Abstract
Belonging is usually seen as a taken-for-granted, and perhaps ill-defined, aspect of everyday life. Through looking at the weather, family life and the local neighbourhood, this article argues that belonging should be recognised as an active and rhythmic practice, creating and recreating relationships, or an ‘ethic of care’, between people, place and history. Using elements of Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis, the article employs a diary written during a week of inclement weather to illustrate how belonging is done through the rhythms and activities of everyday life, such as being a neighbour. This demonstrates how belonging as a way of being-in-the-world, an ‘ontological belonging’, is practical, material and tangible. Repositioning the ‘sense’ of belonging as an everyday activity with tangible consequences brings with it associated responsibilities (an ‘ethic of care’) for place and the people who live there.
Introduction
Belonging is often ‘taken-for-granted’ (May, 2013: 4) as is much of what is thought of as everyday life (Sandywell, 2004). Belonging can be nebulous and ineffable but can also be argued to have an important relationship to identity (May, 2013: 78–79). It is not simply a claim that one makes or a choice (Savage et al., 2005) but also requires a form of acceptance, or recognition, by others (Hage, 2003). I have argued elsewhere (Bennett, 2014a) that belonging is seen as intangible, along with many other aspects of everyday life such as routines or feelings of being ‘at home’. I have also argued that belonging should be understood as practice, as a way of being and acting in the world. Vannini et al. (2011) take a similar approach in describing senses as social constructions which allow us to understand ‘their quality as products and practice, as action and interaction, as work and performance’ (p. 6). A sense of belonging has all of these aspects. Belonging is also rhythmic. Rhythms bring together place and time and shape everyday life (Edensor, 2010a). These include ‘man-made’ rhythms of rites, rituals and routines as well as ‘natural’ rhythms of seasons and the weather. Examining the rhythms of belonging will bring its ‘thing’-ness to the fore (Lefebvre, 2004).
As a product of repeated practice by or within a social group belonging is material. Daniel Miller (2005: 4), in relation to Bourdieu’s theory of practice, explains: ‘[w]e are brought up with the expectations characteristic of our particular social group largely through what we learn in our engagement with the relationships found between everyday things’. Categories of objects relate to other social categories so that, for example, picnics – hampers, blankets, wasps – are correlated to summer in northern Europe. In other words ‘the less tangible [summer] was grounded in the more tangible [picnic paraphernalia]’ (Miller, 2005: 4). Belonging as a way of being-in-the-world is less tangible but becomes tangible through relationships with place, things and other people, that create it and result from it. What I will argue here is that belonging, specifically belonging-in-place, what I, after Linn Miller (2002), have called an ‘ontological belonging’ (Bennett, 2012), is indeed tangible as an embodied, material, rhythmic performance of caring for the world.
This article will show how ontological belonging is ‘done’ over the course of a week, predominantly through the diary of one participant in a wider research project. It will demonstrate, through daily rhythms and activities and, in particular, the impact of the weather, a form of ‘participatory belonging’ (Hage, 2003) with an associated ethic of care.
The next section will explain the concept of ‘ontological belonging’, and then how care is implicated in belonging. This is followed by considering Lefebvre’s (2004) rhythmanalysis, which synthesises place, temporality and everyday life, as an overarching framework for exploring an ontological belonging. Data from one of the diaries written as part of a wider research project (Bennett, 2012) then demonstrates how an ontological belonging may be practiced. Finally, there is a brief exploration of possible implications of the shift of understanding from a ‘sense’ of belonging to a practical, tangible belonging.
Ontological Belonging
An ontological belonging arises through an attachment to place created over time, intersubjective relationships to others in the place and inalienable relationships to the materiality of the place (Bennett, 2012). In order to belong, ontologically, one must understand, in a corporeal sense (cf. Merleau-Ponty, 1962), the place (locality), change over time (history) and the local society (community).
Places, often overlooked in sociology, matter because they hold within them the past, present and potential future (Ingold, 2000) thereby providing a basis for the continuity over time of a local society. Place links together ‘the social’ and ‘the environment’ (Strangleman, 2012: 3.1) through habitual use of a place by the people who inhabit it. For example, discovering coal under the ground allows for the creation of coal mines and brings miners to live there. Above ground, the weather impacts on activities undertaken in a particular place (Ingold, 2010; Rantala et al., 2011; Vannini et al., 2012). Wigan, where this research took place, became a centre for the cotton industry because the damp climate of the north west of England was suitable for spinning the yarn which breaks in drier conditions. These and other attributes of place are formative of everyday social practices.
