How is it possible to feel an affinity with a place? What is happening when someone feels almost literally transported to another time by a smell or a texture or a song? Why do striking family resemblances sometimes feel uncanny? In each of these cases a potent connection is being made, involving forces, flows, energies and atmospherics that conventional sociological approaches can find hard to grasp, but that are important nonetheless.
In this innovative book Jennifer Mason argues that these are affinities – potent charges and charismatically lively connections in personal life, that rise up and matter in some way and that enchant or toxify the everyday. She suggests that exploring affinities opens up new possibilities for conceptualizing the experience of living in the world through what she calls the ‘socio-atmospherics of everyday life’. This book invites the reader to embrace possibilities and themes that may seem outside the usual range, and to engage in a more open, attentive, inventive and poetic sociological sensibility.
Tabla de materias
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction: Affinities as an Invitation to Think Differently 1
Part One: Sensations of Living
Why Sensations? 7
Facets of Sensation 11
1. Ashes, ghosts and the ‘sense of presence’ 11
2. ‘Grandma’s Hands’ by Bill Withers (version by Gil Scott Heron) 17
3. The sensations of others: children’s perspectives 18
Looks 21
Voices, volume and imitation 22
Size, height, weight, growing 24
Play fighting and real fighting 26
Bodily proximity with others 27
Relational traces and bodily inscriptions 27
4. The sensory-kinaesthetic intimacies of violence 29
5. Becky Tipper’s creaturely ‘moments of being’ 31
6. Meat, ‘food-animals’ and Rhoda Wilkie’s ‘sentient commodities’ 33
Layering the Argument: Sensations of Affinity 39
Life is full of sensory-kinaesthetics 40
Sensations are multiple and atmospheric, emanating in encounters 42
Sensations as sensations: not representations, adjuncts or qualities 46
A sensory-kinaesthetic attunement reveals characters 50
Affinities are charged with the energies of fascination, wondering and discordance 54
Part Two: Ineffable Kinship
Why Ineffable Kinship? 59
Facets of Ineffable Kinship 63
1. Family resemblances in literature and art 63
2. Resemblance interactions 68
A familiar conversation topic and form 70
Resemblances as striking, fleeting and capricious 71
Negotiating and ‘settling’ resemblances 72
An uneasy combination of the potent and the trivial 74
3. Resemblance stories 74
4. The still-beating heart 89
5. Nordqvist and Smart’s donors as ‘enigmatic presences’ 93
6. Konrad’s ‘nameless relations’ and ‘transilience’ 97
7. Super-donors and dubious progeniture 101
8. ‘The Seed’ by The Roots, featuring Cody Chesnutt 104
Layering the Argument: Affinities of Ineffable Kinship 106
Metaphors of genetics and heritability 106
Poetics and the ‘frisson’ of ineffability 111
Wondering about what is circulating and relating 114
Part Three: Ecologies and Socio-Atmospherics
Why Ecologies and Socio-Atmospherics? 123
Facets of Ecologies and Socio-Atmospherics 126
1. Animate places and things in literature 126
Nan Shepherd’s ‘living mountain’ 126
Jon Mc Gregor’s city that ‘sings’ 127
Haruki Murakami’s ‘pulsing’ city 129
Barbara Kingsolver’s Africa as an ‘attendance in my soul’ 130
2. Atmospheric memories of animate places and things 131
The atmospherics of a teenager’s city 131
Anat Hecht’s ‘tangible memories’ of home 133
Karin Widerberg’s atmospheric memories of ‘the homes of others’ 135
3. Animate technologies, vehicles and journeys 137
Phone feelings 137
The threaded worlds of train travel 140
Mimi Sheller’s ‘automotive emotions’ and ‘feeling the car’ 143
Lynne Pearce’s ‘autopia’ of driving and thinking 146
4. Weathery weather in social science and literature 148
5. Writing weather stories 152
6. Socio-atmospherics and the time of the floods 154
Shock: the power and magnitude of water 155
Bearing witness and being in touch 156
An atmosphere of ‘getting on with it’ 158
Legacies of the floods 159
7. Weather poetics 164
Layering the Argument: Ecologies and Socio Atmospherics 168
Ecologies as convivialities, assemblages, happenings and animated space 169
The feel of places, things, journeys and technologies 175
Enigmatic ecologies and the socio-atmospherics of living 178
From what is connected to the dynamics of connection 180
Ecological poetics 184
Conclusion: Affinities in Time 186
Three layers of the argument 187
Time: a final layering 188
Time and sensations 190
Time and ineffable kinship 193
Time, ecologies and socio-atmospherics 196
Accepting the invitation of affinities 200
Notes 203
References 204
Index 000
Sobre el autor
Jennifer Mason is Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester
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