Ageing is a lifelong process that starts at conception. Often overlooked in ageing studies, midlife is a particularly dynamic period prone to challenging life transitions. Defined here as the period between 40 and 65 years old, midlife is ‘both a time of upheaval and a time of mastery’ (Lachman 2004: 313). People in midlife are an understudied demographic particularly deserving of inquiry, given their pivotal role in society and the related impact on those they care for (Lachman 2015). While the concept of the ‘midlife crisis’ is debated (e.g. Lu 2011), midlife often introduces challenging transitions, such as caregiving and grieving for parents, the ‘empty nest’, the onset of health problems, divorce and widowhood, career promotions, relocation, redundancy and retirement. Midlife transitions are complex, relational and non-linear processes that ‘involve flow and movement within the interactions between persons and their environment’ (Wiggs 2010: 219). The emergence of such transitions may precipitate a crisis in meaningfulness (Altmaier 2020).
A resulting quest for meaning can be fulfilled by engagement in meaningful occupations (Hammell 2004; Hasselkus 2011). ‘Occupations’, those activities of self-care, work or leisure that make up daily living, are defined as ‘chunks of culturally and personally meaningful activity in which humans engage’ (Clark et al. 1991: 301). Pivotal to the formation of identities, emotions and connections with others and the world, meaningful occupations are powerful antidotes to the void of an existential crisis (Ikiugu and Pollard 2015). One type of meaningful occupation is leisure – activities that people do in their free time, such as sports, music or gardening. The salutogenic effect of participation in leisure occupations is well known (e.g. Caldwell 2005). The benefits of meaningful leisure in midlife have been demonstrated from both positivistic and constructivist perspectives. Lu (2011) examined country-wide survey data from Taiwan and found that leisure participation in midlife was associated with fewer depressive symptoms, singling out ‘perceived leisure meaningfulness’ as a significant predicting factor of depression. Qualitative studies show that tangible creative leisure occupations, such as arts and crafts, are meaningful in midlife for identity maintenance, socialisation and coping with stress and illness (e.g. Dickie 2011; Reynolds 2004). Focusing on the ‘meaningfulness’ of leisure offers a nuanced alternative to the neoliberal, ageist framing of leisure participation as ‘active’ or ‘successful’ ageing (Laceulle and Baars 2014; Lamb et al. 2017).
Against this backdrop, we wonder how meaningfulness is experienced in leisure occupations, particularly arts and crafts. Focusing on tangible creative leisure occupations invites attention to embodied and emplaced aspects of meaningfulness. There is growing awareness that meaning transcends Cartesian views of disembodied thought processes. Rather, meaning's origins should be understood as rooted in physical encounters and bodily sensations (Johnson 2007). Merleau-Ponty's views on the body as ‘a nexus of lived meanings’ (Park Lala and Kinsella 2011: 203) have influenced the discourse on meaningful occupations, calling for investigations that lean on corporeality and the lived body (Bailliard et al. 2018).
Bodies, however, do not perform occupations in a vacuum. Meaningful occupations are relational entanglements with the environment, ‘a transaction joining person and situation’ (Dickie et al. 2006: 90). Meaning is known to be impacted by the ways that people engage with places (Rowles 2008), objects and tools (Orth et al. 2018). What is less clear is how these relational entanglements are experienced, and how those experiences intersect with the lived (and therefore ageing) body. Curious to investigate phenomena of meaningful leisure in midlife as relational entanglements with the environment, we ask: what embodied and emplaced meanings stem from relationships between the body, tangible creative leisure occupations and the environment in midlife?
Theoretical Underpinnings
A study of embodied and emplaced experiences of meaningfulness calls for a phenomenological approach as per Merleau-Ponty, by which ‘experience, body and world are indivisible’ (Čargonja 2013: 26). Phenomenological anthropology, and within that, existential anthropology, which seeks to explore ‘lived reality as it makes its appearance in real time, in specific moments, in actual situations’ (Jackson and Piette 2015: 3), is a relevant lens through which to frame this article, as it attends to the small details of the everyday to study experiences of meaning that go beyond language (Jackson and Piette 2015). Pink (2010a, 2010b) offers sensory anthropology as a relevant interdisciplinary field emerging from phenomenological anthropology and informed by Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception, engaging with geography, sociology and neuroscience to focus on experience and perception.
