In this paper, we discuss findings from a study on intergenerational relationalities in order to examine some aspects of how people over 50 years of age experience belonging in their everyday lives. Belonging emerged not as a single unitary ‘thing’, but a complex intersecting of relational, cultural and sensory experiences. We explore how people, place, time and cultural context intertwined in people's sense of belonging to place. Although much previous research on belonging has largely focused on geographical movement, we found that temporal movement, at an individual level in the form of ageing and at a collective level in terms of generational change, proved to be an important layer of our participants’ experiences of belonging and not belonging. Furthermore, we argue that people often come to understand and speak of temporal shifts in belonging in embodied terms, based on their sensory engagement with the world. The paper concludes by considering the consequences of this additional aspect of the experience of belonging for the study of belonging as a social and personal process, and how our findings contribute to debates around ‘ageing well’.

In this paper, we discuss our use of participant-produced digital footage of family Christmases, collected as part of a larger project exploring family backgrounds and family traditions. The audio-visual recording (and subsequent dissemination) of these otherwise difficult-to-access domestic celebrations provides important insights into the multi-dimensional, multisensory, physical and situational nature of such family traditions. With their blend of genre styles - from narrated documentary to home-movie style wobbly camera work - the ‘Christmas videos’ show both conscious ‘displays’ of family life and practice (performed for the camera, for the participants and for posterity) and largely unscripted, and sometimes noisily chaotic, interactions. Although videos cannot provide unmediated access into what such traditions are ‘really like’, in combination with our other data sources the footage has helped to push our thinking about family traditions as being at once intellectualised productions and a series of bodily engagements with a host of practices, understandings, knowledges, family histories, things and people. This form of ‘backstage’ analytical usage of the video data has been very productive for us. However, we argue that there are ethical issues in publicly presenting such data alongside other forms of data, eg interview data, in a deep sociological analysis of people's personal lives. There is the potential not only for the production of incisive knowledge and insight, but also for a prying and distinctively sociological intrusiveness, and sociologists need to think carefully about how to proceed.

Despite some macro level concern with the concepts of tradition and 'detraditionalization', sociologists for the most part have paid relatively little attention to the everyday realities of family traditions as they are experienced and narrated in people's lives. Based on a qualitative study of 'Family Backgrounds and Everyday Lives', this article explores people's experiences and narratives of family Christmases, and examines how traditions are conjured up and evoked in multidimensional, embodied, emplaced and sensory ways. The article argues that in recognizing and conjuring up family practices and happenings as 'traditions', people create a vivid and potent sense of generational eras, atmospheres and family styles. These have a moral currency that matters -sometimes quite profoundly -in people's lives, and are the subject of debate and negotiation between, as well as within, generations. Christmas traditions, it is argued, are central in the constitution of eras not least because they enable the bundling up of time -past, present and anticipated for descendant generations -into packages of generalized 'time out of time', characterized by distinctive atmospheres, and around which memories can coalesce and about which stories can be told. These atmospheric eras -more than broad or macro understandings of 'tradition' -are central in how generational dynamics and personal family histories take shape, and how memories are 'indexed' in and through time.

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For many Australian practitioners of alternative spiritualities, ‘nature’ and the non‐human environment are alive with significance: they embody a universal divine ‘spirit’ that is both independent of, and continuous with, individual subjects. Particular locations within nature also have special value as a font of powerful personal feelings and as a kind of natural resource of spiritual energy. Moreover, the effect of specifically Australian landscapes is frequently understood by reference to a place’s Aboriginal history or ‘spirit’, with recognition of such places both celebrating and laying claim to the land. However, having a feeling for land is not straightforward. Although Aboriginal people often served as a synonym for the land itself and thus were considered intrinsic to much of the land’s spiritual and personal value, their prior claims to its ownership also sometimes upset non‐Aboriginal feelings of love for the land.