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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
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.
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Seitenzahl: 444
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Affinities as an Invitation to Think Differently
PART ONE: SENSATIONS OF LIVING
Why Sensations?
Facets of Sensation
1. Ashes, ghosts and the ‘sense of presence’
2. ‘Grandma’s Hands’ by Bill Withers (version by Gil Scott-Heron)
3. The sensations of others: children’s perspectives
Looks
Voices, volume and imitation
Size, height, weight, growing
Play fighting and real fighting
Bodily proximity with others
Relational traces and bodily inscriptions
4. The sensory-kinaesthetic intimacies of violence
5. Becky Tipper’s creaturely ‘moments of being’
6. Meat, ‘food-animals’ and Rhoda Wilkie’s ‘sentient commodities’
Layering the Argument: Sensations of Affinity
Life is full of sensory-kinaesthetics
Sensations are multiple and atmospheric, emanating in encounters
Sensations as sensations: not representations, adjuncts or qualities
A sensory-kinaesthetic attunement reveals characters
Affinities are charged with the energies of fascination, wondering and discordance
PART TWO: INEFFABLE KINSHIP
Why Ineffable Kinship?
Facets of Ineffable Kinship
1. Family resemblances in literature and art
2. Resemblance interactions
A familiar conversation topic and form
Resemblances as striking, fleeting and capricious Negotiating and ‘settling’ resemblances
An uneasy combination of the potent and the trivial
3. Resemblance stories
4. The still-beating heart
5. Nordqvist and Smart’s donors as ‘enigmatic presences’
6. Konrad’s ‘nameless relations’ and ‘transilience’
7. Super-donors and dubious progeniture
8. ‘The Seed’ by The Roots, featuring Cody Chesnutt
Layering the Argument: Affinities of Ineffable Kinship
Metaphors of genetics and heritability
Poetics and the ‘frisson’ of ineffability
Wondering about what is circulating and relating
PART THREE: ECOLOGIES AND SOCIO-ATMOSPHERICS
Why Ecologies and Socio-Atmospherics?
Facets of Ecologies and Socio-Atmospherics
1. Animate places and things in literature
Nan Shepherd’s ‘living mountain’
Jon McGregor’s city that ‘sings’
Haruki Murakami’s ‘pulsing’ city
Barbara Kingsolver’s Africa as an ‘attendance in my soul’
2. Atmospheric memories of animate places and things
The atmospherics of a teenager’s city
Anat Hecht’s ‘tangible memories’ of home
Karin Widerberg’s atmospheric memories of ‘the homes of others’
3. Animate technologies, vehicles and journeys
Phone feelings
The threaded worlds of train travel
Mimi Sheller’s ‘automotive emotions’ and ‘feeling the car’
Lynne Pearce’s ‘autopia’ of driving and thinking
4. Weathery weather in social science and literature
5. Writing weather stories
6. Socio-atmospherics and the time of the floods
Shock: the power and magnitude of water
Bearing witness and being in touch
An atmosphere of ‘getting on with it’
Legacies of the floods
7. Weather poetics
Layering the Argument: Ecologies and Socio-Atmospherics
Ecologies as convivialities, assemblages, happenings and animated space
The feel of places, things, journeys and technologies
Enigmatic ecologies and the socio-atmospherics of living
From what is connected to the dynamics of connection
Ecological poetics
Conclusion: Affinities in Time
Three layers of the argument
Time: a final layering
Time and sensations
Time and ineffable kinship
Time, ecologies and socio-atmospherics
Accepting the invitation of affinities
References
Index
End User License Agreement
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Affinities
Potent Connections in Personal Life
Jennifer Mason
polity
Copyright © Jennifer Mason 2018
The right of Jennifer Mason to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2018 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2430-3
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com
‘Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it’(Roald Dahl, The Minpins)
Acknowledgements
In researching and writing Affinities I have drawn upon and debated with the work of all kinds of fascinating thinkers, researchers, artists and writers, many of whom are cited in the book. Although I do not know all of them personally, I wanted to start by saying a general thank you for their willingness to put exciting ideas, thoughts and work out there for the rest of us to benefit from and engage with.
I am also very grateful to the Economic and Social Research Council, and to the Leverhulme Trust, for funding a range of projects which have fed into my thinking about affinities, and on which the book draws. I am especially grateful to all of the people who participated in those research projects, generously sharing their time and experiences with me and my colleagues.
I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to all of my colleagues past and present in the Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives at the University of Manchester. The Morgan Centre was established in 2005, and it is no coincidence that it was around that time I began thinking about affinities. Collaboration and an irrepressible desire to think differently are at the very heart of the Morgan Centre, and these create a special atmosphere which encourages and nourishes all those involved. Being part of all this has given me the most wonderful and intellectually generous set of colleagues it is possible to imagine, as well as many exciting and stimulating times through conferences and events over the years. I consider myself very fortunate to be part of the vibrant conversations and associations that are the Morgan Centre.
