Making Sense of Reality Culture and Perception in Everyday Life [Paperback]

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.

An accomplished and thought provoking study of everyday 'reality' and how we represent, perceive and experience it. With examples throughout, it offers readers an exciting new way of understanding identity, perception and culture.

Making sense of the everyday is not a topic or theme, but a way of looking at things, a sense and sensibility of ordinary life. The diversity of studies and topics that DeNora puts together will enable readers to find a subject close to one's heart and, at the same time, this heterogeneity brings about a kind of sociology that is not only micro, nor individualistic, but simply human.Making Sense of Reality articulates what culture is and how it works.  It brings substantive concreteness to a concept that is so central it ordinarily defiesls€