In the context of this article's focus on human occupation, we find a compatible phenomenological framing of occupation as a lived and emplaced experience in Nelson (1988), who characterises occupation as a relational outcome of person, time, environment and the actual doing, calling this ‘the occupational performance’. Occupation is thus not a type of thing that somebody does, such as cooking or crafting, but rather ‘the thing itself’ – a unique event that occurs in a particular time and space. The exact same ‘thing’, done two hours later, is a different occupation. This unreplicable nature of occupation stems from it being the product of a dynamic relationship between the person, the environment (‘the occupational form’, an objective and external collection of circumstances, comprising both physical and sociocultural dimensions) and voluntary doing (Nelson 1988; Nelson and Jepson-Thomas 2003). Such a phenomenological and relational view holds that meaningfulness in occupation is generative through interactions between the person and two separate but intertwined aspects of the environment: perception of its physical features and symbolic understandings of its sociocultural aspects.
Methodology
This study employed a sensory ethnographic approach. Rooted in phenomenological anthropology, sensory ethnography aims to capture the above strands of meanings as they occur through lived experiences, by giving particular attention to perception, movement and emplacement in daily living (Pink 2010a). Focused on the sensorial as both object and mode of research, sensory ethnography aims to capture the essence of lived experiences through participatory co-production of multisensorial knowledge, attending to both subject's and researcher's embodied experiences (Drysdale and Wong 2019).
This embodied approach aligns with Johnson's (2007: xi) interpretation that meaning transcends verbalised language constructs, ‘reach[ing] down into the images, sensorimotor schemas, feelings, qualities and emotions that constitute our meaningful encounter with our world’. Pink (2015) contends that knowing is not just embodied; it is always emplaced. This ‘place’ is not merely geographical, but rather an ‘event’ in time and space, an entanglement of all components of the environment, both physical and social (Hunter and Emerald 2016), evoking Nelson's (1988) ‘occupational form’. To access these nonverbal, embodied and emplaced meanings within their contextual environments, this study wove together sensory ethnographic methods of data elicitation (participant observation, reflexive diaries, photo elicitation and interviews) and analysis (textual and visual).
To carry out the sensory ethnography, data was collected and analysed by me, the first author (TA-S), while the other authors (MV, TS, AS) reviewed the coding and analytical processes. This study followed three women – a convenience sample recruited from my network. Inclusion criteria were being between 40 and 65 years old, speaking English, living in the Netherlands and having a meaningful tangible creative leisure occupation.
Dee-Price et al. (2021: 6) hold that although sensory ethnography does not claim objectivity, the subjective experiences of the ethnographer must ‘remain loyal to the reality of the source of the knowledge production’. Reflexivity is key to achieving such fidelity, with the researcher's own bodily sensations providing insight into the investigated experience. This reflexive stance runs throughout every step of sensory ethnographic methodology, from data collection through to analysis, writing and communication (Drysdale and Wong 2019). In this project, I used embodied and emplaced methods, including participant observation, a sensory ethnographic diary and visual analyses of photo-elicitation images. Fundamentally, I brought myself to all phases of the study, with the stance of a white, middle-aged woman with a hearing disability, an occupational therapist with a background in design and lived experiences of migration.
Study participants
| Name* | Age | Creative leisure occupation/s |
|---|---|---|
| Ellen | 55 | Knitting |
| Nicky | 47 | Painting, sculpture, chair upholstery |
| Stacey | 49 | Scrapbooking |
* All names changed.
Data collection events comprised, per participant, one semi-structured interview and one observation session, on separate days, followed by photo elicitation via email exchange. The interviews employed phenomenological and sensory lenses and lasted between sixty and ninety minutes, following a prepared interview topic guide comprising eight broad topics. These sessions were recorded and later transcribed verbatim. Phenomenological research aims to describe and understand individual experiences of a phenomenon, focusing on personal meanings in specific contexts and aiming to find common themes that can be generalised (Smith et al. 2009). Maintaining what Drysdale and Wong call ‘a sensory sensibility’ (2019: 10), I considered the interviews as relational and emplaced events, noting embodied and nonverbal expressions as well.
Furthermore, I held one observation session with each participant, which allowed me to attend to sensory information while engaging with materials, tools and spaces, ‘to develop co-experiential and practice-based knowledge’ (Drysdale and Wong 2019: 9) of the occupations. Observation sessions lasted between sixty and 130 minutes. Oscillating, as Throop (2018: 206) describes the phenomenological anthropologist's shift, from ‘immersive interaction to distanced reflection about such interactions’, I focused on each sense separately, noting both mine and the participants’ sensory experiences (Valtonen et al. 2010). In addition to the five senses common to Western cultures (sight, sound, touch, taste and smell), I noticed somatic senses (proprioception, balance, pressure and vibration), movement patterns, embodied cognitions and routines. I transferred these observations into written fieldnotes documents and, later, vignettes. Sessions were recorded and transcribed, capturing spontaneous conversation, nonverbal utterings and craft soundscapes. Additionally, I took photographs of the occupational performances, which were later used in the photo elicitation sessions.
