Historical writing about everyday life

Abstract

'Everyday life' is an enigmatic term which eludes a straightforward or universal definition. The notion is less precise and more complicated than it looks. One reason may be that since 'everyday life' and the categories with which it is described are constituted within specific cultural and historical contexts, we face a host of (often contradictory) concepts.l Yet all approaches to everyday life in contemporary historical writing do have something in common: a concern with the world of ordinary experience (as opposed to society in the abstract) as their point of departure, together with an attempt to view daily life as problematic, in the sense of showing that behaviour or values which are taken for granted in one society are dismissed as self-evidently absurd in another (cf. Burke 1991: 11). For some time historians and social anthropologists have been trying to uncover the latent rules of daily life. The everyday includes actions, which could be defined as the 'realm of routine' (Braudel), and also attitudes, which may be labelled mental habits. Another important aspect in the context of everyday life is ritual. On the one hand, as a marker of special occasions in the life of individuals and communities, ritual is often defined in opposition to the everyday. On the other hand, outsiders and visitors notice everyday rituals such as ways of eating or forms of greeting in the life of every society, which the locals fail to perceive as rituals at all. In this introduction we attempt, first of all, to present some general conceptual and methodological issues which have evolved around the concept of everyday life in European, especially German history. The German debate about 'Alltag' is illuminating, because the discussions have been conducted in an often fierce and 'fundamentalist' way and thus highlight a number of problems inherent in this notion. While the concept of 'everyday life' has provoked a widely recognized and often highly controversial debate in European and American history, it has hitherto been more or less neglected in the context of African history. Although, as will be shown, aspects of everyday life (especially for the colonial period) have recently received increased attention in historical writings on Africa, 'everyday life' as an analytical category has seldom found its way into current Africanist debates. Thus, in order to provide a more adequate framework for research into 'everyday life in colonial Africa', we will address some of the 'achievements' and 'weaknesses' of the everyday life concept that have been discussed in the context of