Making sense of reality : culture and perception in everyday life / Tia DeNora.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 151-164) and index.

Part 1: Philosphically informed sociology -- Introducing slow sociology -- Conventional and unconventional realities: the case of sexual difference -- Part 2: Cultural sociology -- Culturally figured reality -- Once more, with feeling: beyond performance -- Variations in space and time -- Reflexivity: enacting cultural categories along with their instances -- Multiple realities in their maintenance -- Part 3: Artful practices and making sense -- Making sense of reality: perception as action -- The sense of reality: here, now, artfully, pragmatically and with consequences.

What is reality and how do we make sense of it in everyday life? Why do some realities seem more real than others, and what of seemingly contradictory and multiple realities? This book considers reality as we represent, perceive and experience it. It suggests that the realities we take as 'real' are the result of real-time, situated practices that draw on and draw together many things - technologies and objects, people, gestures, meanings and media. Examining these practices illuminates reality (or rather our sense of it) as always 'virtually real', that is simplified and artfully produced. This examination also shows us how the sense of reality that we make is nonetheless real in its consequences. Making Sense of Reality offers students and educators a guide to analysing social life. It develops a performance-based perspective ('doing things with') that highlights the ever-revised dimension of realities and links this perspective to a focus on object-relations and an ecological model of culture-in-action.--Provided by publisher.