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- Convenors:
-
Fredrik Nilsson
(Åbo Akademi University)
Lars-Eric Jönsson (Lund University)
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- Stream:
- Everyday Life
- Location:
- Aula 26
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 16 April, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
We invite colleagues to a panel that will focus on the concepts of the common, ordinary and everyday life; how can they be used as analytical tools as we define or track what is "out there"?; what happens, if something is deemed not common at all, or as in the novel above, too common?
Long Abstract:
In her recently published novel - The Son of Svea - the Swedish author Lena Andersson starts with a scene where one of the main characters, Ragnar, is interviewed by an ethnologist who is about to investigate the history of the Swedish welfare state, known as "Folkhemmet". Ragnar is asked about his everyday routines, not the least his very regular coffee drinking habits, but the ethnologist finds him to common and decides to exclude him from the project.
We were somewhat disturbed by the fact that ethnology, which is supposed to be tracking the common, ordinary everyday life, was used to illustrate how cultural sciences distance themselves from the ordinary everyday life. Reading the novel we got a feeling of uneasiness; had ethnologists poured the common, ordinary everyday life into an indefinite pond of consensus?; had these concepts become almost so common or familiar that we forget to reflect upon them?; are we not trying to track the ordinary?
We invite colleagues to a panel that will focus on concepts such as common, ordinary and everyday life; how, when and where are they used?; to what extent are they (merely) important performative acts that identify and legitimize ethnology as a discipline?; what happens as these concepts are applied in our research?; how can they be used as analytical tools as we define or track what is "out there"?; what happens, if something is deemed not common at all, or as in the novel above, too common?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 16 April, 2019, -Paper short abstract:
The paper will explore the idea of the ordinary by thinking about Sunday service in contemporary Church of Sweden. It will discuss the construction of ordinariness and the various meanings that can be attributed to the ordinary, and reflect upon the conditions for studying ordinary worship today.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will explore the idea of the ordinary by thinking about Sunday morning service in contemporary Church of Sweden. I will explain how - in what contexts and from what points of view - this service can be seen as ordinary, and reflect upon how it has been subject in recent years to debate and reform in order to make it more close to everyday life (that is, more ordinary), and more coordinated on a national level (that, is, more common). Likewise, I will discuss how, for various reasons, the same phenomenon can be perceived as alien or extraordinary. Throughout, my ambition will be to use this example for thinking about the construction of ordinariness; about how the characterisation of something as ordinary depends on perspective, context, expertise and expectations, and about the various meanings that can be attributed to that which is considered ordinary, common, or everyday/mundane. I will also reflect upon the extent to which ordinary worship in Sweden has been studied by Ethnologists in recent times, and the reasons for its relative marginalisation. I will also reflect upon how ordinary worship could be studied by means of fieldwork today, and whether, in this regard, it poses an ordinary or extraordinary challenge.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper notions of the ordinary in archive material are discussed via aspects of mobility. Questioning the perceptions of the everyday in ethnographic work is not only an opportunity to gain a greater understanding of older archival material but also to open up for new interpretations.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I want to discuss notions about the ordinary in tradition archive material through different aspects of mobility.
From the outset, documentation of everyday life in the tradition archives favoured the image of stability and, correspondingly, place was interpreted in terms of contained units such as the farmstead or the village. On the other hand, mobility was connected with modernity and perceived as a threat to traditional culture. Mobility was understood as an anomaly and not as something representing the ordinary.
Despite the early ethnographic emphasis on the static, movement has been part of the everyday in both 19th and 20th century life. Nevertheless, everyday patterns of movement such as walking have often been taken for granted (being too common) and have therefore been overlooked. Moreover, the introduction of new mobility technologies, such as the bicycle and the automobile, had an immense effect on everyday life and on how people related to place. In Swedish-speaking Finland, mass migration was decidedly part of everyday life in the decades around the turn of 19th century. The fact that migration was an out-of-the-ordinary experience for the individual but a common phenomenon in many communities reminds us of the multifaceted nature of everyday life and the complexity involved in documented the ordinary. Questioning the perceptions of the common and the everyday in ethnographic work is not only an opportunity to gain a greater understanding of the material in question but also to open up to new interpretations.
