Journal submission

As you proceed through the course materials and learning activities, you will be expected to make entries in your Learning Journal. These entries should address aspects of everyday culture that you have directly encountered within the domains discussed in each Study Guide unit—the home, the workplace, recreational activities, and real or virtual communities and subcultures. These entries should reflect on how the course topics are making you re-evaluate your own daily life and preconceptions. The real key to this assignment is to demonstrate some critical self-reflection in relation to the course discussion. A minimum of 3–5 entries or topics (depending on length) should be included. Library research will not be required to complete this assignment—instead you are to reflect on your personal experience. However, you may wish to reference course materials in your discussion. Your first submission should deal with the subject matter of Units 1 and 2.

THE STUDY GUIDE:

The Study Guide you are now reading represents a somewhat arbitrary attempt to delineate, or “map out,” the domains of everyday lived culture in six units. You will find, however, that the boundaries between domains may blur and there are occasional areas of overlap. For example, domestic space is now also mediated space, given the presence in the home—no longer just of radio and television—but of computers and multiple forms of social networking and communication using the internet. Given that this is the case, it may be helpful to keep the following four themes in mind as you work your way through the readings and commentaries in this and every unit of the course.

READINGS

Chapter 1 in Reading the Everyday, by Joe Moran. New York: Routledge, 2005.
“Introduction” and Chapter 1 in Culture and Everyday Life, by David Inglis. New York: Routledge, 2005.

UNIT 1: THE MEANINGS OF CULTURE

Simply put . . . culture is the things we do and make, the things we like, the things we believe, the things we learn, the things we remember. It is who we are. . (Fedorak 12)

Drawing on the earlier work of Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton points out that “culture is one of the two or three most complex words in the English language” (1). “Culture” is derived from the Latin colere, a term which Eagleton adds “can mean anything from cultivating and inhabiting to worshiping and protecting (2)”. In his work, Keywords, Williams elaborates on the shades of meaning that culture has taken on at various points in time and in a range of contexts

Both Eagleton and Williams emphasize that, while the idea of culture had its roots in material processes (e.g. agriculture), over the course of time it came to mean something quite different and much less concrete. By the late eighteenth century, small-c “culture” had been transformed into large-C Culture, and was linked with notions of progress (“evolution”) morality, and the civilizing influence of the Arts. Eagleton also notes that culture as a verb, meaning to tend or to nurture, gave way to Culture as a noun or (as in Matthew Arnold’s famous summation) “the best that has been thought and said” (32). Rather than cultivating and refining nature, society (or at least its upper echelons—those who possessed the requisite wealth and leisure) set about refining itself. At an individual level, culture became something one either possessed, or did not. This conflation of being “cultured” with personal worth, which in turn translated to social status and some degree of power, is something that persists today and to which we will return in Unit 4, in discussing the work of the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu.

In time, this definition of culture gradually gave way to a more general (and to some extent anthropological) view of culture as a whole way of life. In part, as Eagleton and others point out, this was because of a growing awareness that culture as a “civilizing” force carried with it some rather unfortunate baggage: “The trouble begins when the descriptive and normative aspects of the word ‘civilization’ start to fly apart” (Eagleton 10) as they do in the face of the contradictory effects of mass industrialization. How could the “myth of progress” be reconciled with the growing emiseration of thousands?

To further complicate matters, “by the end of the nineteenth century, ‘civilization’ had also acquired an inescapably imperialist echo, which was enough to discredit it in the eyes of some liberals” (Eagleton 10). There was a nascent recognition that the idea of a universal and unitary civilization masked the reality of the cultural and social dominance (or hegemony) of one particular society, i.e. that of Western Europe. As Fredric Jameson notes, culture is “always an idea of the Other” (34). Eagleton expands on this theme:
It is unlikely that the Victorians thought of themselves as a ‘culture’; this would not only have meant seeing themselves in the round, but seeing themselves as just one possible life-form among many. To define one’s life-world as a culture is to risk relativizing it. [Far more comfortable to cling to the belief that] one’s own way of life is simply human; it is other people who are ethnic, idiosyncratic, culturally peculiar. In a similar way one’s own views are reasonable, while other people’s are extreme. (27)

In his Culture and Everyday Life, David Inglis provides a set of eight points to elaborate, from a sociological perspective, the meanings of culture understood as a whole way of life (see pages 7–10). It seems fairly obvious that, if we wish to focus on the ordinariness of culture, then culture understood as a whole way of life is a more logical starting point than, for example, culture-as-the-arts or culture-as-exotic.

