Introduction Culture and Lifestyle

When we were asked to edit a number on the theme of culture and lifestyles, we saw this as an invitation to a very wide-band reflection on what constitutes the axis of our lives at a period we have designated as ’the turn of the millennium’. However, the very act of collating the various texts received has allowed us to define more closely the thrust of the subject matter and to bring out the internal cohesiveness of this edition as a whole. Thus, we find ourselves focussing rather more on lifestyles than on culture, lifestyles that are intrinsically concerned with their relationship to time, spare time, leisure and cultural consumership. A ’lifestyle’ is something located at a junction between ’styles of living’ and ’living conditions’. But whereas styles of living are determined through personal choices and tastes, and point up the freedom to take decisions affecting one’s daily life, living conditions may be seen more as boundaries, marking out the limits of such freedom. These boundaries are defined both by the social context and by the individuals themselves. The relationship between the impact of the objective determinants of individual behaviour and the role played by the subjects as autonomous beings in control of their destiny is a favourite and constant theme of major debate in the social sciences. However, the objectives of this number of our review are rather more modest. Our contributors are concerned rather with how certain characteristics – of society or of individuals – will affect lifestyles, lifestyles that find their expression in the various concrete practises of daily life and during non-working hours. We should, thus, note that although in our call for papers we have, indeed, translated the expression ’modes de vie’ by lifestyles, our contributors, both English- and French-speaking, have interpreted this concept as re-framed above. In order to come to a definition of styles of living, or lifestyles, as we have agreed to call them, the contributors noted the importance of certain parameters of the turn of the millennium: demographic changes, the difficulties besetting school-to-work transition, the growing scarcity of ’time’ as an available resource, cultural intermixing, relational links, the loss of contact with nature, the role played by new technologies. Their analyses are not, however, totally pessimistic: they also bear witness to the individual’s capacity for reflexivity, adaptability and creativity. At the same time, they underline the challenges consequent on the social and cultural changes peculiar to our time and age. The lifestyle analyses presented by our contributors mainly concern specific social groups, defined by age (young people and the elderly), gender (women),cultural origins (Chinese), migratory experience (Australia), civil status (families), or a shared activity (gardening). Sometimes it is a combination of these characteristics – such as immigrant women. The associated lifestyles may, to some extent, be seen as sub-cultures specific to these groups. But they may also be deemed to be key informants with regard to more universal cultural changes, such as domestic and international mobility, gender relations, the increasing level of schooling, and so on, that affect the life of everyone within our societies. The practices being scrutinized do, indeed, cover a lot of ground. Some contributors discuss a wide range of leisure activities, others have focussed on sporting activities, yet others turn to cultural consumership, to gardening, to gambling or to the whole spectrum of leisure practices. This number begins with an overall examination of the relevance of the very concept of lifestyle. The author, A.J. Veal, takes us back over the discussions that have enlivened British writings since the Seventies. Veal first reminds us that the …