Sadzonki myśli i płomyki nadziei – rozwijanie kompetencji głębokich w procesie rodzinnej autoterapii

Reviewed by: Daoist Priests of the Li Family: Ritual Life in Village China by Stephen Jones Daniel M. Murray Stephen Jones, Daoist Priests of the Li Family: Ritual Life in Village China. St Petersburg, FL: Three Pines Press, 2017. x, 406 pp. US$42.95 (PB). ISBN 978-1-931483-34-6 Stephen Jones has engaged in fieldwork on the ritual and music of northern China for the past thirty years, and his previous book In Search of the Folk Daoists of North China1 brought the hereditary Daoist priests of Shanxi, Hebei, and Gansu to the forefront of his work. Daoist Priests of the Li Family continues this focus, but shifts from a large-scale survey to deeply intimate portraits of the Daoists (or Yinyang 陰陽, as they are referred to locally) Li Manshan 李满山, his deceased father Li Qing 李清, and other members of the current band of ritual performers. Jones first met the group in 1991, returning to the village in 2001 and 2003, and has focused his research primarily on them since 2011.The book and accompanying film2 illustrate a close connection between Jones and Li, providing great detail on the family of Daoists and Jones’ interactions with them. The work is something of a reference book to the Li family, chronicling their history, ritual and musical performances, and manuscript collection. It is divided into six parts, each with three to four chapters, as well as introductory and [End Page 80] concluding chapters, and three appendices. The first three parts present a history of the Li family from Li Qing’s father’s early life in the 1920s, through the Maoist era, and up to the present based largely on interviews with Li Manshan and other surviving relatives, as well as drawing on gazetteers and other local historical documents. Part 4 explains the collection of hand-written manuscripts that Li Manshan currently holds, though as Jones points out, these are generally not used. Here Jones stresses the importance of performance over text on the assumption that texts, not ethnography, are what the reader is interested in. Part 5 contrasts the texts with the sound and performance of rituals; he describes the various instruments used and details the funerary rites, which are now the most common rituals, as well as rites for thanking the earth for individual households, which are no longer performed, and temple fair rites, which are no longer common for this Daoist group to perform. Here numerous musical scores and translations of hymns are included, but the Chinese text is only present in images of certain manuscripts. The final section focuses on the future outlooks for the Daoists, their rising prestige through government Intangible Cultural Heritage projects, and travels abroad for performances organized by Jones. These shifts have occurred alongside declining interest paid to them by the rural residents who would normally hire them, perceptions of the instability of the tradition in the future due to its limited income, and simplification of ritual practices. The first appendix presents an argument for fieldwork, with a focus on performance and oral history in Daoist studies, though these points can be found repeatedly throughout the text. The other two appendices list the collection of ritual manuals and describe the chanted scriptures. Jones should be commended for the great detail provided about a tradition for which he clearly has much respect and admiration. While he writes that his expertise lies in ethnomusicology and not ritual studies, it is evident that he has developed a serious understanding of many of the subtleties of Daoist texts and ritual performance. However, those seeking a more analytic or theoretical account of the Shanxi Daoists will be disappointed. The monograph is largely descriptive, lacking much analysis of the changing social life in rural north China or the rituals themselves. Jones’ main argument is largely the same as in his previous book, that the field of Daoist studies is overly concerned with textual evidence and that local historians draw on fieldwork as if contemporary rural life can be taken as a mirror of local society in late imperial times. Additionally, he points out the problematic division of household Daoists in southern China and monastic...

