„Becoming with things“ in Interviews

Materialisierungsprozesse von Wiener Rentner_innen am Beispiel von Bergerzählungen

Abstract

English abstract: In this article, I investigate from an agential realist perspective the way remembered things materialize through human bodies in interviews. Using the case of Viennese elderly people, I show how their non-verbal reference to a mountain caused a temporal materialization of its attributed features through their bodies and, as a result, transformed the way in which they embody age, illness, gender and health. Mountains had an active function during these processes because they initiated interviewees’ nonverbal reference. In analyzing processes of materialization, the article shows the kind of contribution that an agential realist account can make to sociological interview research. It particularly highlights the need to rethink both the constitution of human bodies and the popular procedure of assuming a pre-existing distinction and an asymmetry between humans and non-humans in empirical analyses of qualitative social research.