Nelson's (1988) phenomenological and ephemeral conceptualisation of what constitutes an occupation lends itself well to studies using photo elicitation, a visual method that is gaining favour in qualitative research. Often used to augment interviews, it gives rise to a different kind of meaning, eliciting rich verbal data (Glaw et al. 2017) and accessing ‘embodied everyday life experiences’ (Bukhave and Huniche 2016: 96). Photography captures a unique moment, frozen in time. This delicate state frees the researcher from trying to encapsulate everything that the occupation can ever be and encourages a stance of curiosity and wonder. Aware that photography is already a form of interpretation (Harper 2004), I selected six to ten images per participant observation session that best represented sensorial and embodied aspects of the occupations (Orr and Phoenix 2015). The participants were asked to reflect on the photographs in writing. The prompt directed the women to notice what they felt, including what bodily and sensorial feelings they experienced, as well as recalling materials, tools and spaces.
After the data collection phase ended, I conducted visual analyses of the photo-elicitation images, attending to both composition and content (Rose 2001), juxtaposing my interpretations with the participants’ reflections to form a co-production of meaning. Additionally, I performed an interpretative phenomenological analysis (Smith et al. 2009) of the three collected texts per participant (interview transcript, observation session transcript and the participant's written photo-elicitation response), ‘moving from the particular to the shared, and from the descriptive to the interpretive’ (ibid.: 79). Coding was approached inductively, with both consolidation and splitting of codes as they were developed from the texts. Finally, I reviewed the sensory ethnography diaries and revisited my impressions of both the participants’ and my own sensory experiences across all the data collection events. Through the totality of this multifaceted analysis, I arrived at the findings discussed below. Superordinate and subordinate themes were developed inductively (Smith et al. 2009), although, of course, internalised conceptualisations, stemming from my professional attitudes as an occupational therapist accustomed to organising observations by categories of person, environment and occupation (Law et al. 1996; Nelson 1988), can only ever be partially turned off.
Findings
The sensory ethnography yielded three superordinate and nine subordinate themes.
Superordinate and subordinate themes in the study
| Superordinate themes | Subordinate themes |
|---|---|
| ‘This feels good, it feels right’: | • Knowing through the body |
| Trusting embodied experiences | • Transformative sensations |
| • Caring for one’s body and safeguarding continuity | |
| ‘I like the idea of using old springs again’: | • Material moments and memories |
| Handling things that matter | • Tools that feel right |
| • Holding on to things that feel important | |
| • With this object I share love | |
| ‘Just either give it a really good go or just | • Time to make something out of it all |
| don’t piss about’: | • Feeling at home with one’s craft |
| Carving out time and space for oneself |
‘This Feels Good, It Feels Right’: Trusting Embodied Experiences
While performing creative occupations, the women sense, feel, breathe, move, lift, hold and perform other bodily actions. Amid this flurry, an embodied meaningfulness emerges.
Knowing through the Body
Senses, such as proprioception and touch, couple with movement to provoke meaningful experiences. Ellen tests the weight and texture of her shawl through touch, draping it over her body and turning slowly in the sunlight, imagining it as an article of clothing. Similarly, Nicky sits on a piece of foam to feel whether it is the right firmness to be a cushion she can be proud of, eyes closed – vision is not the best sense to use here, so it is turned off.
While scrapbooking, Stacey suddenly jumps to her feet, ducks her head neatly under a low shelf and rummages through her supplies. This efficient movement is smooth and practised, a habitual pattern that she has undoubtedly done many times before. Her body carries proprioceptive knowledge of where it is in space, enabling her to move safely and confidently around objects in her environment. Seeing a picture of herself using her trusted X-Acto® knife, she writes: ‘If I see my fingers, I am concentrated, focused, this goes back years. I know this, I've done this, I've got this. This feels good, it feels right.’ The sensory ethnography notes capture my own embodied experiences, highlighting my awareness of the animated cadences, vibrations and soundscape of Stacey's craft: ‘She pounds on the stamps. There is a rhythm to it, and force. Thump. Thump. Thump. As she works quickly, stamps and other small items fall, to the table or to the floor. A cat toy suddenly falls from a cabinet to the floor, making a loud bang! I jump. Lots of small sudden sounds.’ The body is a location of embodied and meaningful knowledge, created through patterns of engagement with the environment.