In The Birth of the Clinic, an extended engagement with medical science and its institutions in eighteenth-century France, Michel Foucault argued that an epistemic shift took place at the end of the eighteenth century, a major component of which was the rediscovery of the idea that death provided 'the absolute point of view over life and opening ... on its truth'.1 For Foucault, the development of pathological anatomy in this period was the most vital expression of the new medicine. Through the dissection of the dead body came the discovery that 'it is at death that disease and life speak their truth' (B°C, p145). From this perspective, disease breaks away from the metaphysic of evil and becomes, instead, 'life undergoing modification in an inflected functioning' (p153). More importantly, the anatomical gaze revealed 'the forbidden imminent secret: the knowledge of the individual' (p170). Accordingly, Foucault concluded that 'the experience of individuality in modern culture is bound up with that of death' (p197).Elisabeth Bronfen made productive use of this re-emergence of the idea that death is 'that moment in a person's life where individuality ... could finally be attained' and 'an otherwise incommunicable secret could be made visible' in her reading of nineteenth-century literature and art.2 She cites, as one example, Nell's death in The Old Curiosity Shop, where death 'recreates the body into a perfect version of its former self' (Over her dead body, p89). She notes also the nineteenth-century literary convention in which the deathbed scene involves not only the farewell greetings from friends and kin but also the dying person's last minute vision of the after-life (p77). While death remains an untransmissable experience, the deathbed spectators watch the dying person hovering on the threshold and through them hope to gain a glimpse into 'the Beyond'.This new conception of 'death's presence in life' which Foucault delineates, Bronfen suggests, gave a new power to the dying person and led to 'elaborate stagings' of death (p77). Death certainly seems to have been a regular part of everyday Victorian life, from high infant mortality rates to the death of women in childbirth, from public executions to familial death-beds, from elaborate rituals of mourning to commemorative photographs of the dead.3 Victorian fiction bears eloquent testimony to 'death's presence in life' in a rich variety of forms. If we confine ourselves to the works of Dickens, in addition to Nell's long journey to death in The Old Curiosity Shop, there is Oliver Twist's morally-improving final meeting with Fagin in the death-cell; the 'Resurrection Men' in The Tale of Two Cities; the unhealthy graveyards of Bleak House; the death-house of Our Mutual Friend; and Pip's meditations over the tombstones of his parents and five little brothers at the start of Great Expectations.By contrast, we generally think that dying and death have retreated from contemporary everyday life, withdrawn to the non-places of nursing homes, hospitals, hospices, funeral parlours, crematoria. Thus Ruth Richardson, in her pioneering work on the history of attitudes towards death in the early Victorian period, observes that nowadays 'preparation of the dead for disposal is regarded as a sanitary problem, dealt with professionally by hospitals and undertakers'.4 Roger Luckhurst makes a wider claim: 'In advanced capitalist societies, encounters with extremity are suppressed: birth, death, insanity are all removed from the everyday and placed under technical and institutional command'.5 In Marc Auge's words, this is 'a world where people are born in the clinic and die in hospital'.6In this essay, I will argue that while the process of dying has been removed to these non-places, death itself (in mediated and unmediated forms) has become ubiquitous in contemporary life. I will approach this through the engagement with death in a range of recent novels arguing that, if 'death's presence in life' was linked with the attainment of individuality for the Victorians, death in recent fiction is rather associated with an alienation and a randomness that de-emphasise individual identity. …

