Lifestyles

Characteristics and Features

Interestingly, even if belonging to one and the same civilization or culture, lifestyles are always stratified “in their inside”—that is, according to class gender, education, age, access to life options (e.g. professions), and services and goods (e.g., housing). Socialization and social inclusion or exclusion (often caused by the environment or milieu of origin) also play important roles. Lifestyles are always dependent on life standards. For example, a person living in Western civilization and thus embedded into a mainstream lifestyle characterized by equality, individualism, and open access to technology and professions may still be disadvantaged by age or lack of education, thus being forced to conduct a lifestyle not corresponding to his or her aspirations. In many civilizations around the world, lifestyles are still dependent on gender.

Insofar as lifestyles consist of the complex multidimensional interweaving of all these dimensions and factors, they are often interpreted as the symbolic embodiment of culture in the broad sense, that is, to the extent that culture is defined as “the inheritable of social practice” (Johannes Heinrichs). The relationship between a culture and the lifestyles inhabiting it is shaped both by its affirmation through “ordinary” lifestyles and the opposition (or protest) of “alternative” or “nonaligned” lifestyles against its prevailing mainstream.

Correspondingly, a lifestyle has the double function of distinguishing and unifying groups and individuals within a given society, as well as creating symbolic (cultural) centers and peripheries. According to Pierre Bourdieu, lifestyles negotiate between the objective structures and features of a society and the subjective practices possible in it. They incorporate social structures by transforming them into symbolic capital, that is, into publicly visible habits that thus influence the cultural self-consciousness of a society. In this sense, lifestyles not only are the (passive) expression of given societal patterns and formations but also can be interpreted as (active) agents of symbolic power, because they influence the ideas of what a good life can and should be in a society, thus ultimately also affecting a social formation's political and institutional framework. As a consequence, different groups in a given society compete for symbolic capital by the means and in the “space” of lifestyles. In this sense, lifestyles are the complementary cultural dimension of the material struggles within a society; thus, they acquire a pre-political or contextual political role. Given that, according to Ramón Saldívar, the “power of culture” as a unifying and dividing force is at the core of globalization, this pre-political role today is seen as increasingly important, because in the age of [Page 1077]global communication systems and of a media culture that revolves around the production, distribution, and exchange of images, lifestyles depict and influence the inner conflicts as well as the integrative potentials of the emerging global civilization.

...