Nicky tests the cushion for comfort, with eyes closed, 2020 (photo by the first author).
Citation: Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 32, 1; 10.3167/ajec.2023.320106
Transformative Sensations
Engaging with creative leisure occupations can be transformative, producing states of total immersion. Stacey says, ‘I can lose myself in time and space. It can go very quickly or stand still for hours. Feels like a yesterday from many, many moons ago, or feels present.’ Ellen is aware of how her body transforms through engagement with the soft materials and repetitive movements of knitting: ‘It's calming and pleasing, and it makes me feel content. It's definitely a . . . you know, it sort of feels like you can slow your body down. And, yeah, it's a relaxing kind of thing.’ Sensations trigger nostalgic memories. While upholstering a chair, Nicky grabs a handful of fragrant crin, a natural material similar to hay. The strong olfactory input transports her back to happy childhood memories: ‘Smells like a stable now, doesn't it? . . . Well, I used to do pony clubs stuff when I was younger and my family . . . like, my brother had horses and my mum was a great rider. So yeah, that's nice.’ Meaningful entanglements are triggered by repetitive movements and sensorial input, enabling transformative moments.
Caring for One's Body and Safeguarding Continuity
Tangible creative occupations bring corporeal awareness, triggering reflections on self-care and ageing. Creating garments is Ellen's way to accept and care for her body. ‘Partly because my body is not a very typical body and so it's hard for me to find clothes that fit me nicely. And I felt like . . . I feel like if I could make my own, I can adapt them so that they fit my body well.’ The women consider modifying the ways that they perform their crafts to ensure their continuity as they age. Stacey contemplates buying a standing desk to address back pain, and Nicky plans on using a mask to avoid inhaling toxins. Ellen says: ‘When the carpal tunnel acts up, I really try to be careful and be more ergonomic, so that I'm not, you know . . . because if it gets really bad, then I wouldn't really be able to do it.’ Old habits die hard, however. Upon seeing a picture of herself, Ellen is confronted with how she actually positions her body when knitting: ‘Now I have my hands up high, which I shouldn't [laughs].’
Similarly, seeing herself hoisting a chair up to a table, Nicky re-experiences embodied awareness of how she prepares for action and protects herself from injury.
This photo makes me feel tired! It's physically quite strenuous work and I try to be mindful of lifting chairs correctly so as not to injure myself or indeed the chair frame (if it is old and quite fragile). When I start a new chair I almost need to take a deep breath as if to psych myself up for the task ahead, which is never easy.
Ellen knitting, hands held up high, 2019 (photo by the first author).
Citation: Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 32, 1; 10.3167/ajec.2023.320106
The crafts provide the women with palpable reminders that their unique, active and ageing bodies are sources of meaning and are worthy of care.
‘I Like the Idea of Using the Old Springs Again’: Handling Things That Matter
Tangible creative leisure occupations involve interacting with things: materials, tools and the created objects. Their meaningfulness becomes apparent in how they are handled, experienced and shared.
Material Moments and Memories
The properties of craft materials matter. Nicky loves shopping for fabric, saying that certain colours or patterns ‘speak’ to her when she spots them in the crowded market. Ellen relishes the ways that bodily heat and the friction of touch influence her linen yarn: ‘When I first started working with the yarn, I didn't find it as pleasing as the soft fuzzy yarn. It was crisp and thin. And only after I worked with it a while, I could see that it really does soften up and become nicer to work with.’ Even talking about materials can be a multisensory and embodied experience, both singular and recognisable. I wrote this vignette: ‘When Stacey talks about the paper, she rubs her fingers together. The thickness and texture of the paper are important, but she also talks about the scent. I can sense how this would feel, rough and smooth at the same time, and feel an urge to repeat the movement.’
Nicky lifts a heavy load, mindful of both chair and body, 2020 (photo by the first author).
Citation: Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 32, 1; 10.3167/ajec.2023.320106
Similarly, upholstery materials create strong embodied meanings for both Nicky and me. In a photo-elicitation exchange Nicky wrote, ‘Mmmm I love cotton wadding, it feels so soft and cuddly.’ I reflect in my notes: ‘There are no words to describe the feelings that are elicited by touching soft cotton, but when I put my lips together and try to also say “Mmmm”, I feel a deep and pleasant vibration in my chest. I sense her meaning, more than understand it.’ Such fleeting moments of sensual interactions give rise to deep and lasting experiences of meaning.