From the Study of Culture to Cultural Studies
Just as the meaning of culture has changed over time, so too has the study of it. Traditionally, anthropologists approached culture in one way, while philosophers regarded it in quite another, and a range of other disciplines and perspectives occupied the spaces in between. However it was not until the 1960s that the term “cultural studies” gained currency, largely thanks to the work done in Britain by the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies.
Cultural studies has been, from its inception, an interdisciplinary project, and the texts, chosen for this course—one written by an anthropologist (Fedorak), another by a sociologist (Inglis), and the third by a literary studies scholar (Moran)—reflect this interdisciplinarity. As you work your way through the course readings, you will soon discern subtle (and at times not so subtle) differences in how they describe, analyse, and evaluate the relationship between culture and everyday life. Each of the authors in question deploys theories and methods drawn from her/his particular scholarly background to explain and understand the nature and significance of “ordinary” everyday culture.
Inglis, as we saw above, spends a good deal of time unpacking the term “culture”. He also talks about the “taken for granted” nature of everyday life and the need to “defamiliarize the familiar” (Inglis 11). He borrows the term “life-world” from the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl to describe “everyday circumstances” and notes that:
As the life-world is shaped by cultural forces, but these are generally not experienced as anything but natural, we can say that we exist ‘in culture’ but we are generally not aware of that fact. . . . Defamiliarizing one’s own life-world can be more difficult than investigating the nature and contours of someone else’s, because it is generally easier to spot the oddities and specificities of another person’s way of life than one’s own. (12)
Woman walking her dog in Debdale Park, UK. Photograph by Gerald England, Geographic.org.uk.
Shirley Fedorak also grounds her study of everyday culture in the social sciences, specifically anthropology, and equates the culture of everyday life with popular culture. “Popular” too, is a word with a complex history, according to Raymond Williams. Fedorak makes the claim that popular culture has:

. . . a “more profound effect on the general public than so called high or legitimate culture . . . many more people will hear a country band at their local bar than will have the opportunity to attend an opera, and many more people will read a popular romance novel than a ‘literary’ work. (6)
For Fedorak, the sheer pervasiveness and accessibility of popular culture makes it, de facto, the culture of everyday life. She too is aware of the extent to which the activities of everyday life are seen as natural (taken for granted due to their very ordinariness) rather than cultural:
The line that determines whether an activity is popular culture or not is often blurred. Take garage sales, for example. Is “garage saling” on Saturday morning a form of popular culture? No, it is a commercial endeavour, with the goal of acquiring material goods. Yet, so is buying music or movies. Many people enjoy travelling from one garage sale to another in their neighbourhood; it is a form of entertainment and something they anticipate all week. They meet friends at these sales and exchange news and gossip. In light of the social importance of this activity, then, yes, garage sales are a form of popular culture. (3)
Following Fiske et al., Fedorak defends the active and dynamic nature of popular culture against those who “suggest that people who consume popular culture are always the victims of media manipulation” (9). She is not, however, an uncritical advocate of ‘creative consumption,’ acknowledging that “if we must criticize popular culture . . . for consumer manipulation then mass marketing of Western popular culture in other cultures is where we should focus most of our attention”(9). Fedorak recognizes the role that globalization has played a role in the both the export of “North American” mass media culture and the proliferation of increasingly hybridized local cultures, topics we will return to later on in the course.
The pedestrian zone of Kensington Market in Toronto, July 26, 2009. Photograph by DoubleBlue, Wikimedia Commons.
On the whole, Fedorak views popular culture in a positive light and argues that “popular culture is a mirror of societal dynamics, it has the power to shape and reflect cultural ideals, generate resistance and activism, and represent changing social realities” (1). If this is the case, then clearly the study of popular culture should tell us much about how so-called ordinary people live their daily lives.
In contrast, Joe Moran’s aim is to critique what he sees as the two main ways “the emerging discipline of cultural studies has thought about everyday life over the last few decades: as ritual and as popular consumption” (9 emphasis added). In another of your course texts he explains:
I am less concerned in this book with the ethnographic investigation of daily life per se than with ‘the everyday’ as a category that brings together lived culture and representation in a way that makes sense of, but also obscures, the reality of cultural change and difference. (13)
Like Inglis, Moran emphasizes the need for defamiliarization (or as he puts it, “denaturalization”) and the importance of seeing everyday events in a different light. Only by doing so, he asserts, can we “draw out relationships that do not simply freeze into a more or less rigid pattern of trends, cross-currents, majority and minority attitudes and the like” (25). In his example of waiting for a bus, an experience he describes as “about as unglamorous as you can get”(3) he reveals how a close examination of a mundane and monotonous cultural practice can yield insights about marginalization, deregulation, the privatization of public spaces and even the (perceived) breakdown of social order. While his case studies all refer to specifically British cultural texts and practices, as “reading the bus stop” shows, they have implications that extend beyond a particular nation or cultural group.
Although he is a literary scholar, Moran follows the French situationist Henri LeFebvre in his insistence that “the everyday cannot simply be read like a literary text because it is lived out in spaces and practices as much as in language and discourse”. (22). Nevertheless, as he shows in his discussion of the pervasive nature of multinational advertising, he is aware of the cultural impact that representations, whether words or images, have on our daily lives.
Moran, like Fedorak, is concerned with “the tension between global standardization and local difference” (6) and he is also very committed to exploring “the extent to which representations of the everyday have helped to transform notions of the public sphere in Euro-American societies in recent years” (13). As his discussion of the role of the media underscores, for Moran there is a definite political dimension to quotidian culture and he is committed to the “notion that lived, social space is inextricably linked to represented, imagined space, and both are central to an understanding of everyday life” (19).
Unit 2: Domestic Cultures

In Unit 2 we will look at how we experience culture in that seemingly most private of living spaces, our homes. We will discuss how domestic roles and rituals have changed, and look at counter-cultures within the so-called domestic sphere (e.g. vegetarianism and the slow food movement). We will consider domestic lifestyle politics, domestic arts (e.g. quilting), and forms of recreation we engage with in the home (including the TV and the internet). We will also look at how present-day domestic culture invites us to take on new identities (e.g. the supermom, the soccer mom, and the house husband). Finally we will look at some economic realities that are impacting our contemporary notions of the home (e.g. the return of the ‘servant’ in the form of [often racialized] domestic labour), as well as the home as a new venue, at times replacing the office or the factory, for an increasingly dispersed work force.

