Beyond the Everyday

Ordinary Things, Ordinary Lives, Ordinary Days Across the Centuries Paul G. E. Clemens (bio) Joseph A. Amato. Everyday Life: How the Ordinary Became Extraordinary. London: Reaktion Books, 2016, 256 pp. References, acknowledgements, index. $25.00. Rebecca K. Shrum. In the Looking Glass: Mirrors & Identity in Early America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. 221 pp. Figures, acknowledgements, notes, and index. $54.95. Everyday histories, or daily histories, across time and space, ancient to modern, a Braudelian sweep of the world, all in 200 pages of text. Best to begin reading at the end. The acknowledgements. Joseph Amato tells us that "[n]eedless to say, my sense of the everyday has its deepest roots in my own childhood and family. Nostalgia [a powerful and positive characterization throughout this reflection] makes what was my secure and cared-for youth one and whole—and a standard of what a desirable youth should be" (p. 242). A brick house in Detroit, stay-at-home mom—"resourceful, quick-tempered and generous"; a "loyal, stoic father"; a neighborhood rich in trees and peopled by the children of Eastern European, Canadian and German immigrants; a job at age eleven as a caddy at Grosse Pointe Farms; a "public education and a democratic point of view, sharpened by a militant unionism and an unquestioned allegiance to the Democratic Party of Roosevelt and Truman"—all this has shaped a lifetime of writing social history and about daily life (p. 242). Amato came to think of his mother's family as "my American family" and his father's as "my Italian [family] (p. 242). On his mother's side, a family "who literally dug themselves west along the Great Lakes from the Erie Canal until in the 1850s they finally settled in Wisconsin" (p. 243); on his father's, more recent Sicilians from "the Madonie Mountains in northeastern Sicily" (p. 242). Autobiography and Amato's own family history—his families' journeys from traditional life to modern life—crop up throughout the book and provide background for his reflections on the history of daily life and methods of studying that history. Around the books he has read, the many he has written, and the perambulations of his family, Amato speculates about 10,000 years of changes in daily life, up to a moment when "village and peasant, local and regional societies [End Page 553] increasingly lost their autonomy and capacity to assimilate outside influences," a point in time where one's "[m]ind leaps traditional borders and temporal boundaries," and "follows imagination, affinity and empathy where they lead, making ordinary days of life extraordinary days of mind" (p. 187). His acknowledgements also cite one of his mentors, Eugene Weber, whose Peasants into Frenchmen, succinctly captured this story in a specific place and time; just as tellingly, among the four individuals Amato thanks for their role in helping him "democratically… celebrate the long and extraordinary making of everyone's everyday life" is poet and friend Dana Yost, excerpts of whose poems conclude the book, and suggest to Amato, and the reader, how "historians must follow poets in their approach to the everyday world" (p. 206). Everyday Life, then, is neither an attempt to define its subject fully nor a comprehensive "how-to-do-it" guide to writing about daily life. It provides instead an overarching template for talking about the history of daily life rooted in material culture and economics. Amato admires the work of Fernand Braudel, but gives more consideration to psychology, cultural history, and politics than the Annales school did. The schema is essentially tripartite—traditional, modern, and a contemporary world, a modern world in which we have become "strangers to our own past," the ordinary has become extraordinary, and the "fixed and bounded" has become the "unleased and boundless" (p. 194). The Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution mark the extended transition from the first (traditional) to the second (modern) stage; the emergence of the contemporary self, awash in a world of choices that cut ties to place and past, brings us to our current stage in which "habit-packed nuclei at the centre of daily life no longer holds" (p. 195). The engine of change is "an increment...

In this paper, we discuss the possibility of a holistic approach in the design of new media for interpersonal communication. The key argument is that if we base our design on daily practice, this may inhibit truly innovative ideas from taking form, and, on the contrary, if we design using pure intuition and visions, the design is likely to fail due to a lack of connection to daily practice. Scenario-based design was hence used to makes us envision new media while field observations such as ethnographic studies, become a tool to retain the ties with everyday life. This duality can also be implemented, as we will describe, in a design that makes a bi-language/bi-levelled understanding of a product possible.

