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Acknowledging the Power of Practices
ОглавлениеIn order to explore how broader processes of social change might be reconciled with my interest in the detail of how human relations with ‘nature’ play out, I turned to another body of research. Here the focus was more squarely on patterns of ‘everyday life’, how those patterns are sustained, how they are experienced and how they evolve. Unlike how some of the geographers were keen on finding entanglements, this work was interested in how predictable routes are carved out for people. These were theories of ‘social practice’ and they have attracted a growing amount of interest in recent years. There are many versions, with some being preoccupied with change, others with the role of materials in sustaining practices, and others with the most conceptually sophisticated vision of social life. There are also several overlaps between these ways of imagining everyday life and those to which the above geographers were drawn (see Maller 2019). In view of that, I should itemise the components that I picked from the expanding menu of suggestions produced by this second body of work (Shove, Pantzar, and Watson 2012; Hui, Schatzki, and Shove 2017).
One key feature is there in the basic terminology. The idea here is that we should imagine social life as essentially an outcome of how ‘social practices’ come about and evolve. The implication is that we should focus on how different practices, namely particular recognisable activities, spread through societies, and how they draw people into this process as time goes on. In this respect, a central aim of this work has been to push beyond the way in which it was previously tempting to paint social life as either governed by imagined ‘structures’, like culture, which were ultimately unsatisfying and unhelpful when, in the final instance, they made individuals seem entirely without choice, or instead to invert the picture by championing the ‘agency’ of people. This was also deemed unsatisfactory in the sense that it could end up seeing them as in a constant process of making decisions about how they wanted to live (instead of attending to the constraints that curtailed their actions).
Recognising that there was probably some truth to both claims, and in an attempt to reconcile these two visions of social life, ‘practices’ were seen as providing us with a promising path between them (Giddens 1986; Reckwitz 2002). For me, they were also promising in the way that they pointed to how people were sometimes reflecting on their actions and sometimes simply doing what the situation (or rather the practice) encouraged. People are reimagined here as potentially little more than the mere ‘hosts’ or ‘carriers’ of practices (Shove and Pantzar 2007), who, once they have been effectively infected, may have little occasion to question certain actions thereafter. This idea chimed well with the above suggestion that a range of, hitherto relatively unacknowledged, social trends could be creating new ways of relating to greenspace.
If I were to draw on these ideas, my focus should be on certain practices, namely activities in which many people commonly take part. Various practices have already been examined using these ideas, including how people travel around (Watson 2012), how they organise their eating (Warde et al. 2007), how they keep warm at home (Gram-Hanssen, 2010) and how they are drawn into particular leisure activities (Shove and Pantzar 2007). Building on that work, this book is concerned with four practices that are currently commonplace and which could be feeding into the ‘extinction of experience’ that some of the above researchers have worried about. Accordingly, the aim is less about positioning people as essentially ‘entangled’ in the sense that they are grappling (in presumably at least partly conscious ways) with how they should respond to specific material circumstances. Rather it is more about how familiar settings, along with the accumulation of experience, can serve to do almost the opposite – namely curtail the likelihood of much active reflection by providing relevant groups with conditions that structure their actions. We might, as we will see, sometimes reflect on the processes involved (how did we find ourselves in this situation?). But practices can equally discourage those involved from too much analysis.