I feel especially blessed to have worked with or been close to particular people who I know have shifted and shaped how I think about affinities, and lots else besides. In this regard I would especially like to thank Carol Smart, Becky Tipper and Katherine Davies, all of whom – in their inimitably different ways – have inspired and influenced my thinking and writing about affinities. Very special thanks to Andrew Jones who has lived with this book and its themes for as long as I have. It simply would not have come to fruition without his insights, encouragement, clarity of thought and endlessly generous support. Finally, thank you to Rosa and Joe for always having been both a grounding and an inspiration.
Excerpt(s) from The Minpins by Roald Dahl, text copyright © 1991 by Felicity Dahl and the other Executors of the Estate of Roald Dahl. Used by permission of Viking Children’s Books, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Introduction: Affinities as an Invitation to Think Differently
Why does a woman who discovers relatives she never knew she had, feel so moved when she recognises a family resemblance with them? What does it mean when a life is changed through the serendipity of a chance encounter? How is it possible to have an affinity with a place? What is happening when someone feels almost literally transported to another place or time by a chance encounter with a smell or a texture or a song? In each of these cases, some kind of potent connection is being made, and experienced viscerally and personally. In this book I want to suggest these kinds of connections are affinities, and to explore what they are and how they seem to matter so much. Affinities do matter, and I suggest that taking them seriously and exploring them opens up new and exciting possibilities for conceptualising living in the world.
I am going to argue that affinities are potent connections that rise up and matter. They are encounters where it is possible to identify a spark or a charge of connection that makes personal life charismatic, or enchants, or even toxifies it. Affinities are those connections that feel ‘kindred’ in some way, or make things kindred, whether or not they involve a family or kinship link as conventionally defined, and indeed we shall see that affinities can take shape between elements other than people too. Crucially, affinities are personal connections that have potency. They can be affinities of opposition, alterity or negativity, just as much as affinities of resemblance, empathy and closeness. They can involve ephemeral and ethereal yet somehow defining and elemental connections, and even epiphanal ones. They may feel of us, in ways that seem inscribed or seared into us and yet they also seem to live beyond us and can feel capricious, anarchic, other-worldly and even lyrical and poetic. Affinities involve fascination, wondering and puzzlement, often about their very potency and ineffability.
The potency of the connections is the point, and that is where I want the focus of the book to be. Let me make it clear straight away therefore that this is not a book about kinship systems, where ‘affines’ are formally conceptualised as a specific category or order of kin (usually seen as kin by marriage). Indeed it is not a book about kinship in that sense at all, although I am interested in connections that feel kindred in some way. Neither is it a book that uses affinity as a device to study people who are strongly attracted to certain things, or pleasures, or behaviours, or indeed to other people. Both of these examples involve seeing affinities as to do with the fixed points that they connect (people, kinsfolk, pleasures, behaviours, things), and make the assumption that it is these fixed points, and possible correlations or patterns in them, that are of interest. Such an approach might tell us that young men of a particular social class are strongly attracted to online gaming for example.
My approach to affinities, however, is to understand them as connective charges and energies that are of interest in themselves and not because of what they connect. It is the character and potency of the connections that I want to explore, more than the points that they put in relation. Central to my arguments about affinities is that they constitute animate or living connections, and hence I focus a great deal on concepts like flows, forces and energies. Always something is thought to be moving, flowing, seeking, encountering, making and even forcing connection. Affinities are essentially living, and they are lived through multidimensional encounters and sensations in personal life.
Given that affinities are lived, they are also, ironically perhaps, parochial. I use the term parochial here not in the pejorative sense that has come to characterise it in recent years as the petty or insubstantial, but in a stronger, active and experiential sense to mean the medium and means through which we encounter the world. My reasoning is that our activity of living is always done locally (locally to ourselves) through the medium, as it were, of our own personal ‘parish’. I had been thinking about parochialism and its connection with the concept of personal life in this way for some time, when I came across Robert Macfarlane’s wonderful interpretation of Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘The Parish and the Universe’, in his introduction to Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain. Following Kavanagh, Macfarlane suggests that the parochial is ‘not a perimeter but an aperture: a space through which the world [can] be seen’ (Macfarlane, 2011: xv, my emphasis). This idea of an aperture on the world echoes the argument I want to make that the parochial is not an insubstantial quality of existence, nor is it a fixed locale, but instead – and in keeping with the concept of personal life (Smart, 2007) – it is nexus, medium, mode and locus for our engagement with the world and, as such, it can sometimes channel potent connections, or affinities. It is how affinities can feel powerfully and simultaneously of us, and beyond us.
Perceiving and apprehending affinities in these kinds of ways means we need to allow ourselves to think differently and openly, even or especially when we feel confined by conventional disciplinary orientations. It is in this sense that I want to suggest that affinities, as I develop them in this book, constitute an invitation to think and theorise differently. They invite us to imagine connections, charges and energies that cannot be contained within, or done justice by, existing sociological modes of thought. They tantalise and beckon us to think more boldly, freely and poetically about how we understand living in the world.
