Anthropology Of Everyday Life Research Paper

It has come to signal a special interest in the commonplace and the seemingly trivial routines and activities of daily life as well as a focus on ‘ordinary people’ as creative actors rather than passive consumers or objects of domination. The different ways in which this seemingly simple concept has been put to work illustrate changing concerns in social and cultural research, as well as conflicts between different research paradigms. Like few other similar concepts, the study of everyday life has been used not only as a research perspective or analytical tool but as a research ideology. The study of everyday life often developed as an alternative to or critique of mainstream traditions.

The use of the concept as an alternative approach means that it is constantly being constructed in opposition to something else. It can be organized as the study of the life and thoughts of ordinary or common people against that of elites, intellectuals, or experts. It can be defined as the routines, habits, and phenomena which tend to be neglected because their ‘everydayness’ makes them invisible or self-evident, unlike colorful rituals, celebrations, or other activities with high visibility or prestige. Here it is ‘the everyday’ as contrasted to ‘the Sunday best’ in social life, working with polarities like mundane sacred, informal formal, repetitive unique, trivial special. Everyday life can further be seen as the arena of expressions and meanings threatened by invasion from ‘above,’ by institutions like the state, the market or just ‘the system.’ This perspective favors a view of everyday life as resistance against domination. The focus on resistance is often linked to a view of everyday life as a site of cultural creativity. Finally, ‘the study of everyday life’ often defines a research orientation rather than an empirical field. It is then seen as a certain style of doing research, usually with a focus on qualitative and ethnographic methods— exploring the hidden worlds of daily life. The argument is often that by focusing on seemingly banal phenomena new and sometimes surprising analytical insights into major social or cultural issues may be produced.

The study of everyday life has emerged as an arena of intense cross-disciplinary dialogues, but it is also an interest which also has developed in a constant interchange with new public and political ideas about the importance of everyday life (see Gullestad 1991).

2. The Making Of A Concept

The development of everyday life as a research topic is thus a complex one. It has entered the social sciences along many paths and in this process been charged with very different theoretical and ideological meanings. There are two nineteenth-century traditions which can be seen as starting points for the twentieth century interest in the study of everyday life.

First, the works of those cultural historians, who in the late nineteenth century turned to the everyday of ‘ordinary people’ to create an alternative to the classic history of ‘kings and elites.’ Second, the interest among early social researchers and reformers exploring the lives of urban poor or rural peasants, starting with Henry Mayhew’s classic work London Labor and the London Poor of 1861.

2.1 Sociological Approaches

It was this latter interest in questions of social welfare that influenced the interwar ethnographic studies of the so-called Chicago School of American sociology. An early example is Nels Anderson’s book The Hobo: The Sociology of Homeless Men of 1923.

This interest in urban everyday life of the Chicago School was developed further by the new generations of postwar American sociologists. Behind the new label ‘The Sociology of Everyday Life’ very different theoretical traditions and research perspectives were found. One was the symbolic interactionism of Erving Goffman’s (1959) pioneering work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life with its qualitative, ethnographical approach to the seemingly trivial or invisible routines of ‘the everyday,’ as it surfaced in patterns of social interaction. For early phenomenological contributions to this sociology of everyday life see, for example, Schutz (1973) and Douglas (1971). The third new approach was ethno-methodology (see Garfinkel 1984), mainly devoted to understanding the construction of common-sense knowledge in everyday life. Today, the sociology of everyday life usually stands for a qualitative and ethnographic approach (see Glassner and Hertz 1999).

In France, the sociology of the everyday developed along very different lines. Here the studies of popular mentalities in the Annales School of social history and especially the works of Fernand Braudel created an early analytical interest in the role of everyday life for understanding society. The sociologist and rather unorthodox Marxist Henri Lefevbre started to explore the concept of the everyday already in the interwar period and published a number of books on the topic between 1947 and 1991 (see, e.g., Lefebvre 1971). His interest in everyday life was connected with the rapid modernization France underwent especially after the Second World War with the creation of a new consumer based and standardized everyday life. He used the term ‘everydayness’ (le quotidien) to describe what he saw as the banality and conformity of modern everyday life and the ways in which it was colonized by modern capitalism. But Lefebvre’s approach was not only centered around questions of alienation and domination. His treatment of the problems of ‘everydayness’ also stressed the ways in which social scientists underestimated the role of the everyday, not only as a site of domination but also as an arena with potentials for transcendence and change—the peak experiences or special moments embedded in it (see Shields 1999).

