Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Lifestyles are symbolically embellished ways of living. Sociologically, they serve two important functions: they classify or categorize the practitioner within a broader social matrix, and in so doing offer practitioners a unique sense of self and identity. Thus, lifestyles combine material and symbolic processes: they are practical ways of providing for basic needs and requirements such as food, clothing, and shelter, but also aesthetic and symbolic expressions of one's sense of self and of one's membership among certain social groups. As such, lifestyles occur at the intersection of individual agency and social structure. They project a unity that is both subjectively meaningful to practitioners themselves, and objectively legible to those defining the social context in which they are performed. For these reasons, lifestyle has sustained as a key sociological concept, capable of bridging the divide between macro-level concerns with large scale social structures and social groupings, and micro-level concerns with the subjective dimensions of agency, meaning, and identity. The study of lifestyle also has a more current relevance. Lifestyles have attracted the interest of many contemporary sociologists for their usefulness in the analysis of processes of social change, and particularly for the perspective they offer on the unique social and cultural conditions characteristic of late ... log in or subscribe to read full text