Lifestyles and Modern Culture

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Lifestyles and Modern Culture

• Lecture 1
• Lifestyles, Modern Culture and the Body Project

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Surrounding the great transformation 19th
century Europe
horse racing, spectator sports e.g.football
home decoration eating gardening body
exercise piano learning Christmas Valentine
Shopping malls Seaside resorts Leisure
spots Department stores
hair dresser, designer, journalist, photographer,
novelist
New words, new practices, new meanings for old
practices
Lifestyles
Ways of life becoming -
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LIFESTYLES patterned mode of living that -go
beyond material consumption choice -grouped,
contested nature - contest -styles come and go
with different contexts looking for the prime
mover THE context that determined the choice and
the contest
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Accounting for the emerging lifestyles I
1920s 1960s American urban sociology Prime
mover the city Simmel on metropolis and blasé
attitude Wirth on urbanism as a result of
density, size and heterogeneity Gans on suburban
way of life context urbanization choice urban
wealth, contest against strangers,
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Accounting for the emerging lifestyles II 1960s
1980s British cultural studies Prime mover
Capitalism Dominant lifestyles as ideology (e,g.
celebrating Christmas) or class exclusionary
strategy (Bourdieu on taste) Subcultural
lifestyles as resistance (Willis on working class
school kids) context capitalism and class
struggle choice capitalist economic dynamics,
contest domination resistance
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Accounting for the emerging lifestyles III 1980s
cultural studies on modernism

• 1. No universal prime mover
• Complex variations of lifestyles across time and
  place
• e.g. Notions of slimness Ideals of career
• 2. A discontinuous view of history
• great transformation an industrial, economic
  revolution,
• Modernity wider deeper including the spirit,
  cultural practices - no precise cut-off date
• Modern culture the site of a confluence of
  currentsci
• city,
• capitalist market,
• consumption driven,
• mass mediated,
• technologized,
• scientifically monitored regulated,
• state sponsored,
• uneven global spread

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4. the central importance of discourse how to
classify things, rank order them and provide
justification working macroscopically and
microscopically directly on mind and
body encourage one to be modern in certain
ways modernity embedded in the malleable modern
body notions of health, beauty, discipline,
production and control context fluid modern
societies choice material and cultural
resources, contest nurture, sustain, compete,
create, construct,
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modern body layers of social construction
Beauty
career
ideal city life
childhood
Domesticity
intimacy
nationalism
individualism