The Meanings of Home
We tend to think of domestic culture as taking place in the home, but it is important to recognize that the term “home” is itself steeped in cultural meanings and values. Many of you will have heard phrases such as “home is where the heart is” or the more controversial assertion “a woman’s place is in the home”. For the early twentieth-century American novelist, Thomas Wolfe, home was (famously) the place where you could not go again, and for Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz there really was “no place like home”.
According to John Rennie Short, the importance of the places we call home cannot be overstated:
Although it may come in all shapes and sizes, all manner of forms, the home is of huge social significance. We spend much of our lives in the home, our primary emotional connections are shaped in the domestic arena of the home; where we live and how we live are important determinants of our social position, physical health, and individual well-being. Home is a central element to our socialization into the world. The home is also a place of loathing and longing. George Bernard Shaw’s flippant remark that a hotel is a refuge from home can be counterpoised to the deep feeling expressed in the spiritual refrain that a band of angels was “coming for to carry me home”. (viii)
Queue of automobiles and pedestrians returning to US from Mexico, October 20, 2007. Photograph © Toni and Phil, Flickr.
Short is not alone in advancing the idea of homes as alternately (and in some cases, simultaneously) good and bad places. Sigmund Freud, in his famous essay on “The Uncanny” used the German term unheimlich (which in literal translation means “un-homelike”) to express the kind of strangeness that we associate with gothic novels or horror movies. In Germany during the Nazi era, state propagandists asserted that the home (“the hearth”), the school and the church, were central to building a patriotic and assertive national identity. Today, in the post-9/11 era, various governments have established departments of so-called “Homeland Security” aimed at countering the potential threat of terrorism but also, through such things as travel restrictions and border inspections, exercising “domestic” control over the general population.
Short contrasts his approach to the study of domestic culture with that of traditional anthropology:
Rather than looking for the familiar in the exotic . . . [Short et al.] search for the exotic in the familiar. Objects that are taken for granted like the window; the hall, exterior and interior decoration and familiar activities like laundry and the family meal are looked at anew. (ix)
He adds that:
The home is a nodal point in a whole series of polarities: journey-arrival; rest-motion, sanctuary-outside; family-community, space-place; inside-outside; private-public; domestic-social; sparetime-worktime; feminine-masculine; heart-mind; Being-Becoming. These are not stable categories; they are both solidified and undermined as they play out their meaning and practice in and through the home. (x)
Al-Nadhir Tag al-Sir Bashir with his daughter on his lap and family and house in the background, May 21, 2005. Photograph by David Haberlah, Wikimedia Commons.
David Morley takes things even further, suggesting that it is not through direct experiences of such things as tourism and travel, but rather “at home, that people feel the impact of globalization through their televised (and on-line) mediated images of ‘generic forms’ of distant places” (Pink 12).

Home as Gendered Space
Decades ago, Marilyn Motz observed that “the transformation of a house, a physical structure, into a home, with its resonant emotional meanings, has been in our culture a traditional task of women” (1) and further that ”the importance of this work has frequently been overlooked, in part because the work process is hidden from public view” (1). She goes on to state that:
Throughout the nineteenth century and to a lesser extent during the first half of the twentieth century, women were expected to devote themselves to home and family. Indeed the atmosphere of the home was seen as having an almost mystical effect on its inhabitants, determining their moral standards, happiness, and success in the outside world. It was the responsibility of the homemaker to create this aura of well-being and security that was associated with the home, and her skill and diligence as a wife and mother were judged in part by the condition of her house. (1-2)
Sylvester Rawding family’s sod house, north of Sargent, Custer County, NE, 1886. Photograph by Solomon D. Butcher (1856-1927) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
Clearly the home was idealized, not only as that most private of spaces but also as a perfect space, where one could be pure in mind, body and spirit, as well as protected from contamination from the Big, Bad, “Outside” World. Furthermore, variations of this nineteenth century mythology persisted well into latter part of the twentieth, exemplary cases being squeaky-clean 1950s and 1960s “family” television programming such as Ozzie and Harriet, Leave It to Beaver, The Donna Reed Show, and Father Knows Best.
This private (and pure) image of the home has also been undermined by an increased awareness of domestic violence and abuse that goes on within families. Sadly, for some of society’s most vulnerable members, some acts committed in the home, often invisibly—“behind closed doors”—may be anything but idyllic.

