Abstract
With the aim to take ‘sociological stock’ of the study of everyday life, editors Sarah Neal and Karim Murji, in a special issue of Sociology, present a collection of 10 theoretically informed empirically eclectic articles and an interview addressing what it is that constitutes the profundity of everyday life experiences. Underplaying the traditional ordinary–extraordinary dichotomy, ‘sociologies of the everyday’ focus on the co-constitutive interactions of resistance and normativity, exclusions and accommodations texturing the meta-narratives of micro-life. The sites where the drama of everyday unfold include curious streets, a social housing estate, ordinary cities, a beach, health clinics; so are the practices explored remarkable – community festival decorations during Christmas, 20,000 letters, ‘documents of life’ recording the everyday transactions of a family, women’s footwear practices, diary entries during a week of inclement weather, etc. Because most of the data analyzed are ‘naturally occurring’ and not directly co-produced through the research process, qualitative methods emerge as the preferred strategies of doing research on the everyday.
One of the common themes in a number of articles concerns ways to address the notion of ‘excess’ or its absence in engaging with the everyday. For instance, Les Back explains festive excess in matters of Christmas decoration in working-class homes in New Addington as a seasonal gift to the community, a practical kindness, and everyday street repair, whereas Lis Stanley examines the Forbes scriptural economy, its sheer excess within an everyday sociology framework to analyze changes in South Africa’s racial order. In contrast, Suzanne Hall’s articulation of migrant urbanisms in ordinary streets authorizes no ‘overt migrant spectacle’; it scrutinizes instead how ‘emerging platforms of civility’ allow for diverse cultural expressions in accommodating everyday resistance in a multiethnic trade street. The excessive and recessive idioms suggest different ways of contending cosmopolitan everyday practices. Everyday objects encountered and object relations reproduced are also textured with different hermeneutic gestures. For example, Moore urges an ‘intra-species mindfulness’ in gauging the effects of beach nourishment projects on the reproductive strategies of nonhuman actors like horseshoe crabs found in Plumb Beach, New York. Their rhythmic instinctual reproductive behavior, she argues, are akin to ‘transformational objects’ for humans – intra-acting in the making and unmaking of geomorphologic worlds. Rinkinen et al.’s article situates object relations relating to material engagements of ‘keeping warm’ as recorded in Finnish diary entries by moving beyond the mere practicality of the act to appraise ways in which the multiple, dynamic, and coexisting roles of things are reproduced. Objects like footwear and the relationship women share with them, what Robinson calls ‘shoe moments,’ reveal ways in which gender identity is constructed in everyday life. So different kinds of objects perform variegated, changing roles and are not restricted to being instrumental accessories or inert things in daily lives. The everyday serves as a sticky palimpsest for revealing differentiated roles of objects and practices that belong to it. In reading this palimpsest, the authors simply do not reduce the everyday materialities of Christmas lights, letters, street politics, or shoes as enactments of social markers of class, race, migration, gender, but rather they argue these manifestations are indeed ‘social orderings, stratifications and resistances.’
The register in which the exhibits and exhibitions of the everyday are manifested is deeply sensory and frequently intersensorial in character, touching the written, verbal, and aural sensibilities. In subscribing to de Certeau’s ‘writing laboratory,’ Stanley discusses how the Forbes letters as textual subjects ‘speak back’ and transform the understandings of racial intercourse in South Africa. Likewise, ‘the occultation of the everyday’ in Rinkinen et al.’s article is foregrounded in accounts of everyday life – the lay utterances, patchy, sporadic diary entries that help in imagining and conceptualizing object relations. Again, Gabb and Fink contextualize their phrase ‘spilling from the page’ to express how diary entries create the contour of the emotional ambivalences of ‘telling’ intimate moments experienced in couple relationships. Instances of the auto-acoustic written word have their ready auditory counterparts in the sonic plenitude of listening to physical voices during interviewing respondents. The three datasets arrived at by delivering a semi-structured interview guide to professionals in Powell and Sang’s study to elicit information in understanding power relations in male-dominated occupational contexts, or the 12 focus groups developed to obtain diverse narratives of the shared cultural imaginary that surrounds everyday experiences of shoes in Robinson’s work are cases in point. Listening to different voices and worded materialities constitute a rich hearing culture in sociological exercises of comprehending the everyday. Thus voices, words, and auditory faculties engage in a curious interplay of fleshing out the dynamics of the intersensorial everyday.
Often the everyday as seen, heard, or told registers an incumbent interconnectedness of living the everyday. Moore’s multispecies ethnography including human and nonhuman actors explores how crabs, the beach, the sand, the highway, and other objects are entangled in a mesh ingrained in an incessant relationality reworking networks that are staunchly inseparable. Robinson’s meso-level analysis examines the relationality between women’s agency in choosing shoes, a kind of practicing reflexive femininity and conjuring identity transitions within the temporalities of the life course and everyday practices. Bennett repositions ontological belonging to the everyday at the intersections of place affinity and an ethic of care presenting it as a (offbeat) rhythmic practice creating and recreating relationships. These articles portray strips of the everyday juxtaposed in crucial interconnectedness demonstrating that bits of life can be lived in embedded relationalities of inclusive, enabling, and continuing networks, reflexivities and rhythms. These partly reflect concerted attempts to restrategize through the study of the everyday, the sociological truism that social life is weaved through intricate webs of interconnected and interdependent relations.
As would be expected, the interdependency coopts ethical, affective ethos to recreate intimacies in the familiar and familial everyday. Sharing the communitarian morality, the Hopkinson family through generations bathe in ‘chromatic surplus’ during Christmas – an annual gift of seasonal generosity, rendering the intimately familiar fascinating in ways more than one. Fostering the community spirit, this is indeed a spectacle of the community, ‘a gift given for free in hard times by a family to the estate’ (p. 832). Thomas and Latimer’s and Gabb and Fink’s articles also engage with interdependencies in notions of care and caregiving, which are again related to moral and ethical concerns. Drawing on the site of two clinics, Thomas and Latimer demonstrate that ethical dilemmas in disposing of the disposable do matter even in in/exclusive routines of medical practices that undervalue the potential dysmorphological fetus dehumanizing in the process, the technical discourse. That motilities proliferate in a constituency governed by discursive regimes of biopolitics is a veritable indicator of circulating notions of agency, will, and calculation underpinned by participants’ attachment to and detachment from different moral forms that bring into presence, displace, or make absent different identities. Using the ‘moments approach,’ Gabb and Fink approximate visceral emotional intensities that provide leeway in comprehending enduring love in couple relationships. Relationships, they contend, are dependent on micro-enactments that stretch beyond the moment.
The issue on the everyday asks us to read sociology ‘with a difference.’ Though clearly manifest, Bennett suggests ‘everyday life is sometimes made visible only through certain reminders’ (p. 967). Souvenirs like letters, diaries, post-diary interviews, scrapbooks, and nonhuman actors are generative of the reality the everyday is. The authors innovatively signpost these micro-emblems as they fold in and unfold into the narratives of sociological interpretation and understanding. It is also what shapes Sarah Neal’s inquiry as to whether ‘the small is also a distillation, a manifestation of the big’ (p. 998). With the latitude of the everyday under the scanner, the issue is therefore a valuable contribution as its thematic converges, intersects, overlaps, and underlines at different moments the daily predicaments confronting our lives.