I have taken the term ‘ontological belonging’ from Linn Miller (2002) who argues that belonging is a state of being in correct relation to community, history and locality. This revolves around the key relational axes of ‘a sense of ease or accord with who we are in ourselves’ and ‘a sense of accord with the various physical and social contexts in which our lives are lived out’ (p. 220). Being in ‘correct relation’ requires living in an ethical and harmonious relationship with oneself, others and the environment. Combining social, historical and geographical connections to places creates a multi-layered definition of belonging. History, which may be linked to a storied belonging or an imagined community, represents one layer (Dicks, 2008; Jones, 2010), although social connections are, perhaps, the most commonly examined aspects of belonging (e.g. Rose, 1988; Savage et al., 2005). However, my research shows that the geographical and material elements of an ontological belonging can lead to an ethic of care for the future, or what I have referred to elsewhere as the gift of place (Bennett, 2014b).
In examining a historical or narrative aspect of belonging, it is useful to consider Merleau-Ponty’s (1962: 401–433) conception of past, present and future as inseparable, abiding in both people and elements of the landscape. Time is not something which we stand outside of but is a part of being in the world. In a life story one event succeeds another but it is the accumulation of events that constitute the life itself. Places also have histories, which are told and retold (Dicks, 2008; Jones, 2010). The ‘lives and works of past generations’ are still present in the landscape (Ingold, 1993: 152) and their inalienable traces help to shape the performance and rhythms of everyday life in the present (Jones, 2010).
Belonging allows for a multi-dimensionality that is often missing in identity categories (May, 2013: 7–9). Belonging as identity is about reflection: my environment, the place and the people show me my story, I am part of the ‘we’ group which is reflected back through inalienable presences (Leach, 2002: 132). Reflections confirm acceptance within the group as does the related concept of ‘recognition’ (Hage, 2003: 146–149), which is less reliant on a shared history and more on shared cultural practices which confer ‘mutual obligation’ (Hage, 2003: 148), or the reciprocity of the Maussian gift.
Belonging, Participation and Care
Place communities created through the shared performance of daily life can form tangible, material relationships which embrace an affective, intersubjective attachment to people and place. Ghassan Hage (2003) developed the concept of an ‘ethic of care’ in relation to a participatory form of belonging to place, but an ‘ethic of care’ has longer roots in feminist ethical thinking. As Blum (2003: 522) explains in reviewing work by Carol Gilligan and others, care is ‘applicable at least to persons who might be unrelated and unconnected to the agent but who are encountered by her in the course of daily life’. ‘[C]aring is a form of acting’ rooted in both ‘caring about and taking care of’(Sevenhuijsen, 2003: 23); this shares an element of practice or performance with the view of belonging laid out here. Sevenhuijsen (2003) demonstrates how care is a day-to-day activity as well as a moral orientation and framework making it an integral aspect of thinking about everyday life. Similarly, a minimum conception of an ontological belonging involves being in ‘correct relation’, that is an ethical, caring relationship, to the framework of belonging which is composed of history, community and locality (Miller, 2002). As embodied humans we are a part of the material world (Stevens, 2012: 588); an ontological belonging extends intersubjectivity into the environment in the form of ‘we relations’ (Schutz, 1962) with the past, other people and the place, all of which can then be recognised as deserving care.
The empirical data below will show how together all of these relationships form a tangible belonging which includes an ethic of care. But first, the next section will explore how elements of Lefebvre’s (2004) rhythmanalysis can be usefully employed in this study.
Everyday Rhythms
The concept of belonging as an assemblage of place, people and time emphasises its relational, fluid and variable nature (Ingold, 2000). Place, people and time also act and interact to (re)create everyday life. Everyday life is noted for its repetitive sameness, for being mundane and ‘ordinary’ (Sandywell, 2004). It is nevertheless made up of a co-ordinated series of regular practices (Merleau-Ponty, 1962).