Lefebvre’s discussions of everyday life had a strong philosophical profile, which may be one of the reasons his work did not come to inspire empirical studies in the same way as the work of another French sociologist, Michel de Certeau. His book (1984) has been very influential in shaping the approaches to the study of everyday life in many disciplines during the 1980s and 1990s. Lefebvre and de Certeau both shared an interest in the uses of space in everyday life, but the similarities end there. Unlike Lefebvre, de Certeau focused on everyday life as an arena of cultural creativity and resistance, and above all on consumption as creative cultural production.

2.2 Anthropological Approaches

In anthropology the actual concept ‘study of everyday life’ was not at first used very frequently, in spite of the fact that anthropology often was seen as ‘the science of the everyday’ with its ethnographic and qualitative explorations of life in different settings over the world. One reason for the lack of an explicit use of the concept of everyday life was that it was seen as a cultural category belonging to the modern Western world. In non-Western societies this polarity between the everyday and its counterparts, however defined, did not seem very relevant. In the broad anthropological approach to the study of culture there was no need for a subcategory labeled everyday culture.

In many ways the interdisciplinary interest in studies of everyday life among historians and sociologists from the 1960s and onward meant an anthropologization of both approaches and theoretical frameworks. It was not only the ethnographic methods and the metaphors of ‘discovering’ and ‘exploring’ everyday life as a hidden but exotic culture which accounted for this anthropologization. The anthropological connection also had to do with studies of everyday life emphasizing a cultural perspective on society. It was in the habits, rituals, routines, and traditions of daily life that ‘culture’ was embedded, as invisible to the actors as ‘water to the fish,’ to quote a popular metaphor from the 1970s.

A much more explicit use of the category of the everyday was found in the anthropological branch of European ethnology, which from the 1960s and onward redefined itself as a discipline in which the study of everyday life in European settings, past and present, was central. This transformation may serve as an example of how the concept came to be given strong symbolic and ideological charges (see Frykman and Lofgren 1996).

As European ethnologists in the 1960s oriented their research towards modern industrial society rather than vanishing peasant traditions the basic concept of folk culture was exchanged for the study of the everyday and ‘the ordinary people.’ These new concepts not only signaled a break with earlier generations but also worked as a boundary marker against neighboring disciplines. Ethnologists studied everyday life with a qualitative perspective unlike sociologists and historians, the concept of everyday life was used to show that the ethnological interest in society was not concerned with formal institutions and macrostructures. In reality the concept was thus not about the contrast between every-day and non-everyday phenomena, but a way of stressing a research interest focusing on neglected groups, activities, and spheres.

3. Everyday Life And Cultural Creativity

Another research tradition in which the notion of everyday life became very important was the emerging field of Cultural Studies. As in European ethnology this interest in everyday life during the 1980s and 1990s was linked closely to the new concept of cultural creativity.

Just as the notion of everyday life, the concept of creativity functioned as a counter argument in cultural research. Groups and settings, which at first glance seemed characterized by passivity, simply reproducing dominant patterns, were in the new studies coming out as culture builders and bricoleurs: busy reworking, elaborating, and thickening their everyday lives with new meanings and routines. This approach is very striking in de Certeau’s work as well as in much of the studies made by the so called Birmingham School of Cultural Studies. A good example is Willis’ (1990) book Common Culture: Symbolic Work at Play in the Everyday Cultures of the Young. Here everyday creativity becomes not only a counter argument against the presupposition that creativity is an elite resource, a cultural capital of the gifted, of artists, writers, intellectuals, etc, but also against the notion that modern mass consumption is a passifying, homogenizing force in people’s lives.

When consumption was redefined as ‘cultural production’ or ‘symbolic production,’ the creativity of everyday life moved in to occupy a central position in this production process. This emphasis on cultural creativity as resistance must be seen as a reaction against an earlier discourse on the seduction of mindless consumers: locked up in the iron cage held together by market forces. Creativity became, in some ways, the weapon of the weak—a positive strategy of resistance. More rarely the concept was used to describe strategies of dominance and oppression: other terms were used for the creative and imaginative ways of control and manipulation.

