Structuration and Place: On the Becoming of Sense of Place and Structure of Feeling*

Abstract

Individual and society. Practice and structure. Agency and structure. Socialization and social reproduction. These are the coupled categories usually depicted as dialectically reproducing and transforming one another in the unbroken process of "structuration." Although Bhaskar, Bourdieu, Giddens, and the other social theorists and social philosophers identifiable with the structuration school of thought differ in their selection of foci and categories, they for the most part share certain overlapping and interlocking views that may be crudely reduced as follows.'Social reproduction is a constantly ongoing process whereby, in a given area, the everyday performance of institutional activities (including those mundane practices associated with the institution of the family) not only results in biological reproduction, but also in the perpetuation or modification of: the institutions themselves; the knowledge necessary to repeat or create activities ;' and already existing structural relationships. In the simultaneous unfolding of socialization and social reproduction the individual and her consciousness are shaped by society while society is unintentionally and intentionally shaped by the individual and her consciousness. In order to deal with the dialectical relationships between individual and society, the constant becoming of both, one must really deal with material continuity and the dialectics of practice and structure, or with the process of structuration, whereby the structural properties of any social system express themselves through the operation of everyday practices at the same time that everyday practices generate and reproduce the micro-and macro-level structural properties of the social system in question.Giddens, Bourdieu, Bhaskar, and several others associated with the structuration school are in various ways sensitive to the fact that all practices, all social activities, take the form of concrete interactions in time-space. Yet,

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