Materialities of (urban) space: Emergence and sensory perception in social processes

In our paper we discuss our theoretical and methodological approaches to sensory perception of (urban) space and materiality, i.e. the material elements of life-worlds. We conceptualise “culture“ as the sum of institutionalised and hence materialised actions in a social field –  not only in the Durkheimian sense of “social facts”, but also in a manifest-physical way. On the one hand, materialities are therefore manifestations of past actions; on the other, they are perceived by the actors in the continuing social process and attributed by them with meaning. Materialities effectively provide the context for their present and future actions. For the reconstruction of interpretational and interactional patterns it is then inevitable to take into account the (mobile and immobile) spatial surroundings.

These ideas are significant for all social spaces, yet, in the geographical area of Palestine/Israel they are constantly and decidedly stressed. Not only are nearly all materialities as such disputed and often ideologically charged in every phase of the social process (emergence, preservation, destruction), also their perception by actors in everyday life is.

Our questions are: Which constructions of meaning materialise? Which conflicting attributions of meaning to the materialities exist? Which attributions of meaning are suitable within different groupings? How do sensory perceptions correlate or clash with certain political-ideological goals? How do attributions of meaning change? Etc.

By contrasting examples of Jerusalem’s Old City and Haifa’s quarter Hadar we want to show how these processes can be grasped by combining several methods of interpretive social science.

Our empirical findings are part of a joint German-Israeli-Palestinian research project, which deals with present-day social constellations and the dynamics of interaction between members of different social groupings in Israel and Palestine. It is funded by the German Research Foundation and headed by Prof. Gabriele Rosenthal, University of Göttingen.