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

cultural and therefore as viable for sociological enquiry. She effectively critiques the
Enlightenment-induced dichotomy between the rational and the irrational and real and
imaginary. Smart argues, this concept of the imaginary and its recognition as a social
possibility, complements Morgan’s (1996) understanding of family ‘practices’ or ‘doing’
by stressing the entwinement of thinking and doing (2007: 37-38; Griffiths, 1995). She
argues that the concept of memory in personal life contributes to the increasingly iconic
status of families in our cultural imaginary (39) or; how the families we live ‘by’ in our
imagination impinge on the actual routine practices or the families we live ‘with’ (Gillis,
1996: xv). Smart’s theorization on connectedness of personal life therefore, rather than
downplaying the cultural significance of family, broadens its scope to include diverse
arrangements of thinking and living that thrive simultaneously on creativity and
commitment. It is in Smart’s (2007) theoretical focus on the ‘cultural turn’ on personal
lives (see Chapter 2) that links her ‘connectedness thesis’ to Gross’ conceptualization of
‘meaning-constitutive traditions’ which, in turn can be connected with the meaningmaking
tradition of interpretivist and interactionist sociology.
Similarly in their theorization on family, friends and personal communities, Pahl and
Spencer (2010) demonstrate that far from being ‘isolated, anomic, or narcissistically self
focused’ people still feel committed and connected to others through their personal
communities in a significant and meaningful way (207). To claim that the family in the
traditional social sense is unsustainable in practice does not imply that social obligations
based on hierarchy and consanguinity are necessarily abandoned. It is interesting to
see how they are modified where one set of values is not replaced by another, rather
the two sets fuse where principles of equality and hierarchy exists comfortably in the
31