In this chapter, Yoshiki Tajiri focuses on the connection between trauma and everyday life: a traumatised subject needs to come to terms with everyday life and can find ordinary objects in it unexpectedly significant. By discussing such aspects of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, this chapter will illuminate the ways in which trauma and ordinary life are correlated rather than opposed. It also demonstrates that trauma theory and everyday life studies can stimulate each other: trauma is far from an everyday phenomenon, but it can shed light on the nature of everyday life after calamities of modernity as in the cases of Woolf and Beckett; conversely, there may be ways of enriching trauma studies by incorporating reflections on everyday life.

Patients with chronic kidney disease and their family members experience a number of lifestyle changes caused by the illness. The value of advance care planning includes understanding health status and options for future care, communication between close family members, and identification of wishes and preferences for care and treatment in relation to family and everyday life. Explore how patients with chronic kidney disease and their families experience everyday life and how they experience having to make choices about treatment. An explorative study using a qualitative method with a phenomenological-hermeneutic approach. Twelve patients with chronic kidney disease without kidney replacement therapy who were considering their treatment options and eight family members. Individual semistructured interviews with a narrative approach were conducted between August 2021 and March 2022. The data were analysed using Ricoeur's interpretation theory on three levels: naïve reading, structural analysis and critical interpretation and discussion. One main theme was generated: Family dynamics in a life-changing process. From this, three subthemes were derived: Living in an ordinary life placed in a waiting position, The dilemma of readiness to share and Feelings of being left alone. There are changes in family roles and in identity and a desire to maintain the known and ordinary life. Living with chronic kidney disease as a part of daily life is managed differently in the family, which can lead to feelings such as sadness, frustration and loss of shared life and resilience.

It is a rather widely accepted idea that philosophy is a totally abstract subject and that it is completely remote from everyday life. A philosopher is usually supposed to be somebody who — detached from ordinary life — thinks about the ultimate meaning of existence. But: “Regardless … of the role of the philosopher, and regardless of how remote we may think his activities are from our immediate concerns, the philosopher has been engaged in considering problems that are of importance to all of us, either directly or indirectly.” (Popkin et al. 198LXIV) In any case, the philosopher attempts to work out some general and coherent conception of the world as such and of human affairs in it. Are his ideas always very remote from the world? Sometimes they are, sometimes they are not. As far as ecology is concerned, I believe they are not remote, but rather very material.