The book is therefore written as an invitation, a beckoning, a suggestion of an orientation, rather than as a treatise or a framework. I do not ‘cover’ all possible ‘types’ of affinity (indeed I do not deal in ‘types’ of affinity at all). Instead, I take you on a journey through examples and illustrations of what affinities can involve, woven together with an alternating and cumulative argument about how we might understand their potencies. I want to encourage you to imagine and attune to affinities as potent connective charges and energies. I want to tantalise and beckon you to imagine and then reimagine affinities in your own fields, and in your own personal lives as well for that matter. In the pages that follow I show what happens when we shift our lenses and lexicons to be able to capture or attune to affinities that I argue come alive in sensations. I go on to suggest that understanding affinities means we need to be able to apprehend energies, forces, flows and charges which can take shape as ineffable kinship, or ecological connection, or the ‘socio-atmospherics’ of personal life. The three parts of the book – part 1, ‘Sensations of Living’; part 2, ‘Ineffable Kinship’; and part 3, ‘Ecologies and Socio-Atmospherics’ – correspond to these sets of ideas and they constitute layers in the cumulative argument. Thereafter, I conclude the book with a discussion of ‘Affinities in Time’, arguing that the allure and enigma of time is crucial in all this, but that we need to see beyond conventional linear understandings of temporality to be able to appreciate in what ways. In the conclusion I also return to consider the possible implications, for sociology in particular, of accepting the invitation of affinities to think differently.
To do all this I have adopted a somewhat unconventional approach to writing and compiling the book, which is inspired by ‘facet methodology’ – an approach developed by colleagues and myself at the University of Manchester (Mason, 2011). The main premise of facet methodology is that we can use ‘flashes of insight’ gained through an exploration of strategically and artistically chosen facets of a problem – rather than attempting (and usually failing) to describe and document all dimensions of the problem in its entirety. The argument is that these ‘artfully’ chosen facets can offer strongly resonant and evocative forms of understanding and insight.
What this means for the book is that I have structured each of the three main parts to allow me to present a carefully chosen range of facets, whilst embedding these in a cumulative argument about affinities. Each part of the book is structured in the same way, beginning with an introduction that asks why the concepts developed in that part might be useful. Each then takes the reader on a journey through a set of ‘facets’ – in part 1 these are ‘facets of sensation’; in part 2 they are ‘facets of ineffable kinship’; and in part 3 they are ‘facets of ecologies and socio-atmospherics’. The facets are drawn from a range of sources that I have chosen because they express or illustrate something important or resonant about the energies of affinity. These sources include the arts and literature, current affairs, broadcast radio, poetry, music, academic research, and various forms of creative and autobiographical writing. Each facet, in a sense, is a stand-alone piece, and some of them contain analysis and commentary to feed into the argument about affinities. And yet it is best for the facets to be read together and in sequence, because there are threads that link them, and because they have been chosen to illuminate distinctive and important aspects of affinities. In each part of the book the facets are then followed by a ‘layering’ of the argument about affinities, which draws insights from the facets in that part of the book, and also engages with relevant literature, debate and theorising. Ideas and themes bubble up and are reinforced cumulatively throughout the book in these layers of argument. The conclusion then adds the fourth and final layer, in its focus on ‘affinities in time’.
For ease of reading, facets and the layerings of the argument are presented in different fonts.
PART ONESensations of Living
Why Sensations?
We sense others. We know what they are like and who they are by seeing, touching, smelling, hearing and generally experiencing the sensations of them, at the same time as they are experiencing the sensations of us. We know what it feels like to be with and apart from them and in that sense our relations generate sensations. We know how they are with us (their manner of being with us, of interacting with us, their character and demeanour with us and so on) in these ways. More than that, we do not even have to be physically with others in the moment to experience the sensations of them, and of being with or connected to them, because sensations can be manifest in memory and imagination, just as longing or dread about the company of another can be experienced in sensory-kinaesthetic ways. We can conjure up as well as remember the sensations of others and how they are with us. Such sensations can form part of the weight of grief for example, felt as sensations of the mind, soul, head and chest. Contrary to popular assumption, online and ‘virtual’ interactions are also full of sensations, often bringing faces to faces quite literally in direct interactions with one’s own and others’ faces and bodies, words (spoken or created and experienced in text and symbols), language, sound and noises, immediate environments – and all this viewed on our screens, physically felt, sensed and executed through our bodies, including our fingers as we stroke and tap our devices, aurally heard and encountered in our earphones (see, for example, Jamieson, 2013; Morgan, 2009: 106–7; Wilding, 2006). It is in these ways that the experience of living routinely involves tuning into its sensory-kinaesthetics.