Domestic Labour
Arts and crafts vs. daily household tasks
However much patriarchal values of the past idealized the stay-at-home mom, the value of the actual day-to-day activities she performed was never publicly acknowledged. It was seen as “just” housework. To varying degrees this is still the case, but the issue of what is, or is not, considered to be menial work has grown much more complicated with certain shifts in mainstream culture.
William Morris’s house depicted in the frontispiece of the Kelmscott Press edition of his book News from Nowhere, 1893. Wikimedia Commons.
As we saw in Unit 1, the cultural opposition between the exalted and the mundane, the aesthetic and the (merely) functional, has a lengthy history, and so to do the critics of this division. One of these was the British socialist and designer, William Morris, who was famous for denouncing the dichotomy between beauty and utility. “In his lecture, The Beauty of Life, given in 1880, Morris said: ‘Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful’ (Cariati).” More recently, and thanks largely to the efforts of second-wave feminism, there has been a greater recognition that certain domestic products and practices, formerly dismissed as mere “crafts” have cultural value and status. Fabric art is one example, but there are many others.
Yarn-bombed trees on the campus of University of Texas, March 11, 2011. Photograph © Gogglez, Flickr.
Given that culture is a “contested terrain” it should come as no surprise that, hand-in-hand with this mainstream recognition there have been counter cultural appropriations. One of the more whimsical examples is the sudden appearance of “urban knitting” a kind of guerilla fabric art practice that involves knitting graffiti and attaching it to objects in public spaces (referred to as “knitagging” or “yarnbombing). (For a quick look at some examples see: http://yarnbombing.com/.)
Other examples are more serious. Those who have read A Tale of Two Cities by the Victorian English novelist, Charles Dickens, may well recall how the grim-faced Madame Defarge used her knitting to record the names of those destined for the guillotine. Dickens, of course, was writing fiction, however in Latin America there is a tradition of using fabric as a medium for documenting actual occurring atrocities. According to Kitty Williams:
This example of an arpillera shows women working in cooperative groups. The sign on the wall reads “Where are our detained disappeared?” Photograph of arpillera from Crizmac.com.
On September 11, 1973, [General Augusto] Pinochet led a dramatic coup against Chile’s democratically elected government. In the months that followed, many so-called subversive Chilean citizens were murdered or disappeared. These desaparecidos (the disappeared ones)—primarily men—left behind wives, mothers, and sisters who were not only were frantic with worry and grief about their loved ones, but now also had to find a way to support themselves and their families. [ . . . ]
It was in these difficult circumstances that arpilleras were born—a unique form of protest as well as art. The first arpilleras were made from fabric scraps, and in some cases, pieces of cloth from the clothes of the missing men. The women worked together in co-operative groups to make and sell their arpilleras. Through their art, they were able to say what they could not say in words. (Williams)
The “Names Project,” started in 1987, is a more recent example of the deployment of domestic arts in the interests of social justice. This quilt, consisting of over 40,000 3’x6′ panels, is a memorial to those who have died from AIDS, but also serves an educational function. According to the website it is also “a powerful tool for use in preventing new HIV infections” as well as being “the largest ongoing community arts project in the world”. (http://www.aidsquilt.org)

