Temporalités distribuées et partagées. Une approche écologique des activités familiales dans le foyer

Abstract

Temporality is a concern in and a primary fabric of everyday social life. Through multimodal analysis of adult-children interactions, the article explores temporality in the daily lives of a few families within their domestic spaces. Focusing on phases of transitions between activities, analyses give access to organizational practices that rely on language but also on material and embodied elements of the environment which are perceived and interpreted as time givers. While temporality and temporal order rely on marks, measurements and practical calculations, an ecological perspective on action and cognition highlights temporality as it is distributed throughout the habitat and among inhabitants. Since temporality also relies on moral reasonings, spatial anchoring should be studied together with the normative dimension of family life and with its shared temporalities. Empirical studies about distributed and shared temporalities are likely to feed the discussions on emergent ecologies, social practices and actors’ indigenous skills.

Keywords

• talk-in-interaction
• social cognition
• cognitive ecology
• domestic space
• temporality