Of course, once we start to think about it, all life is lived in and through these sensory-kinaesthetic registers – even the so-called ‘virtual’ – but they are not usually factored into sociological understandings of relationships. Except perhaps sometimes in the sphere of romantic relationships and sexual attraction (and even there the focus is more usually on appearance as an individual characteristic or a personal preference), most analyses of relationships and relating are curiously drained of any sensations, to the extent that a scholar of relationships might be forgiven for thinking that sensations are not involved at all. Yet in everyday life it is well known that sensations are important: for example, whether or not we experience touch, or face-to-face contact in our personal relations with various others, and what it feels like; whether certain interactions are experienced as full of noise or silence, movement or stasis; whether we sense a good vibe between people or an atmosphere that you could ‘cut with a knife’; the capacity of a particular smell or a piece of music to evoke particular occasions in our relationships with others, or to virtually transport us to them. These kinds of examples point to the constitutive role of sensations in social life and interactions, as well as the need for those who wish to study and explain these things – like sociologists – to engage in a sensory-kinaesthetic attunement.
Part of the problem with sensations is probably that sociologists and others do not quite know what to do with them when it comes to analysing relationships, even though as people who live in the world and have their own relationships, they must understand their importance at some level. So even though there is increasing interest in the anthropology of the senses and environmental philosophy (for example, Abram, 1997; Classen, 1992, 2012; Howes, 1991; Howes and Classen, 2014; Pink, 2015), or the sociology of the senses (Lyon and Back, 2012; Mason and Davies, 2009; Riach and Warren, 2015; Vannini et al., 2011; or the journal The Senses and Society, established in 2006) or indeed the sociology of the body or embodiment (for example, Burkitt, 2010; Crossley, 2006; or the journal Body and Society, established in 1995), these do not have a great deal to say about sensations in relationships. For the most part they prefer to keep the level of analysis at either the ‘self’ or ‘society’ or ‘culture’. If we look more specifically from the perspective of the families, relationships and intimacies field, we have seen an interesting ‘cultural turn’ away from more abstract structuralist approaches, with a greater focus on relationships as everyday practices which can include exploring the role of feelings (as in emotions), embodiment, or of things and objects (for example, Gabb, 2008; Gillis, 1997; Morgan, 1996; Smart, 2007). And there have been interesting developments in interpersonal dynamics and the psychology of ‘affect’, which explicitly wants to draw emotion into the frame (for example, Brennan, 2004; Wetherell, 2012). But notwithstanding these, and with some notable exceptions (for example, Davies, 2015; Widerberg, 2010), relationships still are often analysed without much or any attention to sensations that might characterise or constitute them, and indeed often without recourse to a sensory-kinaesthetic register of any sort. Alternatively ‘the sensory’ is often analysed without much or any attention to relationships or to the mutualities and dynamics of sensations. As a consequence, it is still perfectly respectable to conceptualise a ‘relationship’ as a rather abstract thing that has little or nothing to do with sensation, which is, I think, a pity. In opposition to this, I am going to argue in this part of the book that sensations constitute a ‘core seam’ in our relationships with others (see also Mason, 2008), rather than simply our way of perceiving them, or a kind of adjunct to them (for example, as we might think of ‘relationships and the senses’).
My use of the term ‘sensation’ is quite deliberate, and yet requires certain caveats. ‘Sensation’ is defined in the Oxford Dictionary of English as ‘a physical feeling or perception resulting from something that happens to or comes into contact with the body’ (ODE, 2005). I am loosening and taking liberties with that definition somewhat, so that for me ‘sensations’ encompass the idea that they are not only felt, perceived and experienced in ‘the body’, but also that they emanate and flow in things that happen, and things coming into contact. Furthermore, it is an important part of the argument I develop in the book that we think generously and innovatively about what those ‘things’ that happen or come into contact might be. So instead of sensations being the felt effect of external stimuli, perceived or received via bodily receptors or mental faculties, I will argue that they flow through and are generated in encounters. This is crucial in my argument, and requires a more open and interactive conceptualisation than is sometimes applied to the idea of ‘the senses’ in the social and human sciences. What is more, in using the concept of sensation I want to gain a distance from the conceptualisation of particular senses as individual and mutually distinct, either from each other, or as separable from the experience of living in, moving within, relating with and apprehending the world. I am following Merleau-Ponty (2002 [1945], 2004 [1948]), Benjamin (1999), and in particular Ingold (2000, 2011) in this approach, but I shall also draw other ideas and insights into the frame.
Once we start to take sensations seriously, as I try to do in this part of the book, something else happens however. If my starting point was a desire to ‘inject’ sensations into the lacking-in-sensations study of interpersonal relationships, I quickly realised that sensations will not be contained in such a framework, and neither will the affinities they express. The energies and sensations of affinities operate not only within but way beyond and outside of interpersonal relationships, and this part of the book is thus a gateway to a much wider appreciation of affinities in the book as a whole. The major premise of this part of the book is that affinities are lived, made up of, and made potent through and in sensations. We might usefully see sensations as part of the habitat of affinities, or as an essential element in the atmospherics that can create affinities. And at the same time the visceral, moving and affecting nature of sensations is an important clue to understanding the potency of affinities. But we cannot appreciate and apprehend all of this unless we are prepared to tune into the sensory-kinaesthetics of the world around us.
