Abstract
In Affinities: Potent Connections in Personal Life, Jennifer Mason invites readers to think differently about our understandings of the social world, asking for us to be open to considering things that are ‘kindred’ to us and how they may help in conceptualising our lives within societies. Mason approaches these affinities through the use of a form of ‘facet methodology’ – utilising what she describes as ‘flashes of insight’ in order to illuminate these ‘affinities’. The wide-ranging facets, including personal reflections, songs, fiction and other literature, vignettes of data from her own and the work of others to name but some, provide the reader with a way in the often intangible and intricately intimate aspects of our personal lives and lives with others. The book is divided into three parts, dealing with the main aspects Mason positions affinities as comprising: sensations of living; ineffable kinship; and ecologies and socio-atmospherics. These are then overlaid and connected through their relationship to temporality within the final section of the text, drawing together the facets and her layering of these, in order to make sense of these.
The approach Mason takes creates a sense of flow or journey through the book itself, creating something which feels unique from other academic books. The facets examined within each section often draw upon notions of the poetic or lyrical, and in many ways the book mirrors this, in itself creating an affinity between reader and words. The book deals with wide-ranging topics, touching upon what sense, place, feel, texture mean, and in doing so, offers up a new way for considering the fabric of our lives. The book extends affect, embodiment and the sensory turn, into more nuanced and complex phenomena, energies, flows, atmospheres, that is a new departure within sociology, but particularly within family sociology. Social connection is reimagined by Mason to encompass the more intricate frequencies of life, aspects which could perhaps be dismissed by some as more ethereal conceptualisations. Mason does, however, tread a careful line of arguing for the power (the potency, as she describes it) of these connections within social life, without straying into these ‘energies’ becoming somehow mystical in their properties, and roots her ideas back into the reality of what connected and relational lives entail. Some readers may still find the nature of her work too radical a departure in the way that it is challenging of existing ways of knowing and understanding social life; it then perhaps requires a certain ontological and epistemological openness at the outset.
The third section of the book, where ecologies and socio-atmospherics are discussed, provides perhaps the strongest facet into the understanding of these affinities that Mason seeks to convey. Her interpretation of how ‘[w]eather is itself, and is in the weave of everything else’ (p. 151) appears to provide the strongest insight into the arguments she is making around how the aspects she is seeking to attune us towards, affinities, are themselves both material and non-material, familiar and yet strange, but not set in binary to one another. In doing so, she offers us both profound insight into her own understanding and considerations of these sparks or connections and how we as sociologists may utilise these elements ourselves within our own interpretations and understandings of the social relatedness of everyday life.
The broader call to arms of the book, the author’s invitation to us all as sociologists, is to adopt what she describes as an ‘affinities orientation’ – where there is openness, attentiveness and greater poeticism. This approach would see sociology become more porous to other disciplinary approaches, embrace more creative approaches to doing and telling sociology and move beyond the static interpretation of everything, including that which is intangible, ineffable, atmospheric, as part of the ‘the social’ without greater unpacking or examination of what this means. This in some ways connects to the rise of creative methods of not only data generation, but data presentation within sociology (such as through fictionalisation, e.g. Mason’s own work on ‘living the weather’ or visual representations of sociological work such as the work of Williams and Sarson (2017) in the comic The Weight of Expectation) and the increasing willingness in some quarters to see the value and place of interdisciplinary collaborations for enhancing understandings of social life. It does, however, seek to extend and place centrally these aspects. Mason then argues that ‘we should not ignore affinities and their like just because we cannot comfortably categorise and organise them’ (p. 201) but instead be transformative of our own practices and discipline in order to move sociology itself towards greater orientation to and with affinities. Here connections to the idea of these affinities being part of, to borrow from Batalden (2018: 2), the ‘swampy lowlands’ of social life may be apt, in that affinities, as with ‘swampy lowlands’ may appear as areas difficult to navigate, but often where greater meaning and insight can be gained. Through engaging with this affinities orientation, Mason then believes that it could enable us to do better sociology; allowing greater understanding of what is meaningful to social actors and that which sparks, charges and connects their lives both for positive and negative.
Practical applications of this affinities orientation is then potentially limitless, and as with Mason’s compelling call to ‘look for the weather in your own data’ in her 2016 British Sociological Association plenary, perhaps opening ourselves to consider where affinities are present within our research or data could offer a useful practical way in to those piqued by the compelling arguments Mason presents. The book will then not be without challenge to sociologists, but as Mason proves within this thoughtful and thought-provoking text, challenge can bring great opportunity.