ABSTRACT
Joseph, with his beautifully coifed short black hair, confident casual dress – red New Balance Classic trainers, designer jeans, loose-fitting shortsleeved shirt – and easy style, leaning back sipping his flat white at one of the aluminium footpath tables outside Duo, underlines this impression of cosmopolitan knowingness. This picture of Joseph – aged 27, actor, copy-shop assistant, coffee drinker, dandy – encapsulates much of what is interesting about Ponsonby Road. Traditionally, New Zealand has been defined by a limited, intensely masculine, Calvinistic public culture. This culture was and remains intensely antiurban, seeing the city as corrupt and emasculating. Over the past 25 years, and most strikingly in the 1990s, however, the country’s larger cities have seen the development of a strong, self-consciously urban, public culture. The evolution of this new urban public culture – for want of a more felicitious phrase – marks a shift in the way a significant proportion of New Zealanders make sense of their world. This shift is evident in a whole number of areas: in accepted notions of masculinity and femininity, in an openness (indeed, obsession) with difference, whether it be sexual, ethnic, or simply lifestyle based; in an increased confidence that New Zealand (or New Zealand’s larger cities at least) is part of a wider cosmopolitan community. This is the cultural milieu in which Joseph makes sense, from which he gains his confidence. And it is a culture that has been built
a reappraisal of our relationship to our research subjects and the narratives they offer. Thus, I am interested in the ideas of performance and practice on two discrete levels. First, I seek to articulate an understanding of everyday urban public culture as embodied practice – a practice that is creative, pregnant with possibilities, but nonetheless located within particular networks of power/knowledge. Second, drawing on this conceptualisation of everyday life (or ‘ordinary culture’), I attempt to outline how the processes of ‘fieldwork’ and interpretation can embody, enact and thus respect the creativity of social practice whilst still offering useful (and critical) accounts of that practice.
