The Culture of Everyday Life
It's the little things that matter.
Everyday life. It’s most of what we experience, and yet it can easily pass us by. Walking, shopping, cooking, reading on a favorite sofa, sitting on a balcony with a friend…it’s easy to focus on the big stuff too much and let these little things drift into the distance.
What if instead our memories included these joyful or meaningful mundane experiences? Let’s take cooking for example. It may be a way for someone to relax — to enjoy the colors and flavors, the chopping à la Julia Child. For someone else, it may be a burden on their time when they would rather be able to spend it with children or doing another kind of paid work. The reasons and experiences of cooking (as well as eating a meal) are vast. They can form meaning in our lives in this way, either leading to a way of capturing joy or a catalyst for change.
In the same way, we can understand characters, places, and ideas through a careful look at everyday life in the arts. Today, we’ll take a look at the way theorists Michel de Certeau and John Fiske frame the term. I’ve mentioned this phrase in these two articles and will surely refer to it in the future:
In theorizing everyday life, we move from unconscious movements through our worlds into an understanding of how and why we do so (or others do) as a product of our place in society and our free will.
Michel de Certeau
French scholar and Jesuit priest was a philosopher of everyday life, among other things. His book The Practice of Everyday Life (translated by Steven Randall, 1986) is an important read if you want to understand this kind of theorizing. In it, he writes of popular culture and language, of walking in the city, of Foucaultian power structures, “Spatial stories,” and other ways of investigating the everyday.
De Certeau does not offer definite answers or methods of analysis; instead he says (p. xi):
The point as yet is not to discuss this elusive yet fundamental subject as to make such a discussion possible; that is, by means of inquiries and hypotheses, to indicate pathways for further research. This goal will be achieved if everyday practices, “ways of operating” or doing things, no longer appear as merely the obscure background of social activity, and if a body of theoretical questions, methods, categories, and perspectives, by penetrating this obscurity, make it possible to articulate them.
De Certau makes use of Foucault’s “procedures” in order to juxtapose the everyday with “rites and customs” in order to point out the lack of “discourse” available to talk about them with any purpose (p. 45+). These areas may include punishment or criminal institutions, education, and medicine/hospitals.
He further discusses the “art of speaking” in creating narratives of the everyday. This artistry is a Kantian “art of thinking” and a way of giving language to the beauty and truth of common experiences (p. 77+).
John Fiske
John Fiske was a media scholar and cultural theorist who picked up on many of de Certau’s ideas in “Cultural Studies and the Culture of Everyday Life” in 1991. His work moves partly into a sphere of providing a voice for the marginalized through their invisible everyday practices.
Fiske immediately discusses the difficulty in finding a distance at which to fully appreciate the significance of everyday life, stating that “cultural distance is a multidimensional concept” (p. 154). He looks at the way we can understand a group’s experience — such as a female domestic sphere, in certain cases, or a “mainly black, working class culture” in the writing of Brett Williams, or “urbanized Brazilian peasants” (p. 155-6).
In the discussion of Williams’ work, he discusses his use of the term “creativity” in the process of cooking (p. 158):
Williams describes how this creativity works in, for instance, the culture of collard greens—the fertilizing, nurturing, and harvesting of them in urban backyards, and the multitude of ways of chopping, cooking, seasoning, and serving them. Collard greens are used to negotiate the differences and similarities between Carolina and Washington, and also between individual creativities within a common set of constraints.
By giving language to the experience, others can learn from it and validate the creative elements of this culture. He proclaims: “I want to develop a cultural theory that can both account for and validate social difference, for it is in these differences that we find what the people bring to the social order.” (p. 161).
For further academic reading or connections, there is a scholar’s group devoted to Philosophy, Culture and Everyday Life at Nottingham Trent University. The bottom of the linked page includes several articles of interest.
Examples
To get started in understanding ideas through the arts in this way, one might start with the cinema of Hong Kong filmmaker Ann Hui or Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-Hsien and the writing of the late British novelist Jane Austen or Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk.
Here we can read through everyday work and experiences — cooking, dancing, taking care of children — but also make meaning, as Fiske does, of marginalized: the domestic worker, the elderly, the foreign worker, the single-divorced-woman, the 19th century woman, the classes of society in Istanbul.
Trailer from Ann Hui’s A Simple Life:
Trailer from Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s The Flight of the Red Balloon:
Excerpt from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice:
Mr. Bingley had soon made himself acquainted with all the principal people in the room; he was lively and unreserved, danced every dance, was angry that the ball closed so early, and talked of giving one himself at Netherfield. Such amiable qualities must speak for themselves. What a contrast between him and his friend! Mr. Darcy danced only once with Mrs. Hurst and once with Miss Bingley, declined being introduced to any other lady, and spent the rest of the evening in walking about the room, speaking occasionally to one of his own party. His character was decided. He was the proudest, most disagreeable man in the world, and everybody hoped that he would never come there again. Amongst the most violent against him was Mrs. Bennet, whose dislike of his general behaviour was sharpened into particular resentment by his having slighted one of her daughters.
Elizabeth Bennet had been obliged, by the scarcity of gentlemen, to sit down for two dances; and during part of that time, Mr. Darcy had been standing near enough for her to overhear a conversation between him and Mr. Bingley, who came from the dance for a few minutes, to press his friend to join it.
“Come, Darcy,” said he, “I must have you dance. I hate to see you standing about by yourself in this stupid manner. You had much better dance.”
“I certainly shall not. You know how I detest it, unless I am particularly acquainted with my partner. At such an assembly as this, it would be insupportable. Your sisters are engaged, and there is not another woman in the room whom it would not be a punishment to me to stand up with.”
Excerpt from NYT interview with Orhan Pamuk:
“I had little interest in Byzantium as a child,” Mr. Pamuk wrote in “Istanbul.” “I associated the word with spooky, bearded, black-robed Greek Orthodox priests, with the aqueducts that still ran through the city, with Hagia Sophia and the red-brick walls of old churches.” Legal disputes have kept this patch of waterfront property, where we were eating lunch, in limbo, resulting in a rare zone of neglect in the heart of the city. It’s one of Mr. Pamuk’s favorite places. “All my childhood was like this, but will it be like this in 20 years? No way,” he told me, as we savored the maritime smells. He is all but certain that the rapid gentrification of surrounding neighborhoods will eventually overtake this forgotten field.
We continued across the Galata Bridge, the historic epicenter of Istanbul, stopping midway to admire the scene: tourist boats and pleasure craft floated down the Golden Horn, past the mosques of Sultan Ahmet on one side and the steep hills of Cihangir on the other. “This was originally a wooden bridge, and when I was growing up you had to pay to cross it,” he said, “but you could also hire row boats. I remember my mother taking me across by boat in the 1950s.”
What do you think of the above passages and clips? What does the everyday tell us about a society or an individual, about truth?
What aspects of your daily life go by unnoticed but perhaps hold meaning? How might writing about them give them more significance for you or others?
Thank you for this piece. Life happens in the small, quotidian moments. Understanding them yields wisdom and ultimately, happiness. As the authors and artists you quoted show, this notion transcends time, place, and culture.
Interesting and thought provoking piece. I always enjoy how some writers manage to convey the every day in a way that draws you in, and also love to have conversations with friends and aquaintances on the rituals their families have. The minutia of everyday life is really the stuff of life.