Reviews 423 David E. Sutton. Memories Cast in Stone: The Relevance of the Past in Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg, 1998. 241 pp. ISBN 1-85973943 -1, $55.00/£39.99 cloth; ISBN 1-85973-948-2, $19.50/£14.99 paper. Sutton's sensitive and insightful book is the result of recent f ieldwork on Kalymnos, a small Aegean island in the Dodecanese group lying ten mües from the Turkish coast. In this Greek community of fifteen thousand, the past remains alive and active in the present as a source of both cultural identity and everyday social consciousness. But this book is neither a local history of Kalymnos nor a reconstruction of Greek history through the perceptions of its people. It is rather an attempt to understand "how people filter the present through ideas of the past [so that it may be used] to interpret, evaluate and judge issues pertaining to today's present" (ix). In American or British culture, history remains bracketed-off and isolated from the present: it is considered to be over, forgotten, and personally irrelevant to the concerns of ordinary life. However, "On Kalymnos you meet history" as a Uving past which permeates all modes of current perception and remains inextricably embedded in contemporary social life (209). Introducing the ethnography of this society through an investigation of the origins and epistemology of its ideological components has a particular significance in an era of resurgent nationalism and ethnic politics within Europe. Sutton's use of apparently prosaic examples of behavior on Kalymnos, as a means of opening inner worlds of social and political meaning, is therefore a valuable task for anthropology. History for the Kalymnians is not of course a simple melange of innocently structured past events: it is a series of stories chosen from classical, Byzantine, and modern times which "are told with a particular purpose in mind" (16). The cultural construction of such "historicities," which is the main purpose of this study, is in fact complex and multifaceted (2). Sutton skillfuUy unravels the integrated layers of social consciousness that are derived from historical perception which reach from the extended famUy to the local community, the Greek nation, the European Union, and ultimately the global political order. History is seen as any pattern of events that alters ordinary life at different levels. These may include past quarrels, sexual scandals, or financial misconduct that the Kalymnians exploit in gossip. They are self-critical of their propensity to undermine and "eat" their neighbors, leaving a stain on a family's name (122). But history is also about much less parochial matters. History is constantly evoked to define both Kalymnian and Greek identity, to explain national and European poUtical life and international relations, and above all, as a means of reference for analogies in everyday life. The history of the Dodecanese is strongly marked by discontinuity. After classical times the islands were controlled by the empires of 424 Biography 22.3 (Summer 1999) Rome, Byzantium, and Venice, and then ruled by the Genoese, the Knights of St. John, and finaUy, from the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Turks. In the 1820s the islands became part of the new Greek state during the War of Independence, only to be handed back to the Turks in 1828 as part of a diplomatic barter. Italian rule, which foUowed in 1912, became harsh during the fascist period, but this was to be eclipsed by the appalling German occupation from 1943 until the retreat of Axis forces. A brief period of British trusteeship ensued, which ended in a final union with Greece in 1947. The legacy of longterm foreign domination and manipulation by the great powers has been a tradition of both resistance to authority and an intense interest in the international political process responsible for the islands' subordination. These are now potent elements of mass consciousness which coexist with an ingrained distrust of the motives of poUtical power. Kalymnos also firmly embraces a strong left-wing tradition: it has consistently returned socialist deputies in national elections and is staunchly anti-monarchist. But these political leanings are in fact shared with other islands in the eastern Aegean which are not considered by Sutton. Lemnos...

The experience and lives of international university students studying and living in Cape Town, South Africa demonstrate the centrality of religiosity, in their case Pentecostalism in adapting to and grappling with existential perturbations wrought in a xenophobic and hostile environment. This article explores the everyday appropriation of Pentecostal religiosity and rituals by international students in navigating uncertainties and everyday anxieties and struggles of studying and living in a foreign and alienating space. Studying the mundane forms of the everyday has gained traction since Michel de Certeau’s pioneering works on the practice of everyday life. This article is based on an ethnographic study conducted with international university students to understand how Pentecostalism mediates their daily life and experiences and what it means to live and study at a foreign university. I show how Pentecostal Charismatic Churhces (PCCs) not only cater for the existential material needs of migrant students on campus, but also provide space for integration and forging convivial relationships and belonging. I argue that a Pentecostal identity and being connects and creates a sense of ontological security that pervades Pentecostal students’ everyday life.

This article presents the intellectual approach of an important thinker of the contemporary world, Michel de Certeau (1925-1986), to show its coherence. At the first look his work seems confusing: it addresses both the mystical phenomena of the past and the daily life of his contemporaries. His interests are multifaceted: he was at the same time theologian, historian, sociologist, philosopher of history. His work is a permanent research in a world in perpetual transformation. Although his main field of research was history, his first works dealt with theological problems. The interest of M. de Certeau begins by the analysis of mysticism as a phenomenon characteristic of the beginning of modern times. This leads him to take a broader interest in history as a set of events that cannot be reduced to a “system”. The spiritual experience of that period offers a clue to understanding current events. A significant part of M. de Certeau’s works deals with the problem of “modernity” and “everyday life”. There is a will to “think about event”. In the last part of his life, he works on the anthropology of the everyday life of “ordinary” people, in order to show the capacity they have to “invent” their existence by “tinkering” with the materials they receive. The religious dimension permeates all his work, his religious themes embrace both historical and contemporary Christianity. Christianity is for him the “religion of event”. That is why it must always remain open to meeting the other. Throughout his creativity Michel de Certeau shows a great concern for the singularity of every person, spiritual experience, interrelations with others.