Conceptualising everyday life and ontological belonging as regularly performed practices is not to imply that these are merely mechanistically repeated ‘successions of movements’ (Lefebvre, 2004: 6). Rather than automated repetitions, everyday practices are practical competences (Merleau-Ponty, 1962), or habits (Grosz, 2013). Habit is necessary for a feeling of familiarity, of being at home. Forming habits frees us up from having to focus on what Lefebvre (2004: 30) refers to as ‘the daily grind’. Habitual behaviour allows us to perform one commonplace act whilst pursuing another at the same time, for example talking whilst eating with utensils, such as knife and fork, which require a level of skill. This ability to sediment the use of tools within our bodily memories (a concept similar to Heidegger’s ‘zuhanden’) is what Grosz (2013: 217) calls ‘the point of transition between living beings and matter, enabling each to be transformed through its engagement with the other’. The everyday is thus not simply a background to more significant thoughts and actions but is what makes us human. This is where our identities begin ‘in the usually unreflexive habits of the everyday, the taken-for-granted, temporally organized routines …’ which contribute to ‘a sense of home and place’ (Edensor, 2006: 532), in other words, belonging in place.
Regular daily routines are thus performative networks of belonging (O’Neill and Whatmore, 2000). Rhythm exists wherever there is ‘interaction between a place, a time and an expenditure of energy’ (Lefebvre, 2004: 15), making rhythms an ideal framework for analysing belonging-in-place in the performance of the everyday. The synchronisation of time-space routines and rhythms can bring people together in a variety of ways which may promote, define or signify belonging, such as what Seamon (1980) refers to as ‘place ballets’, where regular habits – catching the same train, buying a coffee at the same time – will bring together strangers who come to recognise each other. Rhythms are a way of understanding how things exist separately and together, to make up a whole: Lefebvre writes of the rhythms of a garden where the separate elements (‘trees, flowers, birds and insects’) within the place create a harmonious ‘polyrhythmia’ (Lefebvre, 2004: 17). This rhythm can be seen as ‘being in correct relation’ to the garden, analogous to Miller’s (2002) conception of ontological belonging as a state of being in correct relation to community, history and locality. Just as the polyrhythmia in the garden brings together the constituent elements of what we understand as ‘a garden’, so the constituent elements of an ontological belonging – community, history and geography – can, when brought together harmoniously, create their own polyrhythmia as a collectively constituted ontological belonging. Rhythms are composed of different beats that may have different emphases: the downbeat is typically given more emphasis but placing greater emphasis on the upbeat will produce a syncopated rhythm (Conlon, 2010). Alternative rhythms can be present simultaneously in everyday life, occupying different temporal spaces for different assemblages. Seamon’s (1980) ‘place ballets’, for example, will have different choreographies according to the various temporal landscapes of the actors. Everyday life has an underlying normality akin to a bass rhythm – often noticed only in its absence. As well as reproduction (the bass), the lived experience of the everyday is a form of jazz improvisation which creates variations on a specific theme or melody. It is the balance between the rhythms in place, people and time, the constituent parts of the assemblage of belonging, that creates specific and variable belongings, which are, nevertheless, ‘ontological’ – a way of being in the world.
Different rhythms will be present within different temporal spaces. Rhythms expanding beyond an individual human life will be present in family stories and traced out in heirlooms and old buildings. Regular rhythms such as attending school or work at particular times will provide shared cyclical rhythms whereas housework, buying a newspaper or a coffee might afford the underpinning linear rhythms of everyday life. Beats will change over the course of a life, but also over the course of a week. Both linear and cyclical rhythms work together to create a eurhythmic or harmonious assemblage of community, history (or temporality) and locality. Regular, repetitive rhythms are sometimes offset by syncopated rhythms which begin on the off beat, typical of jazz rhythms. These may be instigated through disruption, a lack of routine or a sense of powerlessness (Conlon, 2010) but disruption and arrhythmia should also be understood as a part of everyday life (Edensor, 2013). Rhythms, like everyday life, are most noticed when they become irregular (Lefebvre, 2004: 77). These can also be ‘positive’ disruptions such as a birthday celebration, wedding or birth.
