ABSTRACT
Atmospheres are an integral part of being human, and not necessarily something that can be verbalized or easily defined. Central to an atmosphere, on both an experiential and analytical level is the role of the body. Atmospheres emerge in the process of shaping the co-presence of the affective properties of material culture and attuned people as ‘tempered spaces’. Atmospheres thus have culturally informed affective potentials grounded in the meanings, practices and presences of people and things. When informants state that one type of atmosphere, stemning, relies on the people present, what is sensed is a derivation of their attunements. The atmospheric approach, of which the notion of hygge is an exemplary case, aims to focus on how such sensations are spatially extended in affective encounters with atmospheres, as the co-presence of subject and objects.
