The Meaning of Everyday Life

The time of everyday life is repetitive but punctuated by the unpredictable

• Everyday life is a temporal term.

• Repetition sometimes associated negatively with boredom, but repetition is key to the gradual formation of social identity and social norms. We become who we are through acts of repetition (Durkheim).

• Repetition is not necessarily in opposition to innovation. Rather, the opposite is true. Repetition may in fact enable creativity.

• The repetitive nature of everyday life is also sometimes punctuated with unexpected, unpredictable eve

The everyday is synonymous with habit.

• Habit is not exactly the same as repetition though it is linked. Habit describes not just an action, but also an attitude or state of mind.

• Marcel Mauss, French anthropologist in ‘Techniques of the body’: it is possible to distinguish between ‘squatting mankind and sitting mankind. . . People with chairs and people without chairs ( 1914:81).

• Mauss says that ‘bodily habits are ‘assembled by and for social authority’ Example: eating around a dinner table. Who sits where?

• Bourdieu coined the word ‘habitus’. Idea of ‘habitus’ is the idea of acquired ability. It is something much stronger than habit ( Bourdieu talked about ‘durable dispositions’). ‘Habitus’ is taught not just by word but by imitation. For Bourdieu, these ‘durable dispositions were strongly influenced by class as well as gender and they applied to all sorts of aspects of life , from eating to how we decorate the home, to the TV programs we watch.

• But also an important body dimension: ‘the book from which children learn their vision of the world is read with the body’ (Bourdieu [1972] 1977:90)

The spaces of everyday life are spaces of familiarity

• What are these spaces? What constitutes a strange place?

• Home is seen as a privileged symbol of everyday space. Like everyday life itself, home constitutes a base; a taken-for-granted grounding that allows us to make forays into other...