A rhythm is not a thing, is not tangible (although it may at times create a tangible response through the body), but it is grounded in the tangibility of place, as is time (Miller, 2005: 4). As rhythms change so do places (localities) and those who inhabit them (what might be referred to as a ‘community’). Places are thus constituted through rhythms and vary in their constitution as the rhythms vary across the course of a day (rush hour) or a week (Saturday shoppers) or a year (holiday makers), or longer (Edensor, 2013). As these rhythms alter places moments of polyrhythmia may come and go creating both fleeting and more substantial belongings. A rhythmanalysis (Lefebvre, 2004) can therefore be productive in looking at how an ontological belonging is created and performed through everyday routines.
Lefebvre (2004) insists that ‘[i]n order to grasp and analyse rhythms, it is necessary to get outside them, but not completely’ (2004: 27). He resolves the difficulty of the positioning of the researcher by watching the street from a balcony which allows sound and smells to be experienced directly. As part of my research into belonging (Bennett, 2012) I asked respondents to complete a written and photographic diary over the course of a week. This enabled me to take up a comparable position to that of Lefebvre watching from his balcony. I could overlook the goings on through the diary, and in addition, I was able to ask questions through a post-diary interview. Here, aspects of all the strands of an ontological belonging are demonstrated empirically through a diary and can be brought into bas relief by examining the rhythms underlying them.
After a brief overview of the empirical research, one diary in particular, John’s, is used to tease out the rhythms which go to make up the triple aspects of an ontological belonging, pulling out the regular and irregular beats, the activity and sensory based rhythms. Through analysing these rhythms a fluid and tangible belonging-in-place emerges.
The Research
The diary and post-diary interview used here are part of a wider research project into belonging in Wigan, with a focus on sociological understandings of place (Bennett, 2012). The research was based around three generational family units, situated in Wigan, Lancashire, in the north west of England. Researching families encompasses wider sociological ideas than those of the family relationships: families are connected to places too through houses, businesses, schools and graves. Belonging was not mentioned to the participants: the research was framed as being centred on family and place. In using a broad array of data collection techniques I was able to allow participants to direct the focus of the research rather than entering the field with pre-formed ideas around their everyday lives. Two or three generations of families were recruited, together with some individuals who could not persuade other family members to take part, making 22 people in all, ranging in age from 16 to 85 years old. Biographical interviews were conducted with family groups, couples or individuals that encompassed the life history of the participants, sometimes other family members (absent partners, for example) and ancestors, where these were known about. Ten participants then went on to create photo diaries over the course of a week and six of these subsequently undertook a post-diary interview. I asked people to write down where they went and who they met over the course of a week taking photos of the places they visited. The photos were then used as the basis of a photo-elicitation interview. This enabled participants to talk about what specific places meant to them (Moore et al., 2008: 56).
Although Lefebvre (2004: 27) implies that observation is the most useful way to study everyday rhythms in many ways the diaries brought more to the research than observation could have done. Being written at home, in private, the diaries contained the observations of the diarists on their own daily lives. Some diaries were more descriptive than others. I had only asked for a minimum of information, in order to encourage the take-up of diaries, but several participants wrote down a wealth of detail about their lives. Two of the diarists told me how much they had enjoyed completing the diaries. John was one of those who gave a considerable amount of detail in his diary. However, the key reason for selecting his diary here is that he wrote during a week of snow when usual everyday activities were disrupted, bringing the rhythmic quality of daily life to the fore. The extracts below demonstrate how John belongs, ontologically, through the polyrhythmia of ‘being in correct relation to community, history and locality’ (Miller, 2002).
John’s Week 1
This section illustrates how an ontological belonging is done and how, through practice, belonging is indeed a tangible aspect of material life. The discussion following will consider more broadly the usefulness of ‘ontological belonging’ as a concept. In order to focus in on everyday lived experience the examples that follow are largely taken from one diary, John’s, of a week in January 2010, together with further information on his activities during that week from his post-diary interview. The diaries provide the present-but-outside perspective rhythmanalysis requires (Lefebvre, 2004). They allow a more extended relationship with the interviewer, giving the respondent the resources to ‘work through and recount the detailed patterns of their everyday life-worlds’ (Latham, 2004: 123). As Schutz (1962: 210) says, the meaning of acts can only be understood in retrospect. Here the diary provides this reflective viewpoint for both John in his writing shortly after the events took place and in terms of a reflection upon ‘a local life’, as far as can be accommodated within a week.
