Page 58 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

5 Globalizing, hybridizing and localizing:
processes of elective belonging

In the previous chapter, I argued that ordinary life requires to be conceptual-
ized in the context of the understanding of audience and performing
processes. I concluded that these processes themselves involve belonging, dis-
tinguishing and individualizing and pursue these ideas (remembering the con-
texts and claims that I have outlined so far) over the next three chapters. In
this chapter, I focus on belonging. I take my argument forward through the
idea of ‘elective belonging’. I will first of all introduce this concept and its
context and then further contextualize it through processes of globalizing,
before offering some illustrative evidence. I conclude by arguing that these
processes can helpfully be theorized in the context of ideas of performance
and audience, as scenic.

Belonging
Recent work has argued for a new approach to processes of belonging
(Savage et al. 2005). This approach seeks to move away from accounts of
belonging as somehow ‘primordial’ and therefore involving an inherent
attachment to face-to-face community or as constructed through discourse
and therefore without significant social anchoring. It sees belonging as a
social process through which people evaluate a site of belonging in the
context of their social trajectory and social and cultural positions. People con-
struct and perform positions and identities that make them feel at home
through processes of reflection, but also imaginings about themselves and
others.
This argument develops themes from Bourdieu and reflects the influence
of literatures that have evaluated the significance of Butler. In studying local
belonging it is important to draw on:

Bourdieu’s interest in how people may feel comfortable or not in
any one place, relating this to the habitus and capital of its residents.
This allows us to explore local belonging as fluid and contingent, in
a manner consistent with Probyn’s (1996) and Fortier’s (2000) insistence
that belonging is not a given but is itself unstable, positing both states