Socialising place attachment: place, social memory and embodied affordances

Cathrine Degnen

doi:10.1017/s0144686x15000653

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe significance of place attachment for later life has been convincingly demonstrated. Scholars have offered useful models that help account for the depth of feeling bound up in place attachment in later life, how this attachment is achieved, and its relevance for belonging and identity. To date, however, this focus has largely been on the individual level of experience. This article draws on sociological and anthropological perspectives to consider how place attachment is forged and experienced in dynamic interaction with other entities and other processes: how place attachment is also a collective, relational and embodied process, caught up and experienced via social memory practices and sensorial, bodily knowledge. This resonates with and contributes to the ‘relational turn’ which has attracted burgeoning interest in the larger home disciplines of sociology, human geography and anthropology, and reciprocally helps them extend and build their interaction with critical ageing studies. In making this argument, I draw on two periods of anthropological, ethnographic participant-observation that I conducted in a semi-rural village in the former coalfields in South Yorkshire, England.

Highlights

Place attachment, or the emotional sense of deep connection with particular places that people experience, is a significant source of meaning throughout the lifecourse
What is less evident in the literature is a consideration of how place attachment is forged and experienced in dynamic interaction with other entities and other processes: how place attachment is a collective, relational and embodied process, caught up and experienced via social memory practices and via embodied, sensorial registers
I have taken up a recurring theme in the literature on ageing and place, namely place attachment and what bonds people and place in later life

Summary

Introduction

The emotional sense of deep connection with particular places that people experience, is a significant source of meaning throughout the lifecourse. My aim is to begin thinking through the ways in which place attachment is bound up in social memory, embodied knowledge and the significance of the passage of time.

Results

Conclusion