Publicación: Personal is Metropolitan: Narratives of Self and the Poetics of the Intimate Sphere
Fecha
2016
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info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
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Urbanities
Resumen
This article focuses on current narratives of daily life among young dwellers of metropolitan cities as a particular genre in the growing relevance and visibility of the intimate sphere. The ethnography is highly experimental. It results from workshops based on the collective exploration of the participants’ inhabiting practices and consists mostly of micro-narratives. Although most of these data were gathered in Madrid between 2010 and 2014, I also use material from fieldwork carried out in México DF and Montevideo during the same period. The analysis addresses the form of the storytelling, the conventions of modern living as background and a plot where the Ego is the main character. Such discourses must be understood in the light of silent processes transforming city life from the inside. They speak from a strong ‘I’: a subject committed to autonomy, mobility and self-design. This individualizing tendency compels a young generation of dwellers to ‘become oneself’ through a personal, reflexive quest that entails being open to the future and breaking with the past (thus establishing discontinuities with class, family, local or ethnic determinations). At the same time, daily routines allow them to discover an emerging order of their own through a process of production of meaning that is amazingly conservative, as it consists in the permanent integration of collective memories and traditional and familial forms of domestic practice. These processes take place at a historical time in which the intimate sphere is given visibility and legitimacy. Classical definitions and metaphors of public space fail to recognize fully these silent processes.
Descripción
Categorías UNESCO
Palabras clave
Intimacy, narratives, domestic space
Citación
Centro
Facultad de Filosofía
Departamento
Antropología Social y Cultural