not only unearthing the significance of objects to their owners, but also