Abstract
For Everyday Life
Welcome to the 2015 Special Issue of Sociology. It is the journal’s policy that each editorial team has the opportunity to guest edit a Special Issue of Sociology during their editorial term. As a part of this editorial treat, the theme of the Special Issue is completely open and in the gift of the editors. Taking time to explain why we selected and settled on the sociologies of everyday life as the theme for our Special Issue provides a way for us to begin this Introduction.
In many ways, it is difficult to overstate the significance of the everyday because it is, as Sarah Pink (2012: 143) observes, ‘at the centre of human existence, the essence of who we are and our location in the world’. The study of everyday life is a well-established tradition within sociology and interest and thinking about the quotidian continues to grow, with these engagements becoming increasingly interdisciplinary across the social sciences and beyond. In his worry about the drift of sociology into more generic social science, John Holmwood (2010) argues that the discipline has been particularly effective in working as an ‘exporter’ of concepts and methods (as well as personnel). With this ‘open borders’ character of sociology as a discipline in mind (see also Meer and Nayak 2013; Urry 2000), we saw our Special Issue as a timely moment for taking sociological stock. This means that the Special Issue can be thought of as both a reflective moment – where has sociology been and arrived at in its attempts to think through the everyday? – and as an anticipative moment – what are the new logics, foci, approaches, uses, limits for sociologies of the everyday?
Everyday life-approaches attempt to capture and recognize the mundane, the routines in (and of) social relations and practices. In doing so, they not only give importance to the ordinary, and take the ordinary seriously as a category of analysis, but they also evidence how everyday life social relations, experiences and practices are always more than simply or straightforwardly mundane, ordinary and routine. Rather, everyday life is dynamic, surprising and even enchanting; characterized by ambivalences, perils, puzzles, contradictions, accommodations and transformative possibilities. Focusing on what the ordinary is involves an immersion in the seemingly unremarkable and routine relationships and interactions with others, things, contexts and environments. The intrigue of the ordinary has attracted a wide range of sociological and wider interest: from Simmel’s stranger (1971), de Certeau’s resistances (1984), Goffman’s dramaturgy (1959), Elias’ manners (2000) and Lefebvre’s rhythms (2013) to the relationality of Bourdieu (1993), Latour’s interdependencies and Actor Network Theory (ANT) (1993, 2005) and a more recent focus on materialities, the experiential and the sensory (Butler, 1990; Pink, 2012; Shove et al., 2007; Wise and Velayutham, 2009). It is then apparent that micro social life, the banal and the familiar are co-constitutive of the wider complexities, structures and processes of historical and contemporary social worlds. In this context of inquiry and excavation, we suggest, everyday life can be thought of as providing the sites and moments of translation and adaption. It is the landscape in which the social gets to be made – and unmade. It is because of this multiplicity that ‘everyday life has […] been heralded as a key site for academic analysis. It has been posited as a domain of normative behaviours or conversely as a site of resistance’ (Pink, 2012: 143).
Pink (2012) notes the paradox that the rise and rise of interest in everyday life means that that the hidden, the slight, ordinary, the mundane – the bread and butter focus of everyday life perspectives – have never been more scrutinized, analysed and generally ‘unhidden’. But in many ways, this paradox itself drives the seductions and importance of everyday life as a field of sociological and interdisciplinary inquiry – the more extensive the gaze, the more complex and compelling the ‘gazed on’ becomes. Hence this Special Issue is an opportunity to gather together a series of articles which variously reflect the breadth and diversity of sociology’s enchantments and engagements with everyday worlds; additionally, it opens up the imaginative and innovative ways in which the discipline has continued to analyse and respond to the ways in which lives are lived and, to borrow from Les Back (this issue), made ‘livable’.
The Uncertainty of Everyday Life
While being ‘central to human existence’, everyday life is rarely understood in those terms. More often the everyday is dominated by routines and familiarities that fog this centrality. Almost by definition, the quotidian can be easily overlooked, not actually noticed for much other than for its sameness and its continuities. Its ‘below the radar’, routinized, rhythmic nature – the heart of what the quotidian seems to be – can also be misleading. The lacuna between everyday life as a ‘given’ and the less visible but ‘always becoming’ dynamic of the everyday are brought home in this vignette from Sarah about a gallery visit she made last autumn.