Nicky sinks her hands into soft cotton upholstery wadding, 2020 (photo by the first author).
Citation: Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 32, 1; 10.3167/ajec.2023.320106
Tools That Feel Right
Sensation plays a key role in meaningful relationships between the women and their tools. Ellen reflects, ‘The needles are metal, and they're very smooth, which I like. And they click when you use them, and the clicking is very pleasant.’ Tools that feel right become intimate extensions of the body. Stacey tucks a paintbrush in her hair for safekeeping as she works, or chews on a pencil as she concentrates.
Tools assume meaning in how they are used and what feelings they evoke: ‘I like to use palette knives and things that – uhm, I don't even know if I'm using them right, but whatever. I find I might use the end of the paintbrush, that's the wrong end of the paintbrush, to get something through. And it feels fun to be free to use whichever tools you want’, shares Nicky. Handling these simple tools can induce meaningful occurrences of pleasure, intimacy and freedom.
Stacey's tools become extensions of her body, 2020 (photo by the first author).
Citation: Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 32, 1; 10.3167/ajec.2023.320106
Holding on to Things That Feel Important
The women form relationships with objects of their crafts, including recycled elements and end products. Stacey has tangible memories of her family on her mind and in her hands when she creates. Old buttons and paper ripped from a 1960s telephone book – treasured finds from her late aunt's home, now neatly stored in cupboards packed with more such objects – find their way into her handmade crafts. Nicky also relishes ‘holding on’ to salvaged objects: ‘I like the idea of using the old springs again if possible (if they're not too badly bent – I check each one). I get satisfaction from recycling these and keeping the authenticity of the chair.’
Later, when I analyse the image, I interpret the object and its holder as kindred spirits:
How does [Nicky's inspection of the old spring] relate to inspecting one's own ageing body? How does this relate to having a body that is bent, but not too badly, on this side of usable, and living a life that is ‘keeping the authenticity’? I reflect on the visual imagery in this photo: the spring appears as an extension of the body. Out of frame, the right elbow is pulled back in flexion, while the left arm is extended – elbow straight and long, hand splayed – mirroring the tension.
Ellen holds up a half-finished project, joyfully pointing out a detail that chronicles her development: ‘I'm really proud because it joins together nicely . . . And I learned how to do that.’ It is not the object, nor the arm holding and inspecting it, that enable meaningfulness – rather, it is the creative occupation that brings it together.
With this Object I Share Love
Relationships are formed not just with objects, but also through them. Stacey makes scrapbooks for family and friends: ‘The gifts that I give to other people, they're truly from my heart. And I've learned a long time ago that you give it away and you forget about it. And it's not a matter of whether they like it, or they wanted, or they need it, or anything else, but it's my love for them. And, uhm, it will live on past us [voice trembling].’ When Nicky migrated to the Netherlands, her father gifted her an heirloom chariot plane, which she relishes using, or even simply holding: ‘It reminds me of my dad and I just know that – like, we're talking about touch and stuff and I just – the feel of this is brilliant. And you just think, “well Dad used it”, so there I have it.’ Materials, tools and objects are tangible aspects of the creative occupations that provide satisfying and joyful sensations, while also touching on deeper intangible meanings.
‘Just Either Give It a Really Good Go or Just Don't Piss About’: Carving Out a Time and Space for Oneself
The women lead busy lives, juggling roles as workers, caregivers, mothers, wives, daughters, neighbours and friends. Time and place create the context for their creative occupations, a set of negotiable and non-negotiable constructs within which meaningfulness is experienced.
Time to Make Something Out of It All
The temporal aspects of creative leisure occupations are entangled throughout the women's stories. Ellen finds that midlife presents new possibilities for creative leisure: ‘When kids are really little, you have to be, you know, able to get up and be hands-on all the time. And I can't imagine having the time to sit and finish a whole row with knitting.’ With her children grown up and her retired husband taking over cooking, she finds time to knit. Nicky feels that midlife opportunities must be seized: ‘This period of my forties seems to be a bit of a honeymoon. I think you have to make hay whilst the sun shines. I don't know what my circumstances will be in the future. Hence, I'm doing everything that I've always wanted to do, a bit more. Uhm, now.’ For her, midlife is a time to dare and try long-held ambitions. She tries new media and classes, exploring the boundaries of her creative abilities: ‘Now I realise actually, just either give it a really good go or just don't piss about.’
