Peter Berger (1929) is an American sociologist best known for his collaboration with Thomas Luckman in writing The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. That book argues that human reality, and knowledge of it, is a social construct, emerging from the individual or group’s interaction with larger social structures (institutions). Social structures, once widely adopted, lose their history as social constructions (objectivation), and come over time, by the people who live within them, to be deemed natural realities independent of human construction (reification). Berger predicted, in his later book, The Sacred Canopy, near-term all-encompassing secularization of religion, which prediction has proved false, especially in the third world (as Berger himself has acknowledged in his later work, Desecularization).

神圣的帷幕 : 宗教社会学理论之要素 = The sacred canopy elements of a sociological theory of religion

The tourist: a new theory of the leisure class

The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality

This article argues that studying everyday life is valuable because it makes sociologists attend to the routine and temporal aspects of social life. The ‘everyday’ brings the seasons of society into view. It also brings to the fore how liveable lives are made in the midst of the social damage produced by widening class divisions. Drawing lessons from Erving Goffman’s sociology, the article argues that attending to everyday life necessitates developing an eye for detail and attentiveness to the seemingly unimportant. It is also argued that central to the study of everyday life is the relationship between history, culture, class and biography. These arguments are illustrated through a discussion of a working-class estate in Croydon, south London where residents light up their home at Christmas in ‘chromatic surplus’.

Why Everyday Life Matters: Class, Community and Making Life Livable

Literature within economic geography on the financialisation of everyday life has so far overlooked the role of family. Using data collected from ethnographic research with six families in the UK before and during the recent financial crisis, this article argues the case for using family as a lens through which to conceptualise everyday experiences of recession and finance. The findings highlight interpersonal family relationships, inter- and intra-generationality, gender responsibilities, reciprocity, shared experiences and memories as essential to conceptualising how people get by in times of financial crisis and relate to finance in everyday life. The conclusions outline the key contributions of the article to literatures on geographies of finance and family.

Everyday family experiences of the financial crisis: getting by in the recent economic recession

In this paper, we discuss our use of participant-produced digital footage of family Christmases, collected as part of a larger project exploring family backgrounds and family traditions. The audio-...

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Capturing Christmas: The Sensory Potential of Data from Participant Produced Video

In this paper, we explore the ways in which family traditions, specifically those centred on Christmas, are conjured up or brought into life in people?s narrated experiences. For the twenty-seven couples participating in a study on ?family background?, such traditions were often deeply imbued with a sense of family history yet they were more than simply heirlooms or discrete bundles of practices handed down from one generation to the next. Rather, the family traditions we encountered were dynamic ? and sometimes hotly debated ? assemblages of old and new practices. The way that Christmas traditions were remembered, practiced, and experienced mattered to the people in our study because such traditions conjured up particular family eras ? past, present, and anticipated for descendent generations ? and indexed the passing of family time. They also called to mind and brought into being particular atmospheres that spoke to, or raised questions about, the moral worth of different family styles. This leads us to argue that the sociological significance of family Christmas traditions lies not so much in the detail of their content, albeit this is important, but in the ways that they are implicated in the atmospheres, eras and generational dynamics of family life.

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Conjuring up Traditions: atmospheres, eras and family Christmases

For many alternative spiritualists, it is axiomatic that indigenous peoples offer a radical alternative to Western materialism and alienation. Such a vision served some of the Australian alternative spiritualists in this research as both an auto-critique of modernity and a profound truth that could serve a range of personal and political projects. In practice, however, faith in this vision had to be reaffirmed in the face of Australian Aboriginal people who did not match the ideal. Maintaining faith in a useable Aboriginal alterity thus required negotiating the tensions between competing constructions of the genuine as either personal authenticity, adherence to tradition, or genealogical essence. Indeed, it was the movement between these different iterations of authenticity that ensured that the search for the real maintained its value as a framework for self-making at the same time as it tied Aboriginal people to a restrictive notion of culture and personhood.

Real People: Authenticity and Aboriginality in the Australian Holistic Milieu

For many Australian practitioners of alternative spiritualities, ‘nature’ and the non-human environment are alive with significance: they embody a universal divine ‘spirit’ that is both independent of, and continuous with, individual subjects. Particular locations within nature also have special value as a font of powerful personal feelings and as a kind of natural resource of spiritual energy. Moreover, the effect of specifically Australian landscapes is frequently understood by reference to a place’s Aboriginal history or ‘spirit’, with recognition of such places both celebrating and laying claim to the land. However, having a feeling for land is not straightforward. Although Aboriginal people often served as a synonym for the land itself and thus were considered intrinsic to much of the land’s spiritual and personal value, their prior claims to its ownership also sometimes upset non-Aboriginal feelings of love for the land.

Stewart Muir

Papers

Capturing Christmas: The Sensory Potential of Data from Participant Produced Video

Conjuring up Traditions: atmospheres, eras and family Christmases

Real People: Authenticity and Aboriginality in the Australian Holistic Milieu

Australian alternative spiritualities and a feeling for land