I am in the crowded spaces of London’s National Gallery for the Rembrandt: The Late Works exhibition. I am struggling to see the pictures amongst all the bodies of others doing exactly the same thing. In one of the rooms there are a few small pen and ink drawings, among them a lion on a stretch of grass, which looks like a tended lawn, a figure hanging from a gibbet. The title of this room is ‘Observations of everyday life’ and the curators’ note tells me that what is in this room are Rembrandt’s recordings of the ordinary world around him. A lion and hanged body. I have a jolt moment . . .
At the time we had been reading through the submissions made to our call for Sociology’s Special Issue, Sociologies of the Everyday. What appears to count, in Rembrandt’s 17th-century Amsterdam, as the quotidian – the frightening, horrifying, spectacular, the strange and non-ordinary – contrasts to the quotidian that we had been reading in the submissions that had arrived with us. But reflecting on this reaction to the Rembrandt drawings and curator’s description prompted our thinking about the connective lines between these Rembrandt drawings of the 17th century Amsterdam ordinary, and the ordinary in the papers which we were reading.
We come back to the idea of the drama of the everyday – and it is the ‘transformative capacity of the everyday’ that Victoria Robinson (this issue) explores as she argues against any separation of the ordinary from the extra-ordinary. But what the Rembrandt pictures confirm is the everyday as temporal and locational, it contains within it the dramatic and it is not fixed or static. It is this protean stretch which means that working on the everyday is to be alive to/troubled by a set of interconnective puzzles: how can the category, ‘the everyday’, be defined and interpreted, how does it change over time and space, what does the everyday look like, how does it get represented, how is it experienced and felt, and why might any of this matter? Each of the 10 articles selected for this Issue presents a set of theoretical and empirical deliberations and engagements with these puzzles.
We began by arguing for an understanding of the everyday as moments of translation and synthesis in which the ‘big’ folds into, shapes and is concretized in, but also co-constituted by the ‘small’. For sociologists, the micro, the slight, the most mundane and the banally ordinary practices, emotions, social relationships and interactions also reflect convergences with and manifestations of wider social factors, forces, structures and divisions. This is the tipping point when the micro becomes an effective and illuminating terrain through which to understand, recognize and examine social change, lines of social division, social conflict and abstract conceptualizations – race, class, gender, urbanism, industrialization, globalization, late modernity, inequality and climate change. These are not external or straightforwardly exterior to micro life, shaping it from an outside, but, rather, constantly entangled and co-productive, the general in the particular as well as the particular in the general. It is the realm of the everyday that brings the structure-agency knot directly into view, but more than this it brings close the immediacy and intensity of being in, and part of, social worlds.
This is reflected in the way in which the everyday has consistently been a focus of sociological labour as sociologists have been drawn to micro-life and the significance of the ordinary world (see above and also, for example, Garfinkel, 1967; Oakley, 1974a, 1974b; Plummer, 2003; Stacey, 1960). This is a labour over time as well as across national contexts. In part this is because micro social analysts are working with/through the principle and process of making the mundane strange and defamiliarising the familiar. Goffman’s concepts of civil inattention and dramaturgy have been influences in developing sociological understandings in which the familiar is always significant as a dynamic site of social practice and exchange. For example, reading Goffman’s Behaviour in Public Spaces (1963: 138) and the extract from Cornelia Otis Skinner’s humorous essay about ‘where to look’ when waiting for an elevator (Skinner, 1955) which outlines people’s various civil inattention strategies, invites the permanent scrutiny of the mundane (what sociologist can wait for/be in a lift without that extract coming to mind?); it demands an acknowledgment of the ordinary as anything but inert or marginal. In the same way, Goffman’s ethnographic descriptions of the ways in which male Shetlanders would wear ‘fleece-lined leather jerkins and high rubber boots’ as these worked as ‘notorious symbols of crofting status’ (1959: 48) is a sociological prompt that reminds us that even the most mundane of clothes are never just clothes.