Other diaries shared with John’s a dense local social network, an intimate and affectionate relationship to local places ranging from mill buildings to McDonald’s and close family relationships. Four diaries from the same family over the same week created a particular rhythm around a wedding anniversary which affected all the diarists in different ways (Bennett, 2014a). But this particular diary was chosen here because the weather is an integral part of the narrative which highlights both the ordinary week John would have had without snow and the changes wrought by the snow, demonstrating the contingency, fluidity and foundational nature of this assemblage of people, place and time.
John was recently retired. His wife, Pat, worked part time at the local primary school which their grandson attended. John usually spent one day a week looking after his pre-school granddaughter and also his grandson before and after school, as their parents worked full time. As well as interviewing John, I interviewed his eldest daughter Joanne, the mother of his grandchildren. John’s younger daughter, Karen, also lived locally. The daily rhythms of the three generations covered by the diary are different, but synchronised. They can be understood through the three elements of an ontological belonging: community, history and locality.
Neighbouring/community
The rhythms of the weather are an absent presence in much of modern urban life (Crook, 1998; Edensor, 2010a; Ingold, 2008; Rantala et al., 2011; Vannini et al., 2012). Although it is, in the UK at least, often talked about, the weather’s impact on daily activities is seldom acknowledged. And yet it shapes both personal and shared cultural memories. Childhood summers always seem sunnier than present ones, Glastonbury Festival is always wet and muddy, rain stops play at Wimbledon. When the weather does bring about a change in the rhythms of daily life it can become part of a national cultural memory (Anderson, 2006) such as the winter of 1963 (very cold and snowy) or the summer of 1976 (very hot and a drought) in the UK. Understanding the local weather conditions and reacting to them is a way of demonstrating an understanding of the place (Rantala et al., 2011; Vannini et al., 2012).
Snowed in!! …We need to visit the Post Office so we go next door to see [neighbours] who are our original neighbours since we moved here in 1974. They are now both in their late 70s. We ask them if they require anything … we are concerned that they will venture out. They ask us to get them pasties from the local bakery. On the way to the shops we meet [granddaughter’s childminder] (unemployed for the day as mummy is at home!). The weather is dominating the conversation … [the lady who works behind the Post office counter] tells me that she has had to run the shop today as the owners … have been unable to get here …
The weather is not something that simply sits alongside other experiences, rather we live inside the weather, we inhabit it (Ingold, 2008). This particular weather – snow – is a combination of sensory (cold, wet, slippery) and activity (visiting neighbours, walking to the shops) rhythms. The weather shapes daily life through its relations to other non-human and human agents (Rantala et al., 2011; Vannini et al., 2012; see also Latour, 1993). If the road is covered in snow, cars cannot safely drive along it and people may stay at home, or walk, instead of driving to work or school. It is ‘unusual’ weather which invites the most comment and is most likely to disrupt regular routines, as it has here for John. These are not the regular beats of the ordinary everyday but syncopated, off beat, rhythms of an extraordinary everyday which serve to foreground the ways in which John does belonging in this place.
Walking to the shops, John meets people he knows and he speaks to the lady at the Post Office who he knows well through frequent visits. Conversations are similar – focussed on the weather. This gives them a similar rhythm, based on a shared experience in time and place, a chorus of comments on the disruptions to normal routines. These are syncopated rhythms, off beat through disturbance to the material environment. John and others in the locality create their own, new, rhythms together (Conlon, 2010).
In visiting his neighbours on this and on subsequent days and clearing their path of snow, John signifies (performs) his identity as a member of the local neighbourhood: his belongingness and its ‘thing’-ness. Neighbouring can be seen as a form of gift exchange (Carrier, 1991: 124). One day during the week John’s neighbour brings him soup for lunch ‘a regular occurrence since I retired!!’ (John’s diary) making this a reciprocal exchange. In his post-diary interview this relationship prompted John to speak about other neighbours in the street describing a group of largely long-term residents. Some of the relationships revolve around an annual, rather than daily, rhythm: ‘we’re not too close but we go across on Christmas Day and have a drink’ (John’s post-diary interview). There is an understanding of reciprocation or ‘mutual obligation’ (Hage, 2003: 148) through sharing in these cultural practices which go to make up the rhythms of a neighbourhood.
