Under Construction @ Keele 2016 Volume 2 Issue 1 | Page 61

53

‘character’,

37

as their ‘doxic experience’ does not incorporate a need to purchase

commodities for aesthetic purposes.38
These findings raise the question: why do those in this study possess a
divergent subjectivity to younger people? The answer is multifaceted and is found in
the cultural politics to which the older people were accustomed during their primary
and secondary socialisation. Both the younger and older generations within society
have been born into ‘primordial’ worlds wherein they perceive the world around their
being in an objective (‘being-in-the-world’ as an external entity) and subjective
(individual experiences) way.39 Conversely, according to the older people’s
narratives, these perceptions have been derived in two fundamentally different
worlds. Whilst the young are used to a life of abundance, those in old age grew up in
a world of scarcity, plagued by the consequences of the Second World War,
including hardships and rationing. This is exemplified by the narratives of the
participants, as they spoke of having little access to basic foods like sugar, meat and
cheese. They bought ‘broken biscuits’ [Flo], had ‘no central heating’ [Jenny] or ‘toilet
paper’ [Betty and Jenny] and often sewed items which became undone as families
did not have the wealth to buy further goods. Moreover, at Christmas, a time wherein
most young children are contemporarily showered with gifts, this generation were
lucky if they received an ‘apple or an orange’ [Betty] or handmade products such as
wooden ‘dolls houses, ports and garages’ [Jenny] created by their parents.
It is within this reality of paucity that the older participants learnt the
creativities of their relatives, including how to make, bake, mend and grow their own
produce, skills less familiar to young people today. These skills have helped this
generation to be resilient to the effects of the recession in the contemporary era.
They utilise them within their own ‘grey economy’, which is not lucrative in the sense
of establishing significant profit, but enables the participants to be entrepreneurial
and craft produce at a lower cost than found in commercial enterprises i.e. jewellery,
birthday and Christmas cards, woollen figures and clothing, alongside knitted goods,
home grown vegetables and homemade cakes. To a younger person today these
actions may appear absurd because their ‘pre-reflect[ions]’ of the world, ‘co
37

Andrew Trigg, “Veblen, Bourdieu, and Conspicuous Consumption,” Journal of Economic Issues 35,
(2001): 101.
38
Jenkins, 1992, 75.
39
Albert Rabil, Merleau-Ponty – Existentialist of the Social World (Holland: Columbia University
Press, 1967), 36-39.