The pairing of cultural creativity and everyday life can thus be seen as an attempt to redress the balance, to develop a more actor-oriented approach in studies of mass consumption. In this process, however, the ‘when, where, how, why, and who’ of cultural creativity in everyday life was narrowed down and produced certain paved roads: a tendency to over-research some aspects and arenas and overlook others (see Lofgren 1997).

This slanting of the two concepts was not a very conscious process. It started with the focus on consumption as creativity, a creativity much focused on symbolic production and expressive forms in what Featherstone (1991) has called the aesthetization of everyday life. This very selective emphasis was made more narrow by a marked concentration to specific social settings, above all youth cultures with their constant experimentation with identities and reworking of mass media and mass consumption styles, images and commodities.

With a selective focus like this cultural creativity became a very positive concept. It was seen as enrichening, elaborating, ‘thickening’ everyday life, a process through which people make their daily existence colorful, unique, specific, distinct’ and above all positive. The perspective usually was reserved for those defined as the underdogs of the modern world: consumers, workers, women, teenagers, colonial, and postcolonial subjects, and this is where the concept is linked closely to ideas of counter-hegemony, to the tactics of resistance in the world of mass consumption, or in postcolonial processes of globalization.

4. Problems And Potentials

Just like everyday life creativity became a concept mainly for the age of late modernity. The academic interest in the two concepts mirror a public and political concern too—especially in North European and North American settings—which had its roots in the counter-cultures of the 1960s and 1970s and the interests in alternative life-styles as well as the democratization of cultural expression. During this period the idea of the importance of everyday life became a powerful political symbol, condensing and unifying a number of sometimes conflicting values (see Gullestad 1991). Everyday life was ‘where the action was,’ the location of ‘real or authentic life.’ By studying and engaging this arena silent groups and interests could be given a voice.

Such political and popular interests influenced academic research. Some activities and people easily came to be seen as more everyday than others. Another danger of this perspective was that everyday life was too easily seen as something ‘down there,’ in a way that seldom reflected over the problem of what the opposite of the everyday was supposed to be. It was forgotten that everyday life existed not only in retirement homes or on the streets but also in the corridors of power, that there were everyday practices not only in immigrant suburbs but also in scholarly research projects. Researchers who sometimes said that they wanted to ‘get out into everyday reality’ missed the point that what is interesting about the everyday is that it is ever-present.

Taking such ambiguities and possible ideological overtones into account, research interest in the study of the everyday has on the whole been important both in revitalizing and redirecting scholarly attention to the role of the seemingly trivial activities and ideas embedded in the commonplace. During the last decades of the twentieth century, the study of everyday life has been constituted as a very productive cross- disciplinary field, developing innovative research strategies for destabilizing or problematizing the taken-for-grantedness of much daily life.

The study of the everyday has also been a strategy to avoid paved road in research and develop back-door entrances to major issues. Two examples may illustrate such strategies. The first is taken from the French sociologist Kaufmann’s ethnographies of daily life, his study of the conflicting values of modern marriages analyzed through the routines of doing the laundry in a sample of French families (Kaufmann 1998). Through extensive interviews with wives and husbands about their laundry habits Kaufmann throws new light on the constant negotiations typical of modern marriages, negotiations about divisions of labor, definitions of love and individual space, as well as changing perceptions of the moral economy of the family.

Similar examples of such a use of back-door entrances to major issues can be found in those studies of nationalism, which do not take ideology or official rhetoric of major institutions as their starting point, but want to understand the power of ‘the national’ through the modes in which it is anchored and materialized in everyday life. Such studies, for example, Billig (1995), illustrate the powerful ways in which the nation–state has been made visible and tangible in a wealth of everyday situations and settings, how citizens have been touched by the state.

Studies like these work as a reminder that the seemingly insignificant may be a good starting point for exploring the workings of society. Studies of everyday life have produced techniques and methods for understanding how a lot of cultural energy may be condensed or crystallized in a trivial situation, an unperceived object or a prosaic routine. They have also led to a much greater reflexivity about the manners in which the study of the everyday is conditioned by the researcher’s own embeddedness in their own everyday practices.

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