Almost a week after the original snowfall John was still battling its effects:
I spent a couple of hours removing snow from the porch and ramp in front of the school as it is causing problems for parents and teachers …
His wife works at the school, which his grandson also attends, but he does not say whether he was asked to do this snow clearing. In the rhythm of the week Sunday has left a space, between looking after grandchildren, shopping and housework so that, after his regular visit to the gym early in the morning, John can perform this work of participatory belonging and caring for the place (Hage, 2003). The school building is also part of the neighbourhood: John mentioned a charity he and his family support holding a fund raising event at the school. The place takes on the essence of a gift in a Maussian sense through inalienable connections to the place built up over three generations of the family working in and attending the school (Bennett, 2014b). Gifts are not passed between individuals qua individuals but between ‘moral persons’ on behalf of a group, or social community (Parry, 1986: 456). This confers status on both the giver and receiver of the gift, which is part of the way Mauss links gift exchange to community through ‘the symbolic exchange of recognition’ as Hage (2003: 148) puts it. In recognising the other through receiving from them or giving them a gift, whether through the formal rules of society, as in Hage’s (2003: 146–147) example of a pedestrian crossing, or informally as in John clearing snow, a group of ‘we’ relations (Schutz, 1962) is created or continued. This is the basis of community as ‘moral project’ (Back, 2009) and demonstrates an ‘ethic of care’ (Sevenhuijsen, 2003) for both people and place.
The weather has served to highlight John’s neighbouring work but chatting to those living nearby and looking after his older neighbours are a part of John’s life in a more ‘normal’ week too. Through these actions, which are a part of the regular rhythms of John’s everyday life, John demonstrates how he belongs ontologically, being in ‘correct relation to community’ (Miller, 2002).
Creating memories/history
Went to the gym for the first time since 2nd Jan it really is like a winter wonderland all the trees are still heavy with snow.
Despite the disruptions to the weekly rhythms of John’s, his family’s and neighbours’ lives caused by the snow, John is still able to appreciate its aesthetic value and stopped to take a photo of the trees on his way to the gym. His language in this extract draws on cultural tropes (‘winter wonderland’ and ‘heavy with snow’) which are rooted in the ‘sensory rhythms’ which provide ‘atmosphere’ (Degen, 2010: 24) for a place. Here the snow becomes a welcome addition to the material landscape, rather than a cause for the physical work of shovelling. The stock phrases used indicate compliance with greater cultural rhythms which often help to create memories (Game, 1991).
Monica Degen (2010: 24–25) explains Lefebvre’s focus on the senses and sensory rhythms of places: smells, sounds, the feel of the ground or the walls of buildings. These provide a spatial experience that is often described as ‘atmosphere’ (p. 24) and can be linked to a sense of belonging through memories. ‘Activity rhythms’, on the other hand, through their daily repetitions, provide ‘a sense of location’ (p. 24). The combination of both sets of rhythms gives ‘a layering and multiplicity’ to create a ‘polyrhythmic ensemble’ (p. 25). The changes to everyday life instigated by the weather can be stimulating, as altering a rhythm in music makes us take more notice.
The disruption to what could have been a mundane week in January was also appreciated by John’s five-year-old grandson who ‘had a whale of a time in the snow’ on Tuesday and baked cakes for tea with his mum on Wednesday (John’s diary). The snow vitalises the senses of sight, touch and taste as well as the kinaesthetic sense of playing in the snow and the sense of time out, a suspension of school time. Senses do more work than many sociological interpretations allow, bringing together feelings and actions (Vannini et al., 2011) which produce something tangible: products of practice, perhaps (see Miller, 2005).
Rhythms are memorable, so that poetry or song is far easier to memorise than prose; the ordinary week that the snow disrupted could be seen as the prose, the week of snow lyrical. It is through the disruption to the everyday that distinctive memories are formed. Memories help to create historic and ‘imagined’ communities (Anderson, 2006). Although a single week of snow may not be remembered specifically, certainly extraordinary weather or other shared events do come to signify being a part of a generation and being able to vocalise those memories could, in the future, confer a participatory belonging (see Blokland, 2001).