Urbanisation is one of the defining features of today’s crowded and climate-changed world, contributing to significant declines in biodiversity and ecosystems globally (Mcdonald et al. 2008). Yet, cities, as unsustainable as they currently are, can also be a source of solutions. Contrary to notions that the city is devoid of the ‘natural’, cities habour diverse assemblages of wildlife communities and can potentially enhance biodiversity conservation efforts (Faeth et al. 2011). Moreover, as Dearborn and Kark (2010) and McKinney (2002) note, cities are sites of economic and political power. Thus, an ecologically-connected and informed urban population could generate the public pressure necessary to drive pro-conservation policy. For instance, the reversal of plans to develop Chek Jawa in Singapore stemmed from the ‘groundswell of public opinion that was garnered through outreach programmes, where the public was totally convinced of the value of the habitat’ (Wee and Hale 2008: 48). However, as Clover (2002) warns, the one-directional flow of information typical of education and outreach campaigns can be problematic because it ‘dismisses or ignores people’s knowledge and reinforces the idea that we can attribute different levels of status to knowledge, based on the rationale that, say, professionals Bknow^ and Bothers^ do not’ (317). Accordingly, public and intellectual environmental discourses are typically divorced from the complexities of everyday life (Pellandini-Simanyi 2014). Thus, ‘the everyday has not been seen as a realm from which alternative, competing, normative visions can potentially emanate, but one that needs to conform to norms defined outside it’ (Ibid: 8). Consequently, this sets up a fallacious dichotomy between environmental and non-environmental action respectively associated with normative goods and bads, thus alienating large segments of the population. Not surprisingly then, such a disconnect has resulted in substantial value-action and behaviour-impact gaps across most of the industrialised world—where professed environmental concern does not translate into meaningful action or substantial environmental improvements (Kennedy et al. 2015). Yet, as Sahasrabudhey (2009) acknowledges, it is the realm of ordinary everyday life that (re)produces social life. ‘People constantly produce new knowledge based on their genius, experiences and the needs of everyday life. [And so], [t]here has perhaps never been a greater source of knowledge than ordinary life’ (Ibid: 43). Notwithstanding, as Shove’s widelyinfluential work (2003) highlights, the everyday is usually marginalised by a sociological fixation on the ‘explicit, the visible and the dramatic’ (1). Moreover, the challenge of studying everyday life lies in its ‘sheer ambiguity... its ostensibly Bordinary^ nature... its unavoidable associations with the familiar, the taken-for-granted, [and] the commonsensical’ (Bennett 2005: 1). So, how can we conceptualise an everyday urban ecology? What would it look like? And to what ends would such an everyday urban ecology serve? In the following sections, I weave together two disparate theoretical threads—that of more-than-human geographies andMarxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s ‘critique of everyday life’ and the ‘right to the city’—to elaborate the ethics, agency and politics around an everyday urban ecology. * Ezra Ho ezra_ho@live.com

Reviews 423 David E. Sutton. Memories Cast in Stone: The Relevance of the Past in Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg, 1998. 241 pp. ISBN 1-85973943 -1, $55.00/£39.99 cloth; ISBN 1-85973-948-2, $19.50/£14.99 paper. Sutton's sensitive and insightful book is the result of recent f ieldwork on Kalymnos, a small Aegean island in the Dodecanese group lying ten mües from the Turkish coast. In this Greek community of fifteen thousand, the past remains alive and active in the present as a source of both cultural identity and everyday social consciousness. But this book is neither a local history of Kalymnos nor a reconstruction of Greek history through the perceptions of its people. It is rather an attempt to understand "how people filter the present through ideas of the past [so that it may be used] to interpret, evaluate and judge issues pertaining to today's present" (ix). In American or British culture, history remains bracketed-off and isolated from the present: it is considered to be over, forgotten, and personally irrelevant to the concerns of ordinary life. However, "On Kalymnos you meet history" as a Uving past which permeates all modes of current perception and remains inextricably embedded in contemporary social life (209). Introducing the ethnography of this society through an investigation of the origins and epistemology of its ideological components has a particular significance in an era of resurgent nationalism and ethnic politics within Europe. Sutton's use of apparently prosaic examples of behavior on Kalymnos, as a means of opening inner worlds of social and political meaning, is therefore a valuable task for anthropology. History for the Kalymnians is not of course a simple melange of innocently structured past events: it is a series of stories chosen from classical, Byzantine, and modern times which "are told with a particular purpose in mind" (16). The cultural construction of such "historicities," which is the main purpose of this study, is in fact complex and multifaceted (2). Sutton skillfuUy unravels the integrated layers of social consciousness that are derived from historical perception which reach from the extended famUy to the local community, the Greek nation, the European Union, and ultimately the global political order. History is seen as any pattern of events that alters ordinary life at different levels. These may include past quarrels, sexual scandals, or financial misconduct that the Kalymnians exploit in gossip. They are self-critical of their propensity to undermine and "eat" their neighbors, leaving a stain on a family's name (122). But history is also about much less parochial matters. History is constantly evoked to define both Kalymnian and Greek identity, to explain national and European poUtical life and international relations, and above all, as a means of reference for analogies in everyday life. The history of the Dodecanese is strongly marked by discontinuity. After classical times the islands were controlled by the empires of 424 Biography 22.3 (Summer 1999) Rome, Byzantium, and Venice, and then ruled by the Genoese, the Knights of St. John, and finaUy, from the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Turks. In the 1820s the islands became part of the new Greek state during the War of Independence, only to be handed back to the Turks in 1828 as part of a diplomatic barter. Italian rule, which foUowed in 1912, became harsh during the fascist period, but this was to be eclipsed by the appalling German occupation from 1943 until the retreat of Axis forces. A brief period of British trusteeship ensued, which ended in a final union with Greece in 1947. The legacy of longterm foreign domination and manipulation by the great powers has been a tradition of both resistance to authority and an intense interest in the international political process responsible for the islands' subordination. These are now potent elements of mass consciousness which coexist with an ingrained distrust of the motives of poUtical power. Kalymnos also firmly embraces a strong left-wing tradition: it has consistently returned socialist deputies in national elections and is staunchly anti-monarchist. But these political leanings are in fact shared with other islands in the eastern Aegean which are not considered by Sutton. Lemnos...