What follows is a selection of facets, which are designed to illustrate and help to explore some of the ways that sensations are implicated in affinities, and in constituting them as more or less potent. In writing the facets I have consciously tried out a sensory-kinaesthetic attunement, directing this to a range of encounters and materials that help to draw to light the centrality of sensations in interpersonal relationships. This involves writing differently and variously across the facets. I have chosen to include facets with the aim of creating insights into sensations and the part they play in affinities, rather than representing a particular range or making any claims about propensities and patterns. The aim is to enable you to see what sensations can be in the world and maybe, hopefully, to inspire you to wonder about sensations and affinities that touch you, and to use this kind of attunement in your own field. After the facets, I draw together some of the threads and engage with wider literature and debate, so that I can take forward some propositions and ideas about affinities – in the process moving beyond the confines of interpersonal relationships – into the next part of the book.
Facets of Sensation
1. Ashes, ghosts and the ‘sense of presence’
My father died a year ago. I have his ashes in a large green plastic canister, alongside my mother’s, which are in a mud-brown coloured canister, under a desk in the room where I work and write. The canisters have been labelled administratively, simply and clearly, by someone whose job was to ensure or to reassure that there was no mix up; to convey a clinical sense of certainty about what or who the canisters contained. The canisters are functionally shaped in ways that would be readily stackable on shelves, with the labels showing for ease of retrieval, and they have a surprising heft given how slight and frail both of my parents were when they died.
I don’t look very often at the contents of the canisters, but I know what is there. A startlingly large quantity of stuff; a mixture of fine dust and more coarse-grained gravelly bits. It doesn’t exactly look like ash, or ashes as we come to pluralise them under these circumstances. It looks more like builders’ dust. I can see it in my ‘mind’s eye’, feel it in my mind’s fingers, sniff it with my mind’s nose – my ‘sensory imagination’ (Mason and Davies, 2009) – without having to unscrew the lid and look, and I can feel its texture without actually ever having had the nerve to plunge my hand in and ferret about it in, although I know one day I will, and I have often anticipated lifting out a handful and scattering it somewhere meaningful. I can smell it or, more precisely, I can smell the curious absence of any smell at all, as some of the finer dust rises into the air and enters my nostrils, like a chalky grey vapour that hits my olfactory senses with a form of substance, but not of odour. All this without needing to take the lid off every time. What sensory-kinaesthetic stuff this is!
It is a form of stuff that raises uncertain and awkward questions because in many ways I do not trust it. What is it, this dusty, grainy, gravelly stuff? What are the bits? Are they bone, teeth, bits of coffin? Why aren’t there some really big lumps, if it really is what is left behind in the incinerator when the heat has died down? If the stuff is ash – as they would have us believe – why doesn’t it smell of smoke or incineration, or of anything for that matter? How was it gathered? Was it tipped or swept into this functional plastic container, or vacuumed, or scooped by someone’s bare or gloved hand? Did any get dropped on the floor, or brushed off onto someone’s clothes? Did it make anyone sneeze? Was it sieved into finely graded grains like the McDougalls finer flour used to be, to get rid of the big lumps, or the odd tooth or bit of vertebra, the odd molten filling. What happened to those big lumps? Were other bits, dust and debris from the floor or the incinerator, other people’s ashes, swept up along with it, in a subtle subversion of the individuality and certainty of the label on the canister? Was it topped up with some spare dust or ash because my small, frail dad (big man of previous years) and his wicker coffin hadn’t generated a convincing enough mass or volume? Of course I can’t actually ask such questions of the undertaker, partly because to do so is to challenge or doubt the carefully constructed line between the sacred and the profane that we have all been heeding and negotiating, in keeping with Western death and burial rituals (Hallam and Hockey, 2001). Ashes are sacred and revered in the material culture of death, and worse than questioning the undertaker’s professional practice would be the sense that I was disrespecting the memory of my father.
But I do not entirely trust the ashes. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, my sensory imagination will conjure up the grainy grittiness of this dusty stuff when I am doing something quite other, alone or in company, and I will find myself contemplating its peculiar yet mundane nature and the questions about sensory dis/belief that it raises. My dad (only once dead) was burned up, and this is what is left. How can I be expected to believe that? It isn’t that I don’t believe he was burned or that ashes were produced. It is the implication that this scentless, gravelly dust can in any sense be what was left behind that is the problem, both because I do not trust it, and also because its odd sensory-kinaesthetic qualities, and the formal sterility of its packaging, are completely at odds with the mass of sensory-kinaesthetic goings on that were my dad.