Locality/material environment
Picked [grandson] up at 1500 due to the weather, spoke to the lollipop lady (friend’s wife) she tells me she cannot carry her ‘staff’ or stick as it is unsafe during this period.
The weather can be used to frame experiences in a variety of ways (Vannini et al., 2012: 372), with the snow here creating an element of danger in everyday activities. John’s younger daughter, working in the health service, ‘battled her way in’ to work (John’s diary). The weather is positioned as an enemy to be fought against. Where snow is a more common experience it is less likely to be seen as dangerous. In Wigan people have not learned to live with the snow as it is too rare to simply ‘get used to it’ (Vannini et al., 2012: 372). However, by the end of the diary, despite John’s photos still showing the snow laying on the ground it is no longer commented on as a significant problem.
Moving around was difficult in the snow. John changed some habitual activities because of this. He shopped during the day on Thursday when he would normally have gone with his wife in the evening. He did not spend his usual Tuesday evening in the pub with friends, or Wednesday evening with his sister. Even walking was difficult in the snow and going out meant getting ‘kitted up in boots, hat, gloves etc.’ (John’s diary). The terrain was altered from that of ordinary everyday life. Walking in snow will leave footprints, a trail. Snow, and particularly ice, are slippery. Proprioception is the sense by which we locate our body in space and can negotiate steps, for example, without conscious thought. But when the terrain is altered, through a surface layer of snow, this sensory perception, which has been constructed (habituated) to cope with particular surfaces, is disrupted. In ‘normal’ walking the rhythm takes over (Vergunst, 2010: 381), but on a slippery surface that is not possible and John recounts stories of people slipping and breaking bones. The priest told John how the local hardware store had put up the price of grit for the church path as the weather worsened; economic rhythms falling into step with the environmental conditions (Edensor, 2010b). In writing that local people will be ‘exploited’ if they don’t ‘vote with their feet’ and use the supermarkets, John positions the local shop as uncaring and therefore external to the local neighbourhood, who in turn do not need to feel obliged to support local businesses. At the gym he encounters friends who are glad to be able to go to the gym as ‘the weather has curtailed their daily walks’ (John’s diary), causing another change in the daily rhythms of life during the inclement weather. All of these activities connect people to their landscape either through walking or through the disruption to the usual patterns, the absence of walking (Lefebvre, 2004: 96). In interrupting the regular rhythms the snow brings them into focus. The environment is made alien and a habitual belonging is seen to be absent.
As an embodied, practiced habit, walking a particular route is a familiar rhythm beaten out through footsteps on the ground. On the Saturday, John’s family meet in Wigan town centre and he takes several photos for his diary. In talking me through the photo with the tower of the parish church looming up from behind a row of shops he said ‘I’ve only been in there once … um, but I’ve walked there hundreds and hundreds of times though because you can walk, you can park at the back there and walk through from that direction into Wigan’ (John’s post-diary interview). Despite the interior of the church not being a part of his life, in walking past it, its ‘visual monumentality’ (Degen, 2010: 25) creates a particular rhythm which resonates through time: John’s lifetime and the longer timespan of the building of the church and the paving stones he walks on (Ingold, 2000: 204). The embodied knowledge implicit in walking familiar routes blurs the divisions between representation and the affective feel of the place (Edensor, 2010b) giving John an unlooked for sense of responsibility for this place in talking to me, as a stranger.
John’s experiences of disruption to his regular everyday life through the weather have served to highlight how John does belonging: through caring for his neighbours and environment; through his relations with his family; through an embodied familiarity with the place and walking the same route ‘hundreds’ of times. This combination of active practices and sensual engagement with the place (Degen, 2010) grounds the less tangible sense of belonging in the more tangible practices of, for example, neighbouring (Miller, 2005: 4). Belonging as a way of being-in-the-world is less tangible but becomes tangible through the relationships with place, things and other people, that create it and result from it. Through disrupting the regular routines of daily life the snow has shown how their unconsidered rhythms, the bass line to the melody of life, contribute to a sense of belonging for John.