Time in occupation acts not just on people. There is also material time, determined by the properties of the craft. Ellen's knitting is ideal for putting down and picking up, while Stacey's hands need to work quickly and incessantly through interruptions by visitors, embodying the knowledge of how long a die-soaked sponge needs to be pressed onto paper, or how quickly glue dries. Another kind of relationship between time and crafts materialises through commemorative crafts. Stacey scrapbooks to process the traumatic experience of cancer and important family milestones such as her daughter's first long trip away from home. Tangible creative leisure occupations create and capture time for meaningful self-reflection, growth and commemoration within daily living.
Feeling at Home with One's Craft
The feel of an environment, both sensorial and emotional, contributes to an occupation's meaningfulness. The three women describe the ideal creative environment as safe, comfortable, well-lit and with ample storage. As they create at home, it is no less important that agreements, spoken and unspoken, have been made with family members about the shared use of space. Nicky's atelier used to be the family bike shed before she appropriated it, ‘and then we had to make a new bike shed [laughs]’. My notes capture the experience of being in the small outbuilding, reflecting on its set-up and ambiance: ‘The shed is tightly organised but feels spacious due to a tall ceiling and natural light streaming through the windows. It's a bit chilly, but not uncomfortably so.’ This is Nicky's domain. She invests energy into setting up the space to suit her needs – repurposing old furniture and adding a fresh coat of paint. The environment directly impacts her mood: ‘I did a big spring clean recently and sorted things out so that the layout and storage is better. I feel very happy when I have tidied up and everything is in good order. My focus is sharpened.’ Here she experiments with upholstery techniques, transitioning from hesitant novice to confident artisan.
Stacey's creative space is a heavy table that she drags from one side of the room to the other, balancing optimal lighting with the need for safety and privacy: ‘I move the kitchen table around the house depending on where I want to work . . . sometimes I like to work by the light of the window and sometimes I like to work in the back where it just feels cosier and safer.’
The table is a shared domain, as my fieldnotes depict:
[Her son] throws open the door to the living area and stops in his tracks, taken aback at seeing us seated at the table that is loaded with craft materials, tools, supplies, containers of water and paint, a bright lamp and a project midway. There is clearly no room for him. This is the family dining table, but right now it's Stacey's craft world, and he quickly changes plans, pivots and moves into the kitchen.
Ellen's craft is portable. She constructs it out of her bag, pulling out half-finished work tethered to a yarn ball and marking her territory by spreading out printed instruction sheets, a tablet and pen and paper for counting stiches.
Again, lighting is key: ‘I like knitting during the day. Because there's much more light. I did have to move a lamp over to that corner so that I could knit well in the evening. It's harder to knit when there's not a lot of light.’ The physical environment provides not only a space for the occupation, but also a meaningful place of belonging, safety and focus.
Stacey takes over the family dining table, 2020 (photo by the first author).
Citation: Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 32, 1; 10.3167/ajec.2023.320106
Ellen refers to her carefully placed notes, 2019 (photo by the first author).
Citation: Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 32, 1; 10.3167/ajec.2023.320106
Discussion
Stehlíková (2021) suggests that modern life generates unsettling experiences of displacement and disembodiment, and points to an existential need to balance the ‘extreme lightness’ of our increasingly digital being with an equally ‘extreme weight’ of meaningful embodied interactions and tangible materiality. In this study, a sensory ethnography explored such meaningful relational entanglements, focusing on the dynamic relationship between the ‘doing’ body and the physical context. The sensory approach enables not just a tally of what sensations are associated with an occupation, but delves deeper into what makes it meaningful (Classen 1997), in the context of midlife transitions. Although tightly intertwined, for ease of discussion this has been somewhat artificially separated into embodied, emplaced, material and temporal meanings.
Embodied Meanings
Embodied meaningfulness in active bodies relates to materials, objects, spaces and time (Orr and Phoenix 2015). The maintenance of embodied habits that involve materialities – Stacey instinctively ducking her head in the crowded workspace under a low shelf, Ellen gently balancing her notes on the armrest of the sofa as she knits – is an indication of their meaningfulness. Malinin (2016: 8) observes that craftspeople ‘personalize workspaces, populating them with meaningful objects . . . incorporating environmental features and artifacts into rituals and sense of creative self’. With use, creative tools and materials are integrated into the body schema, becoming ‘transparent equipment’ and thus extensions of the body (Malinin 2016).