Paper short abstract:
I suggest that social change and transformation become visible in narratives about the ordinary. Based on research on the life trajectories of young people in Seoul, South Korea, I want to discuss two ways to use the ordinary as analytical tool to track this change.
Paper long abstract:
Waking up in the morning, drinking coffee and dress, taking the subway to university or the office, participate in courses and clubs, business meetings or casual conversations with colleagues, meeting friends for dinner or do some shopping after work - these are some of the daily routines and activities of my research participants as they are the daily routines of a vast majority of young people living in South Korea. But in this "ordinary generality" (Highmore 2002) I found the particular, even exceptional, of my research participants' lives. The common is at once a general and highly individual experience that illustrates the complexity of practices in a social matrix and requires anthropologists to work between structure and agency (Highmore 2002).
I suggest that in narratives about the ordinary, everyday, and common change and transformation of the social become visible and an attention to it offers anthropologists the possibility to move beyond habit and reproduction to goals, projects and desire (Appadurai 2004). In my analytical approach, I merge two different qualities of the ordinary to illustrate the complexity of my research participants' everyday lives: ordinary ethics and, to borrow the term from Emily Gilbert (2005), money as 'common cent'. Ordinary ethics describes the reflections, explicit judgements, and highly personal reasoning of my research participants in relation to the demands, values, and pressures of their respective social matrix while practical considerations and pragmatic ways of using money illustrate their own values. In engaging with the ordinary, I can show how values change.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I will explore the ordinary as an instrument for tracking social changes, through examples of rapidly diverging lifestyles in a village from Romania.
Paper long abstract:
The inhabitants of the studied village have experienced a Socialist and then a Capitalist industrialization in the past fifty years. In the early 1990s deindustrialization abruptly hit the former Socialist countries, including Romania. Closing factories resulted in a high unemployment rate. A significant part of the unemployed urban population fled to the countryside, where life and economic activity, following the eradication of collective farms, was determined by decollectivization, repeasantization, demodernization processes. Two decades later th1e spread of the internet, the personal computers and the smartphones created local varieties of globalization, the so-called “glocality”. The main question: what does this “glocality” mean from the perspective of everyday life? One of the most exciting feature of today’s re-modernization in Romania consists in the layering of changing processes. While in the Western world the modernization processes came successively, then in most of the Romanian rural world the different modernization processes take place simultaneously – a process called by Hermann Bausinger “parallel polychronicity” (Bausinger 1989). For example: wideband internet has reached the village earlier than piped water.
Paper short abstract:
By examining the ways that 'the ordinary' is constructed, embraced, and resisted by those involved in urban cultivation practices, this paper explores how ethnological research is enriched through engagement with normative discourses of 'the ordinary' that are used by informants.
Paper long abstract:
Often discussed in terms of the 'residual' (Lefebvre 1947); 'rhythms' (Lefebvre and Régulier 1985); "unnoticed, inconspicuous, unobtrusive" (Highmore 2002); or the "ways of operating or doing things" (de Certeau 1984), the ordinary provides a conceptual common ground where thoughts, values, and sedimented practices meet. It is for this reason that ethnologists and other cultural scientists have an interest in the potential of the ordinary. And yet, the moment we question what is perceived as ordinary, we find that it is anything but.
At the same time, there is a tension between those who embrace 'the ordinary' for its own inherent value, and those for whom its desirability is questioned. In the case of activism, this emerges as a tension between those advocating change through contentious politics, and those who emphasize changes that are personal, practical, and relational. Using the example of my own research on activism and urban cultivation in Sweden, I explore three ways in which listening to 'the ordinary' can be a valuable analytical tool to engage with diverse ontologies and narratives of urban cultivation and desirable activist behaviors. In addition to being a way to examine routines and habits within activist communities and what stands out among these, attending to the ordinary as an analytical tool also allows exploration of what is worthy of mention according to activists. Finally, the ordinary can act as a lens through which to explore how those engaged in activism relate to 'the ordinary' as a goal or something to avoid.