The gravelly dust has enormous power which is difficult to reconcile either with the sensory-kinaesthetic textures of what it seems to be, or with the idea that my dad has simply gone, or with all the other sensations of him that are vying for my attention; because at the same time, and at other times, there are all the other kinds of sensory memories and animations of him. The sound of his voice, his intonation, his turns of phrase, his ways of laughing, the sounds he made when he was anxious and confused and that I cannot bear to remember, but which assert themselves into my soul and assail my consciousness and my dreams nonetheless. His smell, that I tried to preserve by keeping one of his jumpers tightly wrapped in a plastic bag, ready to take out and smell from time to time. As with any living person, his smells were combinations and minglings of good smells and less good smells. As well as that, I can feel/hear/see/smell the touch of his hand. I realise that most of the hand-holding I did with my dad was in the early stages of my life and then (after a long gap) towards the end of his – and these hand-holding times were sensorily different but now powerfully combine with a cavalier disregard of time.
I know that I can cut across the years in a moment, traversing them, telescoping them, calling up or encountering situations and atmospheres from a lifetime; my sensory memory is very agile in that sense. I can hold in one moment my shock at seeing my ninety-four-year-old dad when his hair had been cut in a brutal short-back-and-sides by a well-meaning hairdresser who didn’t find a way to discover his coiffuring preferences, with the sensations of ‘styling’ Dad’s hair when I was a child (he was tolerant of all kinds of outlandish hairdos). Both are here with me now creating a nearly tangible absent/presence and I can feel the hairstyling moments (his fine grey hair, his warmth and movement, his bodily tolerance and compliance, the velvety armchair where I perched behind him to do my childhood styling). I can smell them too (‘his smell’, the lightest touch of Brylcreem on his hair), and I can hear them (the feel and sounds of laughter – his and mine), and I feel involved in them – I am there and here, with him and without him, all at the same time. And also here with me are the gravelly ashes and the uniform individuality of their packaging with the promise it is intended to convey, and that I don’t trust.
And as I reflect on all this, I think that perhaps these moments come together not just because memory is agile across the years, but also because these sensory-kinaesthetic forces have their own agility and potency, so that in combination these memories and forces produce something that is more like an encounter than a memory. Certainly, these moments and times feel more like encounters than memories, in their capacity to assert themselves almost tangibly without or despite being conjured, and to create sensory-kinaesthetic perceptions in the here and now, where things I have not consciously remembered rub shoulders with sometimes jarring sensations from different times.
I think my experience of my dad’s ashes in amongst this melee of sensations is ‘awkward’, in the way the poet and essayist Mary Cappello uses that term (Cappello, 2007), because ashes themselves are awkward to encounter, and because they sit awkwardly with the living, breathing, sensory memory of the person. Cappello has a similarly awkward encounter with the death certificate of her mother’s partner – her own ‘beloved father and friend’ – whilst on a mission to purge her life of clutter and tidy out her filing cabinet. She says:
Is the awkwardness of a death certificate obvious? I don’t think so. What’s awkward about it is that it can’t be expected, the fact of it, of finding it in a folder, a stumbling block in the process of a clearing of the decks. It’s awkward for the way it makes you wonder how you will come to fit within its squares; awkward for how it makes death by ‘natural causes’ something to aspire to. It’s awkward in its redaction of a person to a list of wheres and whens. It’s full of information, and it’s full of gaps. The death certificate makes me awkward as it plays its certitude against my confusion. It claims to know what happened to Sidney, whereas I do not. . . . A friend’s sympathy letter seems light and full; the death certificate seems empty and heavy. And full. And empty. It’s trying so hard with its serial numbers, and seals, its approvals and affirmations, its clockwork and authenticating signatures, its decipherable grid, to be correct in its assertion that this person was not buried alive. (Cappello, 2007: 23)
For Cappello there was an awkwardness in the coexistence of the certitude of the death certificate, which she cannot entirely believe or trust, with the sheer ‘force of being’ of Sidney and ‘all that was attributable to him and to no one else’, leading her to ask whether ‘rival awkwardnesses necessarily co-exist’ (Cappello, 2007: 24). I like this notion of rival awkwardnesses necessarily coexisting – indeed awkwardness being a normal state of affairs – because it suggests that we should not expect the experience of interpersonal forces of being to be consensual or singularly categorical, even if sociologists and others sometimes want to see it that way.
I think we get used to remembering those who have died in these kinds of searing and agile sensory-kinaesthetic encounters. For those of us who have experienced the death of another we have known intimately, this weaving of sensory memory – or encounters – into life becomes simply part of the everyday experience of living. So too, to paraphrase Cappello, does the discomfort of the necessary coexistence of these vivid sensory-kinaesthetic encounters with the palpable sterility and empty-heaviness of the material paraphernalia of death – the death certificate, the administratively labelled canister of ashes, the oddly smell-free builders’ dust – which create their own ordinary ambivalences in our lives.
