Heres where Im stuck: In sociology everyday life can function in two ways: as form and content. In the traditional understanding of sociology, everyday life can amount to a field of inquiry: what constitutes everyday life? how is it structured? how do people find meaning in everyday life? and so on. Or, it can constitute a trope or bundle of ideas that run through cultural products in society: what does culture think about everyday life? is everyday life a common theme in art, movies, media, etc.? What I am struggling with is which of these two to turn my attention to for my own studies. The latter is quite a nice trope that I think is rising in culture. The dignity, beauty and sacrality of everyday life is a thread Ive noticed on the rise in culture. Movies: About time, Walter Mitty. And most pointedly, the political discourse in the wake of terrorism (in very big provisional quotes ) in Canada and Australia, the idea that the terrorists will not ruin our way of life, and the micro-activism that resulted from those incidents. Media: the rise of the Humans of New York (HONY) photo blog, for example. All of this may amount, I think, to a good reading of culture as becoming increasingly concerned with everyday life as a central way of making and finding meaning. Theres a quite poetic convergence here of the micro-narrative of everyday life being projected onto the larger narratives of culture and politics. The interest for me, personally, is what I see as the foundation of some of these ideas in Christianity (as a foundational Western story). The idea that the incarnation, and the early interpretation of the incarnation in St. Paul, collapses the sacred / secular distinction. The everyday becomes imbued with divine significance. Where it used to be that feeding the hungry was at one end of the spectrum, and seeing visions was at the other (from secular to sacred / natural to spiritual), now they both concern the spiritual. It may be that this is part of the broader development of Western modernity, and a key part of the Weberian Protestant ethic thesis. I think I lean more towards the latter, cultural, approach to everyday life. What interests me is the trope of everyday life as it flows through culture. Through the early theology of St. Paul, the secularising Protestant reformation, the Dutch paintings of Vermeer, and contemporary exaltation of the everyday - from Ulysses [?] to HONY, and the coercive discourse in the aftermath of the Sydney siege, and the micro-activism of sharing a bus ride with a Muslim, in defence of our way of life. Possible reading: St. Paul (on collapsing the spiritual / natural, secular / sacred divide) Daniel Bell (on the sacred / secular / profane character of contemporary society) Max Weber (on the role of culture in developing Western modernity) Emile Durkheim (on the categories of sacred and profane) Jeffrey Alexander (on the role of meaning-centred discourse in political analysis) John Carroll (on guilt - broadening Webers analysis of Western modernity) Gianni Vattimo (on Christianity as secularisation)
Posted on: Mon, 05 Jan 2015 03:33:42 +0000
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