narratives of three generations of urban middle-class - eTheses ...

embedded in culture and history and is constituted by these shared meanings that pose
limits to its unbounded creativity and reflexivity.
In this context, it is pertinent to bring in Smart’s (2007) ‘connectedness thesis’ that is
sociologically grounded in many of her empirical research projects. Connectedness is
not a normative concept but is important for defining the ‘personal’ in personal life that
incorporates all sorts of families, relationships and intimacies, diverse sexualities,
friendships and acquaintanceships. The personal here is significant in denoting the
importance of the individual, yet avoids the sense of separateness and autonomy that
overlook its socio-cultural embeddedness (Smart, 2007: 188). The individualization
thesis which focuses solely on fragmentation and differentiation needs to be counter
balanced by an awareness of reciprocal emotion, entwinement, memory, history and all
forms of sociality that keeps people connected (Smart, 2007: 189).
A very important sociological contribution made by Smart’s (2007) theorization of
personal lives is the social significance of the ‘imaginary’, memory and nostalgia. She
argues after Misztal (2003) that individual memory is profoundly collective and social as
it relies on specific contexts to be meaningful and on communication to become a
memory (39). The imaginary therefore is connected with memory and is not limited to
individual or personal imaginings but also connects with the social and cultural level
(Smart, 2007: 49). Her novel contribution lies in the sociological acknowledgement that
although recall is often a largely conscious process, what is recalled may come with
multiple layers of desire, meanings and imagination that may go beyond the simple
rational or conscious (39). Her conceptualization of the imaginary is sociologically
radical because it establishes both the imaginary and the irrational as highly socio-
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