Food: Fast or Slow?
In her discussion of the symbolic importance of food, Shirley Fedorak argues that “men and women define their identities, gender roles, and status or position through food production, distribution and consumption” (90). She also observes that:
Urbanization and an ever-expanding workforce of both men and women mean that parents are often too busy to prepare home-cooked meals, so the option of dining out has become increasingly popular. (91)
Eating out takes a traditional family activity once done in the home out of the domestic sphere and relocates it in public spaces. But what about those who cannot afford to eat out on a regular basis?
Father preparing tacos with children, 2007. Photograph © Yvonne Chamberlain, iStockphoto.
As the pressure on working mums (and dads) referred to above has increased we have also seen an accompanying shift in household roles and tasks such as cooking. Microwaves have become ubiquitous (“nuke-ing” has replaced baking) as has eating on the run, (and/or in the car) and full family “sit-down” meals are increasingly viewed as a rarity. This sweeping change in the culture of everyday life has also provoked counter-cultural resistance of a sort, in the form of what is known as the “slow food movement:
Slow Food, a growing international movement, is perhaps best defined as an alternative to its fast counterpart. McDonald’s means unhealthy fare, ecological exploitation and usurpation of local idiosyncrasies; Slow Food means nutritious and tasty diets, preservation of food-source biodiversity and locally, sustainably grown food. (Tuhus-Dubrow)
According to Eric Schlosser:
What people eat (or don’t eat) has always been determined by a complex interplay of social, economic and technological forces. . . During a relatively brief period of time, the fast food industry has helped transform not only the American diet, but also our landscape, economy, workforce and popular culture. Fast food and its consequences have become inescapable, regardless of whether you eat it twice a day or have never taken a single bite. (3–4)
Schlosser also notes the negative geographic implications of our reliance on fast food, and also some associated health risks:
Children at a fast food outlet. Photograph © funnypictures24.com.
In some cases (such as the malling and sprawling of the west), the fast food industry has been a catalyst and a symptom of larger economic trends. In other cases (such as the rise of franchising and the spread of obesity), fast food has played a central role. (9)
The slow food movement signals a return to “home cooking” and a perhaps nostalgic yearning for a lost time when the aroma of soups simmering on a stove symbolized domestic security.
The home as workplace
So far, we’ve talked about domestic arts and crafts, but what about the really menial household chores? Globalization and the polarization of the labour force have meant that in many families where both parents work full-time, often at highly paid but demanding professional jobs, Philippina nannies and Mexican au pairs have become standard fixtures for routine domestic functions and often childcare as well. The domestic servant of bygone days has returned, but in a new guise. Clearly for those (primarily female) individuals engaged in this type of labour, the home is, in fact, a workplace.
At work in the home office, 2007. Photograph © Morgan Lane Studios, iStockphoto.
Nor, is work in the home restricted to domestic work as such. Technology has played a significant role in enabling the home to replace the office or factory for many who engage in work that, while taking place in a domestic setting, is performed for a wage and under the (indirect) supervision and control of an employer. Industrial relations expert Fiona McQuarrie defines telecommuting as an arrangement whereby “an employee…works partially or fully at home and communicates with the workplace through computers, faxes, and telephones” (524). She sees this as one of many changes to how work is organized in the twenty-first century (others include such things as flextime, compressed workweeks and job-sharing). McQuarrie points out that:
Like flexible work schedules, telecommuting allows the employee some degree of freedom in determining how and when the work will be done. In telecommuting arrangements, the employer usually specifies the nature of the work and the time by which it must be completed and lets the employee determine how these conditions will be met. (525)
Although for many, working from home is much more convenient (and from the employer’s point of view, much cheaper) nonetheless it does have a “down side”. McQuarrie explains:
In telecommuting, for example, workers may find that the cost of upgrading their computer equipment, or remodelling a work space at home exceeds any savings they realize by not working outside the home. In addition, telecommuters may have anticipated that they could work at home and meet other commitments, such as care for their children, but instead find that they are working extended or unreasonable hours to meet the demands of both employer and family. (525)
There is also the isolation factor, and the very real danger that home workers will be subject to forms of exploitation rarely encountered in public, and sometimes unionized, workplaces.

The Home as Mediated Space
Unit 2 concludes with a brief discussion of how communications technologies and the global portal that is the internet are having a growing impact on how leisure time is being spent in the home, in short, how these new media are becoming a major part of domestic culture. According to Shirley Fedorak, television alone has a cultural impact that is comparable to that of societal institutions such as “religion, political organization and education”(28). Television, she contends, creates:
. . . new experiences for its audiences, thereby generating new meanings. Television has increased cultural awareness by bringing the beliefs, ideals and patterns of behaviour of other cultures into our homes. Whether this creates a better understanding . . . is open to debate. Nevertheless, people are more aware of the world outside their community than ever before. This is partly due to television. (28)
Cultural “dopes” or Guilty Pleasures?
One of the ongoing debates in cultural and communication studies has to do with how much power the mass media has over its audiences. In her article “A Mundane Voice,” Melissa Gregg discusses how cultural studies scholar Meaghan Morris attempts a reconciliation of two opposing views, arguing that the truth is quite possibly “somewhere in the middle”:
Morris presents a difficult argument in the ‘Uncle Billy’ essay. Against dominant theories of communication—that see viewers either as ‘passive, uncritical sponges’, or instead claim ‘that no one is ever mesmerized, fooled or drugged by watching television’ (1998a, p. 118)—Morris shows the insufficiency of blanket condemnations or celebrations of television. (368)

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