Photo elicitation enabled the women to re-experience meaningful embodied moments, triggering affective responses. When Stacey reflects on the tension and control of her fingers gripping a favourite tool, she repeats the word ‘feels’, encompassing both emotion and sensation, to communicate the depth of her relationships with both the tool and the action it affords. This supports Brown (2017), who sees embodied enskilment and attunement acquired through leisure occupations as engendering skill and competence, and in turn, identity. Photo elicitation also revealed surprising truths about how the body performs occupations, such as when Ellen was confronted with ‘proof’ that she knits with hands held high, showcasing the gap between intention and action. Ellen's musings on the need to adapt her craft to prevent injury evoke Cook-Cottone's (2015: 158) ideas on attunement and mindful self-care as components of flourishing – an embodied stance of loving kindness to oneself that includes ‘both awareness and action’. Meaningfulness transpires through embodied entanglements that draw attention to the ageing self as it interacts with the physical world.
Emplaced Meanings
The three women experience their craft spaces as meaningful person–environment–occupation relationships (Law et al. 1996). An entangled ‘event’ is created between Nicky's mood, the freshly painted space of her shed, cultural values, rituals and routines relating to cleanliness and creativity, and her improved focus. This aligns with Thrift's (2003: 104) view of place as directly linked to embodiment and affect, as ‘certain places can and do bring us to life in certain ways, whereas others do the opposite’, producing empowerment and creative potential. Malinin (2016) sees materials, tools and spaces of creative environments as artefacts that support ideation and creative flow, initiated and sustained through ritual and identity. In the home environments of the three participants, creative spaces are negotiated. Historically, gendered power imbalances resulted in women being less likely to have dedicated permanent space for creative leisure occupations at home (Stalp 2006). Of the three, only Nicky has such a space, although Stacey appears to have command of the dining table at her will, and Ellen's craft is particularly portable. The women seek good lighting, adequate surfaces, ample storage and feelings of safety and privacy. To achieve this, Nicky has renovated an unheated outbuilding and Stacey moves her heavy table according to her mood. Their priorities are clear; the creative occupation is meaningful, and they will do what is needed to adapt the environment and negotiate access to it.
Material Meanings
The findings of this study showed that holding and handling materials, tools and objects can be tangible avenues to the intangibles of cherished relationships with others and with oneself. Nicky's inherited chariot plane holds great symbolic meaning. She describes how to hold it in her hands is to follow in her father's footsteps – an embodied description of legacy and passing down of familial tools, knowledge and identity. The object becomes a surrogate for her father's actual presence. This evokes the words of Kaes (2021: 3): ‘Family heirlooms . . . [serve] as vessels of memory and [bind] family members together, from generation to generation, forging a shared identity through time.’ Stacey nurtures important relationships through gifting her creations, a meaningful crafting tradition that enables her to maintain reciprocity and experience joy in relationships (e.g. la Cour et al. 2005; Reynolds 2010). Caregiving relationships take place not just through the objects, but also with them, as seen in the photo of Nicky lifting the fragile chair. She cradles its armrest in the crook of her elbow in a reversal of how bodies usually rest within a chair's supportive embrace, raising the question of who is supporting whom in this person–chair relationship. Knowing how central the creative occupation is to Nicky's personal growth and identity brings to mind the views of Orth et al. (2018), who believe that person–object attachments go beyond material properties to deeper realms of the self and the life narrative. A similar metaphorical association was made during the visual analysis of the photo of Nicky assessing a recycled bent spring. The sensory approach enabled me to intuitively draw parallels between the ageing object and the person holding it, referencing themes of ageing, productivity and continuity in midlife.
Temporal Meanings
The temporal aspects of meaningful occupations are interwoven throughout life's trajectory, evoking past events, present choices and future dreams. As a halfway mark between birth and death, midlife is a reminder of time that has passed, and a confrontation with time still left. Nicky's midlife computation conveys such recognition: that there is still time to dare and become. Her recurring forays into new media can be understood as attempts to squeeze in more skills, confidence and achievement. This bustle is rooted in what Lee (2016) calls ‘existential urgency’. Typical to midlife, it presents itself as a gnawing sense that time is running out while goals and dreams remain unfulfilled. Fuelled by the human capacity for hope, these ‘perceptions of diminishing time refocus people's commitments onto meaningful pursuits’ (ibid.: 7), such as Nicky's quest to become an expert upholsterer. Examining time in smaller units reveals the occupational balancing act of daily living; hours and days are split into work, self-care and leisure occupations, and time use is entangled with roles and values (Majnemer 2010).