Similarly, in Culture and Truth, Renato Rosaldo presents an ethnographic account of having a typical (eggs and toast) North American family breakfast with his ‘potential in-laws’ as a route for ‘making the ordinary strange’ and repositioning the gaze from the normative other to the normative us (Rosaldo, 1993: 47–49). Breakfast is never just breakfast. This has become a well-cited example because of its effective critique of ethnographic description and focus, but we pick it up here because it not only illuminates the everyday as the moment of translation (of gender and familial hierarchies) but also precisely because it is well-cited. The story works its magic and lingers in the mind long after Culture and Truth has been read, because in its recognizable ordinariness, the breakfast story interrupts the ordinary and undoes (ethnicized) normativity. The breakfast table story is also effective in its exposure of the everyday as multidirectional – micro social life flows (bites?) back, informing, impacting, influencing, reshaping, exposing, resisting structural processes and architectures. For as Rosaldo notes, his ethnographic descriptions of the family breakfast rituals were not only ‘parodic’ but his ‘defamiliar[ising] the family breakfast was to transform its taken-for-granted routines’ (1993: 48). Put differently, the breakfast table practices are not simply examples of gendered routines but, rather, they are gender. As with the articles in this issue, the everyday sites, materialities and experiences – for example, Christmas lights, shoes, letters, diaries, the beach – that are discussed by the authors here are not straightforwardly evidence, enactments or the manifestations of class, race, migration, gender, climates; these are not simply the optics for seeing the macro – they are social orderings, resistances, divisions, stratifications.
Little wonder then that sociology has a fascination with the everyday and its phenomenologies. This sense of a sociological fascination is borne out in our experience in editing this Special Issue in the incredible response to the Call for Papers. We received an unprecedented level of interest in and submissions to this Issue – 120 articles were submitted, and we mention this number to make clear the extent to which sociologists across the world are continuing to work with the themes and data connected to the everyday. That response can perhaps be taken as a bellwether of the extent to which everyday life remains central to the discipline and contributes to its development. It goes without saying that selecting 10 papers from this number of submissions was a particularly difficult editorial process, and our co-editors, the journal’s editorial and associate board members and many other reviewers have helped us enormously in that process. Rather than curating one issue, we could easily have put together one or two Sociology volumes on everyday life sociologies.
Methods and Everyday Life
The 10 articles and the interview that we have collected here speak to the richness and quality of sociological analysis of the everyday as well as the social, spatial and temporal diversity of this work – the street, the workplace, lights, the household, the beach, the clinic, intimate lives, things; South Africa, South London, New York, Singapore; now, the mid-20th century, the 19th century. All of the articles draw on theoretically informed empirical content. As the interview with Amanda Wise shows, sociological work on everyday life also always involves conversations about research methods and data. Our ambition for this Issue was to have a strong methods engagement and it is exciting to see the extent to which this is reflected in the ways each of the articles uses data and develops innovative methods thinking and approaches.
What is most immediately striking from even a quick reading across the Issue content is the diversity of methods that examining the everyday allows social researchers to use, even if most of the articles rely on qualitative data. There are two important exceptions to this, however. The articles by Suzanne Hall, and by Jacqui Gabb and Janet Fink, both draw on data generated through a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods. While Hall’s article draws on a survey (n = 199) of independent businesses in Rye Lane, a largely commercial street in South London, she also works from interview data. In their article, Gabb and Fink reflect on their large survey (n = 5445) data collected from their multi-method study of emotions, intimacy and relationship longevity; as such they demonstrate the capacity of quantitative data to ‘scale up research on everyday life and enhance understandings of the couple relationship’ (this issue) and so directly challenge easy assumptions of quantitative research design not ‘fitting’ everyday sociological investigations.
We had not anticipated quite the extent to which qualitative methods would dominate submissions, although the qualitative trend within everyday life sociology is well established. The Issue reflects the continuing qualitative drift of sociological research on the everyday rather than any exclusion of quantitative work by the Editors. The relative absence of quantitative work in everyday research can be most effectively contextualized in the sociological traditions of ethnography as the research approach most widely associated and used for investigating the quotidian. But it can perhaps also be understood through a wider consideration of what is available for social researchers to use as sources of data about everyday worlds.
The everyday is a particularly generative site in which research data that is not directly researcher-produced is available as for social researchers to ‘re/use’. This is a point made by Liz Stanley who describes such data in her article, as ‘naturally occurring’ (see also Stanley, 2013).For example, personal letters, diaries, documents, photographs, maps, objects and animals are potentially available data sources without having been directly co-produced through the research process. Locating, recognizing and mining such data has been one means by which sociologists have found routes into the everyday. Reading the articles in this collection will entail encounters with various forms of this unintentional research data – 19th and early 20th-century family documents in the article by Stanley, 1940s community newspapers in the article by Back.
