Affinities: Potent Connections in Personal Life [Paperback]

How is it possible to feel an affinity with a place? What is happening when someone feels almost literally transported to another time by a smell or a texture or a song? Why do striking family resemblances sometimes feel uncanny? In each of these cases a potent connection is being made, involving forces, flows, energies and atmospherics that conventional sociological approaches can find hard to grasp, but that are important nonetheless. 

In this innovative book Jennifer Mason argues that these are affinities – potent charges and charismatically lively connections in personal life, that rise up and matter in some way and that enchant or toxify the everyday. She suggests that exploring affinities opens up new possibilities for conceptualizing the experience of living in the world through what she calls the 'socio-atmospherics of everyday life'. This book invites the reader to embrace possibilities and themes that may seem outside the usual range, and to engage in a more open, attentive, inventive and poetic sociological sensibility.

Acknowledgements xi

Introduction: Affinities as an Invitation to Think Differently 1

Part One: Sensations of Living

Why Sensations? 7

Facets of Sensation 11

1. Ashes, ghosts and the ‘sense of presence’ 11

2. ‘Grandma’s Hands’ by Bill Withers (version by Gil ScottHeron) 17

3. The sensations of others: children’s perspectives 18

Looks 21

Voices, volume and imitation 22

Size, height, weight, growing 24

Play fighting and real fighting 26

Bodily proximity with others 27

Relational traces and bodily inscriptions 27

4. Thl3o