Abstract
That traction that the mug has when you lift it out of the dishwasher, the way the outdoor- dried powder wafts from the bedclothes as the duvet is flicked into its cover, the hug of the centrally heated hallway entered from a frostbitten street, garden centre plants whose colours pop brighter than the plastic trowels for children fallen amongst them. Sarah Pink’s latest book Situating Everyday Life is propelled by the twin urge, yes, to situate everyday life studies amongst the textually engraved intellectual furnishings of sociology, human geography and anthropology, but also, to have us, ethnographers and others, over-burdened by the intellect, register a tangible settlement we have made with the fast and hydrocarbon hungry furnishings of home, garden and Facebook.
As we would expect, Pink’s book takes the everyday seriously, takes notice of the un-noticed and takes the ethnographer into the common places that really anyone else could also go to. So it is then, that in chapter four, when we enter her everyday settings for the first time, we find ourselves in two kitchens, unspectacular, a little untidy and altogether familiar in the excuses for how things are not quite right, that accompany the tour. Pink has her camera in hand as she tours the kitchens. In the houses, gardens and towns that feature in the other chapters, she makes mention many times of having her video camera in her hand. The handheld camera is Pink’s signature, as she has become one of the most well-known video ethnographers of her generation. Her camera ever ready to capture a detail for later, in the way that other ethnographers would have their notebook permanently in their hand to scribble down observations of how the locals go about laying the table or decorating the sitting room. The puzzling thing is that for all the mentions of the video camera there is no video. During my first reading of the book, I found myself asking of her, ‘well, where then are the video recordings given you keep mentioning the camera in your hand?’
The answer is offered early on, in the very first kitchen in fact, but I was in too much of a hurry reading onward to notice it first time, it was only as I re-read for this review that I found it. While walking around one of her participants’ kitchens Pink comments, in relation to a squeaky clean glass: ‘cleanliness was not necessarily assessed through the visible evidence of the clean glass, but rather in the embodied knowing of the skilled practice of cleaning it’ (p. 57). In taking us into the details of the embodied knowing, Pink then goes on to provide the details of the sequential ordering of the washing up: glasses first and the greasiest roast tins to finish. A domestic organization of the sink and the soap that many of us learn. The way her participant holds the glass to deal with scalding water and the story she provides of why she no longer uses washing up gloves. These kitchen practices are not the things that lend themselves to Pink’s video camera because it is not in the appearance of them, it is in a wider sensorium of swishing bubbles and the TV on in the background. The video camera in the hand is as much a license for Pink the ethnographer to pay undue attention to the tangible, sensorial, ‘entangled’, materiality of each setting as it is a way of providing a comprehensive visual record of the setting itself.
In the face of our current overconsumption of energy in domestic settings, consumers can seem intractable and unreasonable to the rationalities of the ecologist, the engineer and the policymaker. What Pink’s studies try to help them understand is that this is not because people lose all reason when doing their laundry or washing the dishes. The flows of clothes and furnishings through laundry have their own logics. More than this, Pink wants to show how reason may not be the best way of understanding the everyday. This is where the sensuous comes in. It helps us to understand why it might be absurdly hard to stop using washing-up powder and use the low energy and low pollution washing pellets instead that have no detergent. It is not just the perfume of the detergent but the smell created by that perfume exposed to wind and sun. To shift laundry practices to lower energy forms requires an understanding of how much more laundry is than getting dirt out of fabric. Later in the book, in the garden, Pink reminds us of gardeners’ practices of rubbing the leaves of their plants as she, in turn, finds herself touching one plant after another: ways of being with plants rather than ways of seeing plants. She examines what happens to the feel of shopping in a town without plastic bags. We begin to see that sensuousness does not inevitably lead to increased consumption and can lead quite the other way, to slow food and slow cities.
Where I would have liked to see Pink extend her sensory approach was to Facebook and websites more widely. We have hints of what such an approach might be in the chapter when she describes browsing Facebook on her iPad on the sofa. (Has anyone written anything yet about the sensory experience of the iPad and the sofa combined?) Her chapter on internet media sits at odds with the rest of her studies, being a more conventional reading, history and interpretation of Cittaslow’s website. That aside, here is an ideal book for introducing students at all levels to how to understand and study the everyday and to appreciate the misery of a soggy towel or the heart-lifting gift of a home-grown lettuce from a neighbour.