Research note
Carriers, kinship and the slow migration of meaning-clusters
A small companion note. The Baltic Birch riff ends on a lovely image: the brother who receives the Han Shan slab without the underlying practice (Lisp, NixOS, e-paper, woodworking) and uses it as a weed grinder, but in doing so carries forward one element of the meaning-cluster — “an object good to have around because someone you love made it for you”. This is exactly the partial, generational migration that Shove gestures at when she notes that elements “vanish with little or no trace, remain dormant or take on a new lease of life within and as part of other practices” #YUZMMX p. 49) and that “we are surrounded by things that have outlived the practices of which they were once a vital part” #PWJ5NB p. 58).
What’s interesting practice-theoretically is that the slab is not dormant in the brother’s hands; it has been re-recruited into a different practice (rolling, perhaps; keeping company; remembering a sibling) where one strand of its original meaning-bundle (handmade-by-someone-who-cares) survives even though the technical competences (Lisp, e-paper, joinery) do not. This is closer to Shove’s account of “thrift” migrating from darning into disposal-and-divestment #2BA2KQ the meaning persists by changing host.
For the thesis, the relevance is that Brīvbode is full of these partial migrations. Things arrive carrying the meaning-clusters of their previous practices (utility, gift, taste, family memory) and find new carriers who reassemble those meanings into something else. The shop is, among other things, a site where elements get repacked and unpacked between practices, and where some meanings survive the journey while others go dormant or vanish. The Han Shan slab and the donated coat are doing the same work at different scales.