Paper short abstract:
The paper wishes to reflect on the scientific value of ordinary everyday life, working with material that is as individual as fruitful: personal diaries from archives that allow scholarly research. As a medium of importance for cultural history, diaries offer a wide range of tracks to follow.
Paper long abstract:
Personal diaries, written on paper and stored in volumes often covering decades of events, thoughts and ideas, seem - in times of social media and blogs - to have become an anachronism. But this ageing medium has contained a surprising and growing popularity, especially in a sphere located between professional social research and honorary initiative: Diary Archives, focusing on unpublished documents which have not been produced by professional writers. Founded in the last 30 years, receiving more material than they can process, eight such initiatives formed the network "European Diary Archives and Collections" in 2015 (with three more archives/collections having joined since). Their various activities endorse, among other things, scholarly research that can be widespread in terms of topics or historical and regional differences. As diaries put ordinary everyday lifes on record, and often do so without any specific instruction or leading motivation, they allow tracking changes in a unique way. Using such material covering a timespan of 40 years, the proposed contribution aims predominantly at the following questions: 1.) How can the unspecific nature of diaries with some elements seeming too common be handled methodologically? 2.) How hard is the border between literature and diaries - considering prevalent assumptions that authors of the latter almost always expect readers as well? These questions will be addressed in the frame of contemporary biography research in social sciences/cultural studies - complemented by a theoretical outlook on the specifics of diaries as a medium of human self-reflection, informed by critical theory.
Paper short abstract:
This project studies minimalist lifestyle through sensory and visual ethnography. It explores people's experiences of finding time when changing their approach to life, and ways in which they translate fewer things and more time into a sense of happiness and simplicity in the everyday life.
Paper long abstract:
The project presents an ongoing research project on minimalist lifestyle in Iceland. Based on in-depth interviews, visual ethnography and qualitative questionnaire responses, the project investigates minimalism as a social movement and the diverse practices and experiences of individuals who decide to de-clutter their lives and adopt a minimalistic lifestyle. In most cases, minimalism starts out with dissent toward consumerism but gradually develops into a way of life. It goes from tidying up your home to tidying up your life. Delving into minimalist lifestyle is a means of simplifying for the individual, having fewer things to attend to but noticing the ones they have even better.
One’s ordinary is somebody else’s spectacular. Living a minimalist lifestyle compels the person to look at their everyday life in a new way. Their ordinary routines become visible through their own inward inspection. Simplifying their life requires their them be aware of the practices of everyday life, that most simply overlook day to day. Questioning practices like folding the laundry or how to prepare for the day. it involves a re-evaluation of every aspect of daily life, every routine, indeed one's whole life.
Paper short abstract:
Pizza was introduced in Swedish restaurants in the late 1960's as a novelty item on menus creating many standout memories. Based on interviews on restaurant experiences, the purpose of this paper is to discuss how pizza has gone from exiting and modern to ordinary and forgettable.
Paper long abstract:
In my research, based on interviews about food and eating in restaurants, it is noticeable how the experience of certain dishes and tastes change over time. Theoretically, I want to analyze this change in terms of routinization and socialization, but also in terms of taste distinctions. Some dishes become all too familiar and every day to be spontaneously mentioned in my ethnographical material about food memories. When the pizza became well established at the Swedish restaurant scene in the 1970’s it also became too common to be worth talking about. When pizza became routine, the taste faded. Interview answers about restaurant experiences today do not contain pizza dishes, but other more exciting dishes. By no means does this make the pizza less important or less interesting from a cultural analytical perspective. On the contrary, the routinization can highlight the ordinary doings during a meal that is beyond the more sensational. Swedish pizza has been standardized; there exist a strong consensus about what different pizzas should contain and how they should taste. This opens up for the invention and experience of other and new forms of pizzas made by innovative chefs. These ‘new pizzas’ surprise and amaze and cause pizza meals to again be interesting for informants to recount in interviews. My paper aims at discussing the balance between the everyday and extraordinary in the establishment of pizza as the most common Swedish restaurant dish.