Agriculture Reference
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Felski refuses these definitions, emphasising instead the necessity of routine and
continuity for human development. Repetition is a sense-making mechanism which
helps people to organise their lives. And routines are crucial to the accumulative
process of identity formation: 'Quite simply, we become who we are through acts of
repetition' (Felski 2000, 21). More significantly, rather than theorising routine as a
cycle of domination which circumvents progress or creativity, Felski sees repetition
as a potentially innovative, resistant force. Challenging the view that newness is
by necessity superior, Felski argues the contemporary period is characterised by
social change which is often imposed on subjects, against their will. Under these
circumstances repetition within the ordinary cycles of the everyday can serve as a
coping device:
everyday rituals may help to safeguard a sense of personal autonomy and dignity, or to
preserve the distinctive qualities of a threatened way of life. In other words, repetition is
not simply a sign of human subordination to external forces but also one of the ways in
which individuals engage with and respond to their environment. Repetition can signal
resistance as well as enslavement (Felski 2000, 21).
Dimensions of ordinariness - time-based repetition, the rhythm of habit and the home
as site where these entities are performed - are stabilising cognitive mechanisms
which are central to how people forge and replenish their sense of identity. Indeed
Savage et. al.'s (1999) empirical work on the ordinary consumption of radio, found
that people were not concerned to impress through distinctive consumption practices
or by claiming a firm class identity. Rather, the middle-class people of the study
wanted to be thought of as 'ordinary' - as though ordinariness allowed them a way of
being real and authentic people as opposed to being fixed by class signifiers. Savage
et. al argue that both being and consuming ordinarily offers comfort and reassurance
at a time of accelerated social change (1999, 140). I argue in this topic that rapid
social change has potentially incited people to tighten their grip on dimensions of
ordinariness. It is through the micro-practices of ordinary activities like gardening,
forms of leisure that bear the marks of their locations of class and gender, that people
find ways to cope with the travails of everyday life in the context of wider and
potentially de-stabilising forms of cultural change.
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