Page 77 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

68 Cultural change and ordinary life

The narrative constitutes a means for understanding the ways in which
the narrator at a specific point in time and space is able to make sense
and articulate their placement in the social order of things. This, how-
ever, also means the recognition of the narrative as an action, as a
performance.
(Anthias 2005: 43)

This is a very important emphasis, although, in common with my earlier
discussion, I wish to suggest that the idea of performance here should be
replaced with that of performing and audiencing, in particular to capture the
processual aspect. Narratives of location are important ways of performing
belonging to some things and disassociating from others. This is significantly
to do with the fact that performing involves audiencing as well and that the
intertwining of these processes has made the different dimensions of narration
clearer. This leads to further aspects of identity, but this is predicated on
considering in addition to the points from Devine and Savage, some other
potentionally problematic aspects of Bourdieu.
There are three key issues. First, there is a danger that the emphasis on
fields and the strategies and tactics of social actors within fields leads to a
representation of social life as a kind of game. While there is a long tradition of
considering social life through such theories and the accounts that they pro-
duce, there are also difficulties. Especially important is the point that it is
possible on quite basic levels for an individual to decide whether or not to join
in a game. While this is transferable to social life in that we can decide whether
to engage in one activity rather than another, and we can decide whether to
participate in some fields and not others, our choices are subject to consider-
able restraint. Of course, this is one of the strengths of examining fields relative
to the different forms of capital, which affect movement across them.
The second point is connected, as there is a possibility that the work
inspired by Bourdieu can slip into a voluntarism that overestimates the degree
to which people have freedom to construct identities, forms of culture and
modes of belonging. For example, it might be the case that this sort of point
can be made against the idea of ‘elective belonging’ that I have discussed
elsewhere in this book. Thus it might be argued that this implies that anyone
can elect to belong to groups or to belong to places and so on. Of course, this is
not the case as again a range of social and cultural processes limit such free-
doms. However, this should not be used to devalue the concept itself, as these
‘constraints’ are recognized in it. However, I suggest that this is rather a ‘risk
factor’ that needs to be kept in view when such concepts are deployed.
Third, there are issues with the ‘capital’ model as it can infer that all
social life is conducted according to economic-type processes. An example of
this could be an idea that people are spending all their time considering how
to invest or deploy their various capital assets. Or that they are seeking ways to
secure those modes of capital that they do not possess but would like to. There
is some danger of these ideas shading into a version of rational action theory
(RAT), which sees social and cultural life in related calculative terms and which
downplays other dimensions of cultural life. This is a particular danger that is
considered in the work of Skeggs (2004), which also has much to say on some