In all this with my dad and his ashes, I have never felt the sense of his presence being manifest or asserting itself in a more extra-sensory or supernatural way. Actually I would like to have done, and with my mum too, although both have ‘visited me’ as you might say, in dreams. However Gillian and Kate Bennett, in a fascinating study of ‘the presence of the dead’, have pointed out that ‘feeling a presence’ of a dead person in everyday life is actually very common amongst people who have suffered a close bereavement – they made a particular study of widows – and a study by Hallam et al. notes a similar phenomenon in ‘the continuing presence’ of dead spouses (Bennett and Bennett, 2000; Hallam et al., 1999: 149; and see also MacKian, 2012, for an important analysis of the re-enchantment of everyday life and the significance of everyday spirituality).
Bennett and Bennett detail different types of everyday experiences, including a sense of being watched, hearing a voice – for example calling your name – the manifestation and sensing of odours of a dead person, and seeing the dead person – fully animated – or feeling their touch and warmth, for example alongside you in bed. These experiences ranged from the ‘classic ineffable “feeling” that he is there, to clear sensory experiences’ (Bennett and Bennett, 2000: 143–4). I think it is both interesting and important to note the centrality of intimate relational sensations in these apparently intangible or extra-sensory experiences, and the potency of the connections that were being made. The extra-sensory is clearly full of sensations.
Bennett and Bennett argue that the numbers known to have experienced such presences are likely to be significantly underestimated in a society where the dominant discourse about such things is that they are illusory, or they are ways of coping with grief, or they are ‘symptoms of broken hearts and minds in chaos’ (Bennett and Bennett, 2000: 139). In such a context it is difficult as a widow for example to tell others about your experiences, for fear of being thought ‘crazy’ or unable to accept your partner’s death and move on. They suspect that this societal scepticism or disapproval is, at least in part, at the root of the tendency they noted for people to switch between ‘materialist’ and ‘supernaturalist’ discourses, or the ‘language of reality’ and ‘the language of illusion’ in their accounts – the former emphasising the material realities, which are presumably more likely to be evidentially convincing – ‘he was there’, ‘I was fully awake’ – and the latter the more ethereal ones – ‘it was as if he was there’, or ‘I don’t know whether I was dreaming or not’ (Bennett and Bennett, 2000: 151–2). They suggest that choices and switching of language might be to do with producing a satisfying narrative structure, or decisions about appropriate language for the audience.
And yet I wonder whether there isn’t something tantalising and exciting, something potent, in the very ineffability and acknowledgement of something outside our comprehension that the switching of language and the air of uncertainty in these accounts speak of. In a way, in everyday life experience, just as in the telling of the stories, there is a delicious speculation being lived and voiced here; a knowing and a not knowing, a wondering, a fully sensory experiencing of something that must be extra-sensory – was I asleep or awake? was I dreaming? what kind of connection was I part of? There is a playing across or a hovering over the boundaries between tangibility and intangibility – what we might call an in/tangibility – in process here. And of course let us not forget that the idea that dreams are ‘only dreams’ – products of one’s own neural activities, rather than magical and ethereal sets of relations with the other-worldly – is a fairly recent Western invention and one that I suspect many people do not fully subscribe to. And as many commentators have noted, notwithstanding the legacies of the Enlightenment and the dominance of scientific discourses, ‘there is a persistent fascination with what is loosely conceptualised as an “other worldly domain” at the level of everyday experience and in media representations’ (Hallam et al., 1999: 165; see also MacKian, 2012).
People know what they know and what they experience about the ‘other-worldly’, and I think what they know and experience is full of fascinating ineffabilities and impossibilities. The searing emotional and sensory-kinaesthetic intensity and power of such affinities with the absent presence of the dead come from the absolute and felt knowledge that these in/tangibilities cannot be self-invented whether in a dream or otherwise, and that they emanate from, or are manifestations of, a communing with an other-world that is somewhere beyond one’s own wishful thinking and capacities to conjure. That idea that these are not simply conjurings of the bereaved is supported by Hallam et al:
Continued relationships between widow and husband are not static, fixed in time and based solely on the nature of interaction in life. Rather, they are dynamic relationships within which survivors develop new forms of interactions and, as their life changes, they craft new relationships with the living and with the dead. . . . It is not simply the case, however, that the living are retaining bonds with the dead ... the dead may also seek to continue their social presences, some, even imposing themselves where they are not wanted. (Hallam et al., 1999: 155–6)
It is interesting that the studies by Bennett and Bennett, Hallam et al. and MacKian, in their different ways, all point out that social science has been so busy asserting its right to be seen as a rational science, that it finds it has little space to take on board the ethereal and the other-worldly in any other way than to see it as a socially constructed belief system.
2. ‘Grandma’s Hands’ by Bill Withers (version by Gil Scott-Heron)
If you don’t already know it, you should listen to this song – the Gil Scott-Heron version. Bill Withers wrote ‘Grandma’s Hands’, a bluesy soul song, about his African-American maternal grandmother who had been born into slavery, and his memories of her clapping and singing to gospel songs in church, as well as dispensing advice and discipline to her young grandson. ‘Grandma’s hands clapped to church on Sunday mornings’ it rhythmically begins, and you will be hooked and want to hear the rest, to move in time to the music, to hear how it is that a young adult man is singing about his grandma.