However, the majority of the articles in the Issue draw on data directly produced from empirical research processes. But the range of qualitative methods used is striking. Ethnography, auto/ethnography, multi-species ethnography, surveys, interviews, biography, diaries, scrap books and the non-human all feature as inventive and dynamic data sources in the Issue. This variety and novelty in methods approaches to the everyday are a defining feature of all of the articles and also central to the interview discussion with Amanda Wise.
The Issue’s emphasis on methods innovation resonates with, and in many ways can be seen as response to the challenges of the quotidian but also to the urging of Law and Urry (2004: 390), a decade ago, for social scientists ‘to re-imagine themselves, their methods and their worlds if they are to work productively in the 21st century where social relations appear increasingly complex, elusive, ephemeral and unpredictable’. What matters then is that the methods used by sociologists examining everyday life are ‘fit for purpose’. Each of the contributions here offers a mix of methods and approach that has been inventively and imaginatively shaped according to the dynamic, sensory and multiple and multi-dimensional nature of micro-life. From more familiar approaches of interview talk (Abigail Powell and Kate Sang, Gareth Thomas and Joanna Latimer, Back, Gabb and Fink) and spending slow time in research settings (Hall, Back, Lisa Jean Moore, Thomas and Latimer) – as Amanda Wise observes in her interview, there is little to methodologically trump the value of ethnography for getting to know a social world and its inhabitants – to diaries (Julia Bennett, Robinson, Gabb and Fink, Jenny Rinkinen et al.), scrap books (Robinson) and letters and household accounts (Stanley), these each present routes for being in and understanding the mobilities and contradictions of everyday worlds. The worries expressed by Law and Urry about the ‘fixing’ that social science methods does (2004: 403) are less of a concern here because the inventiveness of the methods work that has been done by the contributors as they effectively ‘decentre’ the researchers and offer instead a palimpsest of data, layers of evidence and information gathered through careful, novel and productive engagements for finding out, and from a range of research design, optics, positions and locations.
Extending Sociological Engagements with the Everyday – What the Issue Offers
From a quick or first glance at the contents page of this Special Issue, the apparent eclecticism of what is here might be the most immediate impression. In many ways, as Editors of the Issue, we would be happy with this. The range and variety of sociological work on the realms of the everyday is part of its value and its liveliness. In our original call for papers we indicatively listed 17 areas that papers might address. The 120 submissions we received went beyond that. So we suggest, there is nothing necessarily problematic in bundling together work on horseshoe crabs, couple relationships, a street, a social housing estate, festival decorations, cities, footwear, health clinics and households, because running through all of these are the reccurring, connective threads of the ordinary and the routine on the one hand and of practice and the experiential on the other. Each of the articles uses these optics to trouble and chip away at, reinterpret and reassert, the sociological value of the everyday. And despite the diversity of the foci, it is these that form the core coherence of the Issue and set the wider terms of engagement.
However, nested within this meta-narrative of micro life and alongside a willingness to discuss methods, there are common themes or sub plots around resistances, exclusions, accommodations (Back, Stanley, Hall, Powell and Sang, Robinson); (sensual) materialities (Moore, Back, Rinkinen et al., Robinson, Bennett) and intimacies and interdependencies (Gabb and Fink, Rinkinen et al., Moore, Bennett, Robinson, Thomas and Latimer) that the articles work through and with. As a taster, an invitation to you to read on, we now consider and tease out these shared themes a little more.
We noted earlier the dichotomy of the everyday conceived of as a site of resistance and/or a site of normativity. The presence of the resistance and normativity is apparent across the articles, but these tend to be approached as entanglements and co-constitutive interactions rather than through any easy demarcations of either/or. As Wise observes in her conversation with Sarah, power and histories of racism are as much a part of the everyday pictures as convivialities and affinities. We are not saying that somehow the everyday is a solution to racism […] It is […] adding another layer to our understanding.