Recalling the findings of Ben Dori and Kemp (2020), who studied gendered socio-temporal aspects of the leisure occupations of Israeli women in midlife, our three participants negotiate with their families to prioritise ‘leisure time’ over traditional maternal responsibilities. The deliberate allocation of precious time for crafts would likely be applauded by Clouston (2018), who argues that health and well-being are influenced by the ability to find time within busy lives for occupations that are personally meaningful. To do so requires having the freedom to make choices, including the choice of how to use time. This entails challenging not just gendered expectations but also performance-based, Western neoliberalist ideology in order to seek a slower pace of life that ‘creat[es] time for engaging more meaningfully in “doing” occupations’ (ibid.: 127).
Also related to time is the making of commemorative objects, such as Stacey's scrapbooks. Powley (2006: iii) explains that memory crafts are a traditional way for women to take on a family role of ‘collecting and preserving memories, which would otherwise become lost’. At the end of our observation session, Stacey gifted me the craft she made, carefully inscribing the date on the back. Kaes (2021: 3) interprets object dating practices as attempts to anchor the maker, the user and the object so that ‘the object mirrors the subject's own historicity and existence in time’. In adding a historical stamp to her handiwork, Stacey was not only making sure that our shared moment is forever memorialised, she was already anticipating a future moment when the dated object will serve as its reminder.
Time in crafts is sensed in present tense through embodied cognitions: ‘If the material does not dictate any temporal structuration, it is the body that makes demands and imposes itself as a time-structuring element’ (Arantes 2020: 200). Stacey gets lost in time and works until her back hurts, and beginners, like Ellen, often discover that they have knit to the point of pain and exhaustion. Time is intrinsically woven into tangible creative leisure occupations through sensory threads of embodiment and emplacement, both social and physical.
Conclusion
As with all ethnographic research, this study's findings lean on observations that are context-dependent; however, trustworthiness and transferability are supported by the inclusion of ‘thick descriptions’ (Stahl and King 2020). Such detailed, sensory, rich and emplaced accounts enable the reader to experience the participants’ creative leisure occupations vicariously and invite the possibility of ‘naturalistic generalisations’, whereby the reader gains insights and may transfer some of the findings to their own context (Mills et al. 2009: 600). Indeed, the homogeneous nature of this study's sample and their fluency in English facilitated the collection and analysis of fleeting sensations and complex emotions, allowing for a rich and nuanced study. The peer-debriefing role of the three authors MV, TS and AS, each from their respective disciplines (qualitative research, occupational science and cultural studies), in reviewing the coding and analysis phases, also increased trustworthiness (Stahl and King 2020).
Future studies would benefit from using a sensory approach to explore creative leisure occupations in midlife across a larger pool of participants from diverse cultural and social contexts. One such group, for example, are people in midlife living with disabilities. There is a need for research on ageing with disability across midlife (Karvonen-Gutierrez and Strotmeyer 2020). Given the embodied nature of both disability and participation (Beudaert 2020), a sensory ethnographic approach could increase our knowledge about the entanglements present in the lives of people in midlife living with disability and the ways that these intersect with their experiences of meaningful leisure occupations. Another example are people in midlife who have experienced migration. Bailliard et al.’s (2013) sensory ethnography of Latino migrants to the USA sheds light on embodied and sensorial aspects of meaningful occupations lost through migration and the resulting impact on well-being, while Hellwig and Häggblom Kronlöf (2020) identify a lack of research on enculturation through occupation in migrants. A focus on sensory experiences during leisure occupations, with an ageing perspective as an additional prism, could add new and important dimensions of understanding.
Meaningfulness is not just what can be expressed verbally, but also what is felt and sensed. Examining meaningfulness in creative leisure occupations through a sensory lens brings attention to tangible aspects of interactions between the person and materials, objects, tools and spaces, but also to deeper meanings such as relationships, identities and the finding of time and space for oneself within daily life. These intangible meanings emerge from the tangible, grounded in materials, objects and spaces: the completed row of a knitting project, a carefully cut piece of paper or a handful of hay in a freshly painted room. Meaningfulness is experienced through entanglements of the body, the occupation and the environment, and it is through this dynamic interaction that life becomes meaningful. If we know what meaningfulness ‘feels’ like, we can notice it when it happens, miss it when it is absent and summon it to our lives, especially in times prone to challenging life transitions, such as midlife.
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