RSQC2 Recall todays’ lecture content Summarise today’s lecture content Question – do you have any about today’s content? Comment about today’s lecture content Connect todays’ lecture content to the readings for today and also make critical connection to last week’s content

Sociol 322: A sociology of relational life Lecturer: Vivienne Elizabeth v.elizabeth@auckland.ac.nz

Today Thursday’s agenda Duncan – last week’s reading Carol Smart & The socio-cultural turn By the end of this week you should be familiar with her toolbox Be able these tools to analyse relational life Thursday’s agenda McDonnell – a collaborative reading exercise Written reflection on your own life

Duncan, Simon. 2011. The world we have made Duncan, Simon. 2011. The world we have made? Individualisation and personal life in the 1950s. The Sociologcial Review 59 (2):242-265. People generally hold pragmatic views of what is reasonably proper and possible. For practical reasons, such as using material resources and ‘social energy’ more effectively, and because people like their pragmatically developed social practices to seem ‘natural’ and legitimate, this means adapting and improvising from past practices. In this way people engage in ‘bricolage’ as they take whatever is at hand and re-inscribe pre-existing relations, institutions, and rules of the game. … This implies not so much revolution as improvised development. [261-262]

Individualisation theories misrepresent and romanticise agency as a primarily discursive and reflexive process where people freely create their personal lives in an open social world divorced from tradition. … But empirically we find that people usually make decisions about their personal lives pragmatically, bounded by and in connection with other people, not only relationally but also institutionally. This pragmatism is often non-reflexive, habitual and routinised, even unconscious. Agents consciously and unconsciously draw on existing traditions - styles of thinking, sanctioned social relationships, institutions, the presumptions of particular social groups and places, lived law and social norms - to 'patch' or 'piece together' responses to changing situations. Often it is institutions that 'do the thinking'. People try to both conserve social energy and seek social legitimation in this adaption process, a process which can lead to a 're-serving' of tradition even as institutional leakage transfers meanings from past to present, and vice versa. … This process of bricolage is a basic reason for the lack of congruence between the way individualisation theory depicts contemporary personal life and people's lives as represented in empirical studies. Duncan 2011, 5.1

Q: Can you think of examples in your own life or the lives of family where you/they have acted as bricoleurs? What does this show about the nature of agency and the part played by traditions in personal/relational life?

This week..

Ontology (Smart, 2007, p. 28) It ‘does not presume that there is an autonomous individual who makes free choices and exercises unfettered agency.’

Centrality of connections Ontology Reflexive social or embedded self ‘I find connections with other people colour and frame every important building bloc in my remembered, imagined, conscious self’ Griffiths cited Smart 2011, 22

From Structure to Meaning Cultural turn From Structure to Meaning

Explorations in meaning the range of meanings that are available to us through cultural artefacts; how these get to be embedded in everyday life and in our social institutions; how these are taken up by us to make sense of our worlds and ourselves; and how we give expression to these meanings through our actions and interactions

Influences Carolyn Steedman & Annette Kuhn John Gillis Daniel Miller Deborah Lupton and Ian Burkitt David Morgan Janet Finch and Jennifer Mason Janet Carsten

‘…we all have two families, one that we live with and another we live by. We would like the two to be the same, but they are not. Too often the families we live with exhibit the kind of self-interested, competitive, divisive behaviour that we have come to associate with the market economy and the public sphere. Often fragmented and impermanent, they are much less reliable than the imagined families we live by. The latter are never allowed to let us down. Constituted through myth, ritual and image, they must forever be nurturing and protective, and we will go to any lengths to ensure that they are so, even if it means mystifying the realities of family life.’ (Gillis, 1996, A world of their own making, Basic Books, p. xv; emphasis in the original)

AIM: Multi-dimensional accounts of relationships and personal life

Relationality - An ontology We come into being as selves through our relationships with others The significant others in our lives may be blood kin, legal kin, fictive kin, friends Affective ties based on history of interactions and versus abstract ties based on blood Describes a mode of thinking and activity – family practices; not something that is simply given

A A contextual field & field of inquiry Relationships exist in our minds as well as in reality The families we live by and live with (Gillies) How we think and feel about relationships is socially and culturally shaped Leading to shared feelings and shared constructions of the normative family, the family we live by

A method of inquiry The life stories of individuals afford access to rich descriptions of lived experience, when combined with the sociological attentiveness to context they can reveal: changes over time, changes over a life, differences between family members Material objects as prompts for relaying biographical narratives – ‘things are entirely relational’ and invested with meaning (p. 22)

A field of inquiry revealed through biography, memoir and material objects What meanings do people give to their relationships with others? Meaning is simultaneously personal & socio-cultural Primacy of family memories Inflected w emotions, esp. family memories Important source of identity and a sense of belonging

A descriptive theme People live linked lives – chains or webs of relationships across generations (resemblances, names, parenting styles, talents) Individual life trajectories are meaningful in context of other lives, including people who are now dead. Afford security & continuity or be experienced as suffocating & impossible to sever because of their emotional residues

+ emotions ‘family relationships are nothing if not permeated with every imaginable kind of feeling’ (Smart 2007, 84) relationality biography imaginary   embeddedness memory emotions