Anthropology and the Everyday, from Comfort to Terror

Abstract

aspect of the world or human experience from within communities frequently, in some dimension, not “ours” and not “us.” In terms of location, situation, and power, these typically have been communities affected but not privileged by (and often not at all enchanted by) whatever that thing is we call “modernity.” However romantically retrograde it may be to say so, ethnography is a liminal, visceral practice (art?), often distressingly so, insofar as it may entail learning to use a novel assortment of objects and meanings: to prepare and consume unfamiliar foods, with unfamiliar implements, framed by unfamiliar systems of thinking about food; to sit, walk, and sleep in unaccustomed postures; to act with grace (or at least without utter offensiveness) in uncomfortable gender, family, status, labor, and ritual contexts; and all of this while gaining some degree of fluency in a language of some foreignness in a conceptual universe whose particular attitudes towards the world will only slowly become apparent, and even more slowly understood. 2 Prior book-learning is only marginally useful, since the most powerful inscriptions of habitus are bodily, 3 and it is the doltish, wrongly-disciplined body doing most of the initial learning in the field. By merit of that discomfiting indoctrination, ethnographers usually feel they have a particular purchase—if clumsy and partial—on the everyday. Since the first injunction is to inscribe, describe, record, but since it is impossible to write about anything of more global interest while one is still learning to eat and defecate correctly, 4 many ethnographers spend weeks and months trying to understand and describe the simplest (hardest?) parts of social life: the minutiae of daily life. And yet, though the trials of everyday learning may be narrated at cocktail parties or in conference corridors, and though publications may be anchored in descriptions of everyday practice, reflection on the singularity of the everyday as a spatial, temporal, and philosophical category is relatively rare.