Multidimensionality of relationships theory

Smart develops a conceptual tool-kit for analyzing the multi-dimensionality of relationships. This perspective emphasizes the voices of individuals. Smart calls for rich, evocative stories of people's lives and intimacies (what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz calls thick description).

Smart contrasts this thick description with what she calls an over-theorized account that can run the risk of making the voices of those studied inaudible. So her point is that if we hue too closely to a theoretical account we can miss the richly textured people themselves who are at the heart of social action and interaction.

Smart introduces several overlapping conceptual tools:

RELATIONALITY: The self is formed in relationships with others. We are not fully autonomous individuals, we form our sense of and ideas about the self in relation to others (see Symbolic Interaction wiki page).

We make decisions not just based on our self-interests but in relation to others. We have to do relationships and this involves thinking and reflecting about who we are, who others are, how relationships should be conducted and so on.

MEMORY: Memory is elastic. Memory is not just about our autonomous brains but is very much shaped by those around us – the stories we hear, others’ memories, incidences that happen that change the way we remember something from the past. Memory is unstable.

BIOGRAPHY: We move through time (from one decade to another, from one era to another) and we move through our life courses (from being 20 to being 30 to being 50). We may even move through material objects. The things we keep, the things we discard, the things we treasure, these all elicit stories and provide clues about a person’s biography. Times of hardship may produce a battered table found on the street and lovingly restored. Times of affluence may result in a piece of artwork that symbolizes cultural capital and the person’s idea of what it means to make it. We invest things with meanings (see Symbolic interactionism wiki page).

EMBEDDEDNESS: It is ultimately the ways we are embedded in relationships with others, the self as a tangled web of connections to others, that links us together, from one generation to the other. The concept of “linked lives” is a way of describing chains of relationships across generations (see Life course theory wiki page).

So this means that people's lives are also shaped by those generations past whom they may have never met. This might be through memory – through the sharing of stories about them – it might be through pictures that tell stories – it might be because of the expectations they placed on their children, the ways they treated their children that then form a part of how their children grow up to treat their own children. Even finding family resemblances across generations of biological kin can point to this notion of embeddedness.

IMAGINARY: Relationships don’t just exist in our doings but also in our thoughts and imaginations. We might imagine our relationships will be better in the future. We might think they will be worse. We might imagine family members in ways that don’t adequately capture their multi-dimensional natures.

Families may be full of secrets and lies. We may hear snippets and imagine what they mean. We may deny and suppress unwanted secrets or conjure up a fantasy that doesn’t fit reality.