Belonging Ontologically
By using some of the principles of a rhythmanalysis (Lefebvre, 2004) which looks at the everyday from the starting point of place, I have shown that places are integral to belonging as part of a meshwork of connections to past and future, as well as to other people in the place. John has a lifelong connection to the ‘visual monumentality’ (Degen, 2010: 25) of the Parish Church. He cares for the place, and its people, through extended forms of neighbouring. He listens to his grandson telling stories which will help him to form memories for the future (May, 2013: 102). These examples demonstrate that belonging is not simply a claim that one makes or a choice (Savage et al., 2005) but requires a form of acceptance, or recognition by others, or by the place itself (Hage, 2003). Recognition can be through long-term relationships such as John has, or passing acquaintance (Seamon, 1980). This is a form of ‘polyrhythmia’ which can also be described as ‘being in correct relation’, or having an ethical relation towards people, place and memory (Miller, 2002). There is a moral dimension to this kind of belonging that involves reciprocated care, that is, the individual does not exist independently of the society in which she lives.
Rhythms expose the humdrum, mundane quality of everyday life. And yet they also show how life is in constant flux. Many of the rhythms which shape John’s everyday life are evident in his diary, even when they are disrupted during this particular week: looking after his grandchildren, regular nights out with friends and family, visits to the gym, shopping and church. These comprise the co-ordinated series of practices (Merleau-Ponty, 1962) which shape John’s performance of his everyday life. They are embodied, material and tangible. As well as face-to-face relations there are references to a wider ‘imagined community’ who use the local shops and streets. The adverse weather conditions bring people together in shared routines (Seamon, 1980): walking carefully due to the snow and entertaining children who are not at school. Offbeat rhythms may unite people in a way everyday rhythms cannot: everyone is affected by the snow and shares this experience.
John’s week as described in his diary has shown how belonging can be understood as practice, demonstrated through everyday actions in place. Belonging-in-place, an ‘ontological belonging’ comprises people, history, place and activities (Miller, 2005). Clearing the snow is a way of acting in the world with tangible results: in this case snow-free paths. Through this act John takes on a responsibility as a member of the local place-community. He acts as a ‘moral person’ caring for the place and people he shares an intersubjective ‘we’ relation with. This also (re)creates a relationship (recognition, as Hage [2003] puts it) between John, his elderly neighbours and the place – their homes and the school. In doing his belonging John continually creates and recreates relationships between the different aspects of belonging; in the process he recognises past, present and future others who have or will create similar relationships. Belonging is done every day, it is mundane, quotidian, unnoticed. But it is also caring, compassionate, nurturing and cultivates the shared recognition which, ultimately, comprises our shared humanity (Hage, 2003: 151).
Conclusion
This article has shown how a particular form of belonging, an ontological belonging, can be practiced. Through daily rhythms and activities and, in particular, the impact of the weather, John’s week has highlighted a form of ‘participatory belonging’ (Hage, 2003) with an associated ethic of care. Ontological belonging is a form of caring for the place, in order to pass it on as a form of Maussian gift. This is not always explicit, and it isn’t here for John, although other respondents in my research were clearer in their intentions of looking after places in order to pass them on (Bennett, 2014b). Through his engagement with the local place-community, his activities in looking after the place and his inalienable relationships to familiar parts of Wigan built up over a lifetime, this article has shown how John practices a tangible form of belonging, which can be described as ‘ontological belonging’. To belong ontologically is to be implicated in a set of mutual obligations to care for the past and future of places and those who inhabit them.
Everyday life is sometimes made visible only through certain reminders – in this case, through writing a diary and talking about the photographs taken as part of this research process. This shows the potential benefits of this method of research and the extra dimensions diaries can bring to people’s narratives. But in highlighting these issues this also indicates the difficulties inherent in investigating less tangible aspects of daily life. The framework of Lefebvre’s (2004) rhythmanalysis synthesising place, temporality and everyday life has helped to draw out the threads (history, the social and place) that go to make up an ontological belonging. Rhythmanalysis helps in thinking through the implications of different ways of interacting with place for doing belonging. It brings the ‘thing’-ness (Lefebvre, 2004) of belonging to the fore.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Tim Edensor and the two anonymous referees for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.
Funding
This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (grant number ES/F022743/1).