It is this notion of layers and the opening up space for more nuanced interpretations of resistances and accommodations in the everyday that allows Stanley to focus on the dominations, complexities (and slippages) of racial configurations and orderings in an affluent 19th-century Scottish migrant South African household. The ways in which the marginal provides room for this resistance-accommodation dynamic or ‘trouble spots’ to quote Stanley is also apparent in Back’s article. Similarly working with pasts, but 20th-century ones, Back argues for the importance of the thick sensory detail of class formations and a consideration that ‘class is lived as a complex structure of feeling’. In perhaps the most explicit exploration of resistance, Hall’s article takes us through the world of a street as a shared urban space of trade and mutualism, where 89% of proprietors surveyed spoke two or more languages, to argue for a ‘sociology of exchange beyond encounter’. The concept of generative capacities explored by Hall resonates with Powell and Sang’s investigation of women engineers and male-dominated work spaces in which macro-in-the-micro gendered exclusions and resistance and accommodation strategies for managing them were integral to the participants’ everyday experience and practices – including how making a cup of tea may become a site for transgression and subversion.
Capacities, agency and the drama of the everyday, which we noted earlier, are apparent in Robinson’s article, which explores data from her study of women’s relationship to footwear to show that in the unremarkable, routine, everyday practice of wearing shoes, the relationship with shoes and what Robinson calls ‘shoe moments’, reveals that the everyday is both mundane and always more than mundane. The importance of the sensory materiality that Robinson explores connects to the two most explicitly ecological and environmental orientated articles in the Issue but is a presence ghosting through all the other articles too – for example, in Thomas and Latimers’ hospital clinic spaces, in Back’s Christmas lights, in the documents that Stanley studies.
Moore’s multi-species ethnography of horseshoe crabs brings the urban, the sea, the beach, the human and the more than human together to deliver an independent materiality, in a highly sensory form, into the Issue. Drawing on Timothy Morton’s work (2013) and with a Latourian nudge, Moore urges a rethinking of the everyday as an intra-species, human and non-human ‘mesh’ and in doing so emphasizes the impossibilities of any separations within it. Like Moore, Rinkinen et al. draw on ANT perspectives and influences to explore how in quotidian practices and routines of ‘keeping warm on a [very!] cold winter day’, peoples’ relations with objects enact and reproduce everyday life. Rinkinen et al. show how, in relations with objects, objects are far from being inert things but rather are dynamic animators of the ‘doing’ of everyday life as well as generative of emotion and engagement. These articles demand taking materialities and interdependencies seriously in everyday life studies, and Bennett’s exploration of the intersections of place, belonging, and social care in one week of snowy weather continues the connective threads within the Issue. Bennett uses the relationships between daily rhythms and localism and practice to develop a notion of ontological belonging rooted in an ethics of care and place affinity.
Bennett’s engagements with materialities, routines, community-place and interdependencies in notions of care and caring in everyday life have an echo in the articles by Thomas and Latimer and Gabb and Fink. In both these articles, care, power relations, intimacies and interdependencies provide the focus of work for innovating theoretical understandings and methodological approaches to everyday life. Through an ethnographic and interactionist consideration of the convergences of bio-politics, bio-technologies and the in/exclusive routines of medical practice within two clinic spaces Thomas and Latimer suggest that in the routine life of the clinic, the clinic works as an ‘intermediary’ domain between medical processes and the re/production of divisions and assumptions about family, kinship, bodies and personhood. Sharing a focus on temporality, families and intimacies, but with a focus on the ongoing micro enactments of couple relationships, Gabb and Fink take us to a very different site of personhood, loving and everyday life. But like Thomas and Latimer, they too explore what they describe as the ‘visceral’ emotional intensities, slippages, uncertainties that characterize enduring intimacy and proximate relationship practices.
As a shared and common project, and in its breadth and diversity, the work presented in the Issue pushes at the frontiers of sociological engagements with the category of everyday life. Each article presents a particular lifting of a lid and in doing so affords central – and moving – insights on the living and doing of social and personal lives. As a whole, this Special Issue represents a dynamic and pioneer sociology that works through bodies, feelings, space and time and that acknowledges, returns to, makes use of and extends well-established sociological traditions and analysis of the micro. As a whole, this Issue foregrounds innovation in and development of social research methods. The authors have sought out inventive, careful, multiple ways for recognizing, comprehending and interpreting everyday life and lives. As Thomas and Latimer conclude in their article, ‘our soft data asks hard questions about some of the most profound dilemmas of our time’ and this has a broader application to all the work that is included here and the task – and the success – of this Special Issue.