Socialising place attachment: place, social memory and embodied affordances

TitleSocialising place attachment: place, social memory and embodied affordances
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2016
AuthorsCathrine Degnen
JournalAgeing and Society
Issue8
Pagination1645
ISSN0144-686X
Abstract

The 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. KEY WORDS--place attachment, belonging, social memory, relational, embodied. doi: 10.1017/S0144686X15000653

DOI10.1017/S0144686X15000653
Short TitleSocialising place attachment