In Susceptible to the Sacred, Bani Shorter, a well-known Jungian analyst, examines the psychological experience of ritual in contemporary life and how this promotes awareness of the individual's natural potential. Basing her book on live material, she investigates, with great sensitivity, how people perceive the sacred and use ritual in their search for purpose, motivation and transformation.

TAI-ME, CHRIST, AND THE MACHINE: AFFIRMATION THROUGH MYTHIC PLURALISM IN HOUSE MADE OF DAWN Michael W. Raymond* Many critics interpret N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn as depicting disharmony, alienation, and the need for spiritual redemption in a squalid, hellish, temporal world.1 Martha Scott Trimble , for example, sees it as a story of how differences in "language and culture tend through their own territorial imperatives to encompass one, sometimes to a point of isolation."2 Even those critics not advocating themes of alienation see House Made of Dawn as an insider's novel. To them, it portrays "the orderly continuum of interrelated events that constitute the Indian universe"3 and "warns native Americans that they may lose more than they gain if they assimilate into the American mix."4 With its alternative to Christianity and to a modern civilization based on secular, technological structures,5 House Made of Dawn's optimism has to be inappropriate for an outsider. Neither of these approaches accounts for the full richness of Momaday's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Rather than denying the possibility of affirmation or suggesting that affirmation can come only through a monolithic cultural identity, House Made of Dawn focuses on the pluralism of ordinary contemporary life and the possibility of finding meaning in it. Depicting a pervasive cultural diversity in even remote, seemingly culturally isolated areas, the novel suggests that meaning in contemporary life comes when one finds his sense of place by recognizing and living within that large and diverse context. At the end of House Made of Dawn, Abel is "running on the rise of the song."9 By seeing and going among the runners, Abel unmistakably associates himself with the dawn runners of eternity: They were whole and indispensable in what they did; everything in creation referred to them. Because of them, perspective, proportion, design in the universe. Meaning because of them. They ran with great dignity and calm, not in the hope of anything, but hopelessly; neither in fear nor hatred nor despair of evil, but simply in recognition and with respect. Evil was. Evil was abroad in the night; they must venture out to the confrontation; they must reckon dues and divide the world (p. 96). "Michael W. Raymond is Nell Carlton Professor of English at Stetson University. He has published widely in the scholarly journals and is currently working on a book on the landscapes of the contemporary American novel. 62Michael W. Raymond Abel saves himself when he identifies with the dawn runners, sees them as a part of the whole, becomes a part of them, and feels significant. But Abel's path to the beginnings of salvation is not easy. Abel's story is one of a journey through and from placelessness.7 It is a sordid and seemingly chaotic journey through a self-conscious and reflective uninvolvement , an alienation from people and places, homelessness, a sense of the unreality of the world and of not belonging. Abel's choices and their outcome are neither simple nor clear-cut. It is more than just the matter of returning to the fulfilling pueblo from the nasty white man's world. Abel's tribulations involve all the complexities inherent in contemporary life. He is forced to face the army, the legal system, and the social service agencies of a society almost totally alien to him. He must deal with such personal tragedies as the deaths of his mother and brother and his own alcoholism. He is torn between personal pride and the necessity for survival in a hostile environment. Swirling around him are the complicated and often obscure promises of value systems inherent in at least three Native American cultures, in Christianity, and in modern technology. Clearly this journey through placelessness is not restricted to the white man's army, city, or values. He experiences the twentiethcentury sense of alienation before ever leaving the pueblo. At WaIatowa , Abel's father was an outsider of an undetermined tribe. His family is considered foreign and strange (p. 15). As an adolescent, Abel unexplainably strangles an eagle he captures during a ceremonial Eagle Watchers Society hunt. On his return to Walatowa in 1945, Abel is...

