Familiar Places, Everyday Lives: places as gatherings (original) (raw)

Place has often been overlooked or taken for granted in social research (Massey, 1994: 119; Casey, 1996: 33) but it is, nevertheless, always there: people are always somewhere. It is taken as a priori, given and therefore static, whereas society is changing, dynamic (Urry, 2000: 133). Local places are seen as irrelevant, because now we live in an homogenous global world where ‘local’ infers a sentimental attachment to history (Appadurai, 1995: 214; Massey, 1994: 5). Here I shall argue that that places are not a priori, but are created interactively. Beginning from Heidegger’s (1971) Building, Dwelling, Thinking I will explore how places ‘gather’ leading to an examination of the entanglement of local places and local life stories. Having established place as a thoroughly social entity the contrasting ideas of the ‘global’ and the ‘local’ will be scrutinised showing how the particularity of place is connected to its people and their practices. Using case studies from my research in Wigan as illustration I will show how building gathers both landscape and peoplescape; building brings together neighbourhoods; building leads from place to place. Places are not merely an effect of human agency but are created performatively as material intra-activity (Barad, 2003), not merely a backdrop to the performance of human or social life.