Nuances of Social Relations in Everyday Life

Abstract

There are complex and critical and also unconscious nuances of social relations which cannot be captured by conventional anthropological terms such as HW, BZ, FM, FS, MD and so on. The micro sociological theoretical tradition tells us to go deeper into the mind, self and the social ambience to get to the strategies individuals deploy in managing their relations and in presentation of self and in management of impression in the public, in both the front stage and back stage. By applying the autobiographical reflexive method the author of the present paper explores the close and proximate relations and the relations that are not so intimate in the family, in the extended kinship network, people in the friendship network, and the “significant others” who leave a lasting impact on the shaping up of a self. It highlights the tensions and stresses in the relations and the strategies the actors deploy in maintaining the relations in a “desired way”. The paper also discusses the core and the periphery of social relations and explains the logic behind locating the social relations in terms of priorities. Methodologically the paper argues that language is a highly inadequate means to capture the complexity of thoughts about even more complex social relations, yet the social scientists apply strategies of descriptive and interpretative phenomenology in order to construct narratives on social relations from the participants’ points of view.