BEYOND THE EVERYDAY Ben Highmore, Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday, London, Routledge, 2010, 208pp; paperback, £20.99Ben Highmore edited die 2002 andiology The Everyday Life Reader (Roudedge) that first brought him to the attention of readers on bodi sides of the Atlantic. That collection was among a handful of books highlighting the importance of everyday life in studies of culture, and Highmore's capable editorship introduced readers to the most influential positions on the myriad ways that everyday life simultaneously functions as the terrain of the taken-for-granted as well as die experiential realm in which struggles over meaning, selfhood, belonging, and politics are actively waged. In contextualizing the work of a very wide range of figures - all the way from Sigmund Freud, Georg Simmel, Leon Trotsky, \NA ter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer, to Kristin Ross, Erving Goffman, and Mary Kelly - the 2002 collection provides an indispensable archive of statements about the everyday that informs any work done today on the topic. For this reason, his recent single-authored monograph taking up some of the same issues surrounding ordinary life - this time exclusively in his own voice - is once more of interest to readers drawn to the 'stuff' of daily existence.Between the earlier andiology and his new work, Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday, Highmore has written three other monographs on related subjects; so perhaps the current study constitutes something of a summary position on the everyday, an attempt both to take its measure conceptually and to promote its legitimacy as a properly aesthetic object. The book reflects his long-standing focus on die everyday and there is a good deal to learn from it; by the same token, there is also much with which to take issue.If we first consider its strengths, Ordinary Lives reprises the question of experience, looking to sharpen its status as an analytic category: how to think it, how to value it and, above all, how to situate it in relation to aesthetics (as a disciplinary mode of knowing and also as a form of being-in-the-world). Highmore does this by usefully situating historical and philosophical conceptions of the aesdiedc - and aesthetics - from Alexander Baumgarten's eighteenth-century ideas to the propositions spread across several volumes of Jacques Ranciere's contemporary writings. In between, Highmore is assiduous in citing the scholarship on aesthetics that bears on concrete studies of daily experience and its theorization in the discursive registers of cultural and media studies, symbolic anthropology, psychoanalysis, architecture/urban studies and, of course, philosophy. I say 'of course' because in Baumgarten's time aesthetics was only understood as a subset of philosophy per se, but also because aesthetic considerations are today a common feature of philosophical discourse at large, whether in political philosophy (Heidegger, Arendt, Ranciere) or its socio-cultural counterparts (Adorno, Benjamin).What Ordinary Lives elaborates most successfully is the texture and richness of the aesthetic as an epistemological and experiential concept. So, for instance, it is refreshing to be reminded via Michel de Certeau that a classical conception of aesthetics would have subsumed the senses within it - such that 'leading the good life' would include in its meanings passion as much as reflection. This emphasis allows Highmore to promote a return to an earlier conception of the aesthetic, one that rests on everyday experience and ordinary activities rather than on that which has categorically been separated from necessity, feeling, and practicality. In this sense, the project Highmore pursues makes its bid against Immanuel Kant's proposition of 'disinterested contemplation' as well as the epistemological priority given in the Kantian system to 'pure intuition' as appearance (Anschauung).With that said, the author's engagement with Kant is glancing at best, although he does provide a fuller discussion of the ideas of Kant's Scottish interlocutor, David Hume. …