Gil Scott-Heron was one of many artists who covered the song, and he clearly made a strong connection with the lyric as well as the song itself, producing a powerful version. Gil Scott-Heron was brought up until the age of twelve by his maternal grandmother, Lillie Scott. She was an important figure in his life, and she gets a mention in many of his songs and poetry, and he often referred to her in his live shows. Although in some ways the song is not literally about her hands and their sensations and rhythm, in other ways that is exactly what it is about. He sings of a grandma whose hands ‘used to ache sometimes and swell’. These are hands that evoke gender, class, ethnic and religious dynamics of the American South, in just a few phrases like these, and in the sounds and rhythms of the music.
I saw Gil Scott-Heron perform live several times, before his death in 2011, and my memory (which may possibly be embellished by nostalgia) is that he performed this song on every occasion and always talked about his grandma, Lillie Scott.
3. The sensations of others: children’s perspectives
Becky: What’s your uncle like?Sam: He’s really loud. And he does things like, he goes to the top of that big rock, and he’ll go up and shout ‘that’s the nicest fresh air I’ve ever had’ or something like that! And he like screamed it and everyone looked at him, it was really embarrassing. Really, really embarrassing [laughing].
It is fascinating to listen to what children say when they are asked about who matters to them, and to observe them when they are talking. Research that has done this, my own included, has tended to focus on the ‘who’ part of the question, and to argue that a wide range of relationships matter to children, beyond parents, siblings and friends. Studies have highlighted the importance of wider kin, especially grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles, as well as those who children regard as like-family even though they are not formally related. Often, children are not clear about what their formal or genealogical connection with relatives is in any case, but that does not stop them feeling they are family. Also, we know that others such as teachers or neighbours can be important, as can those who are definitely ‘not-friends’ but are annoying or difficult presences in children’s lives nonetheless. And of course relatives can be annoying, difficult and problematic for children too. Crucially we also know that many of those regarded by children as friends, family, neighbours, acquaintances, as well as not-friends, are animals (Mason and Tipper, 2008a, 2008b; Tipper, 2011).
But the sociological enthusiasm for categorising kin relationships, either genealogically or in terms of degrees of significance (such categorisation itself defied, actually, by the fluidity and inventiveness of children’s kinship constructions), misses a dimension in children’s perspectives on those who matter in their lives; namely, what they articulate about what others are like, and the way that their accounts of their relationships with them are full of sensations. Becky Tipper and I found out about this in our research study ‘Children Creating Kinship’1 with children aged seven to twelve in the UK. One of the things we talked with children about in the study was what those who mattered to them were like. I think at the time we probably phrased it in that way to make sure the children found our line of enquiry easy to understand and to talk about, but in retrospect I am very glad that we did. Had we been speaking with adults about kinship we might, perhaps, have asked people the ‘significance’ of particular ‘relationships’ with others instead, thus immediately (and unhelpfully) introducing two abstractions – ‘significance’, ‘relationships’ – into the question which might have led us to miss the extent to which sensations are right in there in the mix of things when people are doing kinship.
We were fascinated to discover that the children found it easy to articulate what others were like and how they related to them, and that they did this by providing evocative insights that oozed sensations and imagination. There was a visceral physicality, both in how the children were expressing themselves, and in what they were expressing. Indeed, if you listen to and watch children communicating about who matters to them, you will find it can involve movement, mime, expression, comedy, song, pulling faces, gesticulation, variance of voice, volume and intonation, grunting, clapping and other noises, touch, and you might just get showered in spit as well. Children become very animated when talking about others and this animation takes full sensory-kinaesthetic form. From discussions about snot and earwax to wee and poo, or the precise timbre and cadence of a grandmother’s voice or a pet dog’s bark, children’s experiences of their connections with others are acted out in ways that are full of life, energy and physicality (Mason and Tipper, 2008a, 2008b).
In our study, and in these animated ways, children gave us clear insights into what they felt people and animals who mattered to them were like, and especially what they were like to be with – just as Sam did with the story of his embarrassing uncle shouting from on top of a rock at the beginning of this facet. Often their answers were quite brief and succinct, and many involved – as did Sam’s – an anecdote given as an example, often with a clear point in the tale, and sometimes a twist – which might be about humour, or embarrassment, or awkwardness, or fear, or disgust, or warmth, or ‘weirdness’, and so on.
What was especially interesting was the range of phenomena – always closely observed – that the children chose to present as defining of others and their doings with them. These included how people or animals looked and sounded for example, as well as how they moved, what they did physically (rather than for a living, which was never spontaneously mentioned). They also included aspects of character, mood, outlook and ways of relating to others. Here are some other examples.
Sam also told us about others in his family:
