Rinkinen, Jenny and Jalas, Mikko and Shove, Elizabeth (2015) Object relations in accounts of everyday life. Sociology, 49 (5). pp. 870-885. ISSN 0038-0385
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Abstract
Theories of social practice routinely acknowledge the significance of the material world, arguing that objects have a constitutive role in shaping and reproducing the practices of which daily life is made. Objects are also important for those who approach ‘everyday life’ as an ontology, a tradition in which scholarly interest in the material reaches beyond the somewhat pragmatic concerns of practice theory. In this article we identify traces of both schools of thought in the ways in which people describe their immediate material environments. By drawing on an archive of diary material, we illustrate multi-faceted object relations with reference to the example of keeping warm. We conclude that in keeping warm, diarists weave together encounters, tactics and judgements, encountering objects in ways that extend beyond the ‘mere’ enactment of social practice. In analysing these encounters we explore ways of conceptualising the object-world that are especially relevant for studies of everyday life.