This article examines the collecting practice of Sadberk Koç (1908–1973), whose systematic engagement with Ottoman textiles and domestic artefacts culminated in the posthumous establishment of the Sadberk Hanım Museum, Turkey’s first officially recognised private museum. By foregrounding vernacular material culture – embroideries, garments, and household textiles embedded in everyday and ritual life – Koç’s practice complemented the broader heritage landscape of the early Republic, which, in its pursuit of modernisation and secularisation, placed greater emphasis on monumental architecture, modern painting and sculpture, and Western-oriented music and performing arts, while forms of vernacular domestic material culture, received comparatively little institutional attention. Drawing on archival inventories, oral histories, and family recollections, the study situates her ethos within intersecting narratives of gender, modernisation, and cultural policy. It also highlights the intellectual affinities and networks of mid-twentieth-century women collectors, whose practices reframed private acquisition as cultural stewardship. The museum’s subsequent development and its plans for expansion into a purpose-built complex illustrate the ongoing negotiation between domestic and institutional spheres, and between private initiative and public mission. By bridging vernacular and monumental, intimate and institutional, Koç’s legacy demonstrates how individual agency recalibrated national heritage discourses, ensuring that the textures of everyday life became part of Turkey’s cultural record.

To examine the relationship between illness fluctuations and how people with ankylosing spondylitis (AS) adapt to everyday life situations. Twelve respondents, 8 women and 4 men, age 30-59 years with an AS duration of 6 months to 40 years participated in qualitative interviews. They were asked to give examples of how they lived their everyday life during good and bad times of illness. The text analyses consisted of familiarization with the content, identifying and coding meaningful statements, sorting them into categories, and condensing themes. Three different types of situations for those living with AS emerged from the analysis: ordinary life, slowed-down life, and disrupted life. Ordinary life included managing symptoms by incorporating motion into everyday life routines and adjusting tasks in work situations, sports activities, home life, and social activities. During slowed-down life, an acute or insidious onset of stiffness and fatigue occurred that could be reversed by slowing down ordinary life for a period of time. During disrupted life, the respondents were unable to cope with everyday life because of inexplicable and unmanageable intense, localized, or distributed pain. By examining the relationships between illness and what people do to recover, 3 different life conditions were found: ordinary life, slowed-down life, and disrupted life. Living with AS requires a continuous but varying process of normalization of symptoms and everyday life within the framework of these 3 illness conditions.

London’s Urban Landscape is the first major study of a global city to adopt a materialist perspective and stress the significance of place and the built environment to the urban landscape. Edited by Christopher Tilley, the volume is inspired by phenomenological thinking and presents fine-grained ethnographies of the practices of everyday life in London. In doing so, it charts a unique perspective on the city that integrates ethnographies of daily life with an analysis of material culture. The first part of the volume considers the residential sphere of urban life, discussing in detailed case studies ordinary residential streets, housing estates, suburbia and London’s mobile ‘linear village’ of houseboats. The second part analyses the public sphere, including ethnographies of markets, a park, the social rhythms of a taxi rank, and graffiti and street art. London’s Urban Landscape returns us to the everyday lives of people and the manner in which they understand their lives. The deeply sensuous character of the embodied experience of the city is invoked in the thick descriptions of entangled relationships between people and places, and the paths of movement between them. What stories do door bells and house facades tell us about contemporary life in a Victorian terrace? How do antiques acquire value and significance in a market? How does living in a concrete megastructure relate to the lives of the people who dwell there? These and a host of other questions are addressed in this fascinating book that will appeal widely to all readers interested in London or contemporary urban life.

