Page 70 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

Processes of elective belonging 61

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have extended the consideration of elective belonging in the
context of the themes of this book so far. To recap, this means attention to the
contextualized processes of ordinary life, where audiencing and performing
are critical. Belonging is one of the key aspects of ordinary life conceived in
these terms. Elective belonging can therefore be seen as a significant concept
as it enables consideration of choices that people make in their ordinary lives
in the flow of wider processes. Thus, we belong to places and feel attachments
to people, things and processes and so on to differential degrees. These are not
once and for all but change over time. Moroever, these attachments take place
in an increasingly globalized world, where the media are of increased signifi-
cance. Attachments and modes of belonging are lived through globalized and
mediatized processes. The mediatized processes are uneven as people have
different degrees of exposure to them and differential attachments, but they
play out in belonging. An important way therefore to bring together these
processes is through the concept of scene, which increasingly considers the
relation between the global and the local in a mediatized world. In addition, it
can be located within the core ideas of performing and audiencing of this
book. The next step in my argument is to consider these ideas of performing in
the context of the relationship between wider social and cultural processes and
the identity of individuals.

Note

1 In addition to the book-length study, we have developed the analysis through a
number of published papers on class (Savage et al. 2001), the different forms
of belonging in the places studied (Savage et al. 2004a, 2004b), parent teacher
associations and schooling (Bagnall et al. 2003), media use (Longhurst et al. 2001,
2007) and museum visiting (Longhurst et al. 2004).