Page 68 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

Processes of elective belonging 59

theorization. I repeat the point that I am not simply adopting a Goffman-like
analogy of life as dramatic, although aspects of that theorization have increas-
ingly influenced the point of view here. The key point is to see the spaces of
elective belonging as media drenched and involving new interactions influ-
enced by globalizing processes. However, certain aspects of a Goffmanian
approach have significance. This is also the sort of approach taken to the study
of youth cultural interaction around popular music taken by Laughey (2006)
and can inform the sort of study of sport undertaken by Crawford (2004).
A key aspect of the idea of scene as I use it is to point to the way in which
a range of media interact with other aspects of social and cultural life to pro-
duce ways of belonging that involve active choices. Thus, the following from
Cohen (1999) can be generalized beyond popular music to characterize a scene
in general:
Reasons for getting involved with music-making include the fact that it
offers them: a particular lifestyle; a social network and identity outside of
work, family, or home; a sense of purpose, status, and prestige; a unique
means of communicating emotion and idea; and the lure of artistic and
financial success.
(Cohen 1999: 240)
In studying places of elective belonging as scenes, the particular scenes
are seen as a stage in the wider and long-run narrative of the place and those
who elect to live there. A scene can therefore be thought of as an episode in the
longer run narrative, much like the narrative of, say, a television soap opera.
There is no controlling author of this narrative, or indeed the scene, rather the
social actors involved are the authors of the scene, as contextualized by wider
general factors.
The scene involves those who are performing the processes of elective
belonging, but, in contrast to the theatre, the audience is also part of the scene
itself. Thus, while in some circumstances the audience aspect of the process of
the scene will be dominant (as in when people are constituted as a simple
audience in the theatre or at a sports event); in many others performance and
audience aspects are blurred and conjoined. It is important to recognize that
these are processes and that, therefore, belonging is a process that involves
performing and audiencing. This is particularly significant as it means that
elective belonging can involve feelings of belonging more at certain points
than at others. Elective belonging can therefore be unevenly distributed and
some may feel that they do not belong where they are currently living. In this
sense that scene has changed in ways that make some people unhappy within
the overall narrative of belonging.
Scenes are media drenched and involve social networks and a range of
practical activities. The scene involves a varying number of social actors, some
of whom will be known to each other, but the overwhelming number will be
imagined or thought of as potentially knowable. These social actors will have a
range of different identities and to push the analogy further, these can be seen
as involving them as adopting different characters in different contexts, or that
character, and hence identity, has assumed a measure of fluidity that means
that people are adaptable in different contexts. While the current sociological