So far I have considered the social practice of therapy from the standpoint of clients living their lives across diverse places and participating with varying others in diverse practices. I stressed that for clients to begin therapy means that they are entering a structural arrangement in which they attend sessions at intervals with expert strangers in a way that sets off their participation in these sessions from their ordinary lives elsewhere. I focused on how therapy comes to work because clients somehow turn session phenomena into particular parts of their lives across places. And I decentered the understanding of therapy and the problems it is to treat by considering them as particular parts of the clients' ordinary lives. Now I take this decentering further by going into the conduct of everyday life and the life trajectory that all persons unfold regardless of whether they attend a therapy or not. This illuminates the workings of therapy as a part of the way the clients conduct their everyday lives and life trajectories. I already touched on phenomena belonging to their personal conduct of everyday life and life trajectory. But I did not analyze them as such. I shall now do so. It is easier to define this layer of analysis and link it to my framework after having dealt with therapy as a part of the clients' everyday lives and with their pursuit of changes and problems across contexts.

Co‐temporality and <i>Sovremennost'</i>: Late Imperial and Early Soviet Photographs

In under ten years, the World Wide Web has become an integral part of our everyday lives. During this time, it has also affected education in various ways, serving as a resource as well as a medium for instruction. How has the Web affected Computer Science education? What kinds of resources are available on the Web to support Computer Science courses? How can these resources be located? How can the resources be used in a traditional course? What are the pedagogical merits of using these resources, and what are the pitfalls? These are some of the questions that will be examined in this panel. The panelists will also share their experiences using such resources and list some recommendations for using them. The audience will be invited to introduce the resources they use and share their experiences at the end of the panel.

IN a recent address Dr. F. A. Freeth made an eloquent protest against the habit in Great Britain of always classifying science as something apart from ordinary life. It would be difficult to imagine a document better fitted to demonstrate the essential place of science in our ordinary everyday life, or to inspire a general confidence in scientific workers and science by the public, than the eighteenth annual report of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. Published within a couple of days of Dr. Freeth's address, the report describes contributions made by the work of the Department to every major need of our social and industrial life. The comparatively smaU sum of £654,736 (gross) or £451,987 (net), which represents the expenditure of this Department for the year ending March 31,1933, represents also a contribution to the efficiency of every department of State and to the recovery or the prosperity of many industries, the true value of which it is impossible to assess in cash, but which repeatedly has earned dividends many hundredfold on the expenditure involved.

This visual essay explores the intertwining relationships between urban transformation, homes (the physical dwellings), and imagination in Beijing over a time span of 12 years. The visual materials used in this study are photographs taken in and around the city of Beijing from the time leading up to the 2008 Olympic Games, in 2007, up to the pre-COVID-19 period. Inspired by Arjun Appadurai’s (1996) writing on the social practice of imagination, this article explores the ways in which the imagination – the image, the imagined, and the imaginary – reflects, as well as constructs, the discursive practices of ‘the good life’ in dwellings. The images of the ordinary home not only help investigate the practices of imagination in ordinary life, but more importantly, they serve as a tactical intervention that encourages as well as urges us to contemplate and reflect on the transformation of China. They compel us to ask questions. How do the politics of the spectacular Beijing intersect with the politics of non-spectacular, ordinary everyday life? How have imaginations of the good life that drive support for the state-orchestrated development been displayed, constructed, disseminated, and materialised in the social lives of the ordinary? I argue that imagination of the good life carries the potential to aspire and transform; yet, it can also impose control, and subjugate one to the network of power relations that produces order and normativity.