Making an Impact: Cultural Studies, Media and Contemporary Work

Postmodern procedural poetry has received quite a bit of attention in the last several years. In her book Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy (2004), Marjorie Perloff devotes a chapter to the ...

.This article confronts a persistent challenge in research on children's geographies and politics: the difficulty of recognizing forms of political agency and practice that by definition fall outside of existing political theory. Children are effectively “always already” positioned outside most of the structures and ideals of modernist democratic theory, such as the public sphere and abstracted notions of communicative action or “rational” speech. Recent emphases on embodied tactics of everyday life have offered important ways to recognize children's political agency and practice. However, we argue here that a focus on spatial practices and critical knowledge alone cannot capture the full range of children's politics, and show how representational and dialogic practices remain a critical element of their politics in everyday life. Drawing on de Certeau's notion of spatial stories, and Bakhtin's concept of dialogic relations, we argue that children's representations and dialogues comprise a significant space of their political agency and formation, in which they can make and negotiate social meanings, subjectivities, and relationships. We develop these arguments with evidence from an after‐school activity programme we conducted with 10–13 year olds in Seattle, Washington, in which participants explored, mapped, wrote and spoke about the spaces and experiences of their everyday lives. Within these practices, children negotiate autonomy and self‐determination, and forward ideas, representations, and expressions of agreement or disagreement that are critical to their formation as political actors.

Reviewed by: Street Life and Morals: German Philosophy in Hitler’s Lifetime by Lesley Chamberlain Jeremy Best Street Life and Morals: German Philosophy in Hitler’s Lifetime. By Lesley Chamberlain. London: Reaktion Books, 2021. Pp. 237. Cloth $40.00. ISBN 978-1789144949. Street Life and Morals: German Philosophy in Hitler’s Lifetime details a survey history of philosophical thought in Germany during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At various times in Lesley Chamberlain’s book, she stresses that philosophers from Friedrich Nietzsche to Hannah Arendt struggled to answer a trio of questions raised by the forces of modernity: how to manage liberal, capitalist social relations; technological change and innovation; and the fate of reason itself. [End Page 322] The sections of the book lay out in detail the various interventions and suppositions made by major philosophers of Germany’s early twentieth century to answer these questions. Organized in a basically chronological order, the book conforms to the titular lifetime of Adolf Hitler and begins roughly in 1889 and continues to 1945. An introductory chapter opens the book and then the narrative proceeds to a second chapter detailing the social, economic, and urban transformations of Germany as perceived by philosophers like Georg Simmel and Siegfried Kracauer. The next chapter discusses “Kantianism” in Germany and twentieth-century attempts to adapt what Chamberlain emphasizes was an eighteenth-century philosophy to urban industrial life. Ernst Cassirer and Edmund Husserl figure prominently in this chapter. The most substantial chapter, the fourth, discusses the thought of key figures including Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, and Arendt of the Frankfurt School along with Martin Heidegger. Chamberlain details their engagement with the crisis of modernity and philosophy posed by the Weimar and Nazi period. The concluding chapter attempts to show that the philosophy that came out of this period, particularly from the Frankfurt School and its affiliates, was a “positive outcome,” a remnant of a lost German tradition. The book ends with two appendices, one on Kant’s relevance to National Socialism and one on the experiences of philosophers during the Third Reich. The strengths of Chamberlain’s book lie in its intense and erudite interest in the thought and lives of the philosophers detailed in the book. For a reader unfamiliar with the corpus, this book provides a useful overview of the era’s major ideas and their interconnections. Chamberlain’s overview of Simmel and Arendt, in chapters two and four, respectively, are of noteworthy quality. These virtues mean that Street Life and Morals would be especially suitable for an educated, non-academic reader who desires to understand the history of philosophical ideas in Germany during the Interwar period. Similarly, a scholar seeking a general overview for reference would benefit from the text. Disappointingly, the book examines the crisis of philosophical confidence and sensibility during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries without satisfactorily showing the connections to the wider social and political crisis that lay at the root of the Nazis’ ascendance. Reading the book’s chapters is to immerse oneself in a traditional history of ideas; a discussion of philosophers, their lives and ideas, and their relationships. Only infrequently does Chamberlain connect the wider historical context of Weimar Germany and the Third Reich to these histories. It reduces the lifetime and impact of Adolf Hitler on Germany to little more than a framing device. It would have been highly productive to have the shifts and changes in the ideas of Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, or others connected to the rapidly and radically shifting social, political, and cultural history playing out in Germany at the time. Nor does Chamberlain bring in the extensive scholarship on the intellectual lives of German [End Page 323] academics and cultural figures during the Weimar era. These weaknesses limit the book’s utility for historians and cultural scholars of the period who are not expressly interested in one, some, or all of the philosophers that Chamberlain examines. The approach and tone of the book are uneven when read from an academic perspective. Frequently, Chamberlain inserts herself into the narrative with critiques of the quality of a philosopher’s prose or similar asides. In fact, this approach reinforces the general...

Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966) rose to fame as one of the best‐known cultural critics of Weimar Germany before fleeing the Nazi occupation of Europe to re‐establish his career in the US. Born to a middle‐class German Jewish family in Frankfurt‐am‐Main, Kracauer was originally trained as an architect, though he also studied sociology and philosophy with Georg Simmel and Max Scheler, informally instructed Theodor Adorno on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason , and earned his doctorate in engineering in 1914. In 1921, after a disappointing career as an architect, Kracauer turned to journalism full time, first as a freelance writer in the arts and culture section of the trendsetting liberal newspaper, Frankfurter Zeitung , and then as the paper's editor from 1924 to 1933. Kracauer fled Nazi Germany in 1933 for Paris, where he struggled to earn his living publishing essays, fiction, and longer works of cultural criticism. When Paris fell to the Nazis in 1940, Kracauer was again forced to flee. In 1941, with assistance from Adorno and Max Horkheimer, he relocated to the US, taking a position with the Library of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Vowing never again to write in his native German, Kracauer taught himself to write in English and then resumed his career, emerging as one of the most celebrated mid‐century voices on film criticism and the philosophy of history. Kracauer was appointed research director of the Empirical Social Research Department at Columbia University in 1951. He died in New York in 1966.

BackgroundExposure to low levels of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in ordinary life is suspected to be related to oxidative stress and decreased lung function. This study evaluated whether exposure to ambient VOCs in indoor air affects airway inflammation.MethodsThirty-four subjects from the hospital that had moved to a new building were enrolled. Symptoms of sick building syndrome, pulmonary function tests, and fractional exhaled nitric oxide (FeNO) were evaluated, and random urine samples were collected 1 week before and after the move. Urine samples were analyzed for VOC metabolites, oxidative stress biomarkers, and urinary leukotriene E4 (uLTE4) levels.ResultsThe level of indoor VOCs in the new building was higher than that in the old building. Symptoms of eye dryness and eye irritation, as well as the level of a xylene metabolite (o-methylhippuric acid) increased after moving into the new building (p = 0.012, p = 0.008, and p < 0.0001, respectively). For the inflammatory markers, FeNO decreased (p = 0.012 and p = 0.04, respectively) and the uLTE4 level increased (p = 0.005) after the move.ConclusionExposure to a higher level of VOCs in everyday life could affect airway inflammation.

One of the important theological problems is the issue of the corporeality of Christ. Especially the issue of the risen body raises a lot of controversy. Despite the dogmatic confirmation of His tangibility, the Church has been treating the attempts to physically confirm the risen body from the very beginning with some distance, which is reminiscent of the situation of „unfaithful Thomas”. Nowadays, culture manifests this corporeality, emphasizing „the way of Tomasz” as the only way to prove His presence. The modernist modernization of Christ, immersion in ordinary life, everyday life, and finally carnality, has become a hallmark of literature. The article is a proposal to describe this situation on selected examples of the novels by J.M. Coetzee, J. Saramago, B. Hrabal and I. Karpowicz.