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.
Table of Content
Expanded Contents viii
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction: Affinities as an Invitation to Think Differently 1
Part One: Sensations of Living 5
Part Two: Ineffable Kinship 57
Part Three: Ecologies and Socio-Atmospherics 121
Conclusion: Affinities in Time 186
Notes 203
References 204
Index 214
About the author
Jennifer Mason is Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester
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