Describe and analyse an aspect of your life which has been affected by COVID-19, using what you have learned in this unit.

Week 3: Studying the Mundane

‘What’s going on when nothing much is happening? If, when asked ‘what have you been up to?’ or ‘what’s been happening’ you reply ‘nothing much’ then what is this ‘nothing much’ referring to? (Ben Highmore 2011: 3)

LECTURE OUTLINE

1. Theories of everyday life - Studying everyday life

2. Harold Garfinkel - Ethnomethodology

3. Introduction to Erving Goffman

Bonus lecture: Georg Simmel - everyday life

WARNING: Video clips contain adult and coarse language

What is ‘theory’?

. A ‘framework’ for understanding phenomena.

. Can be contemplative and speculative of ideas, or based on Empirical evidence (and often it can be based on both).

. In the study of everyday life – theory is often built from the GROUND-UP (as oppose to ‘top-down’).

Studying everyday life analytically and in a systematic way

1. Social event involves participants who embody various roles. Direct, face-to- face, spatial and temporal co-presence; distant and mediated (mobile phone, internet, social media). Number of participants is a key factor.

2. Social event occurs in some immediate situation. Some are directly involved and others bystanders/anonymous.

3. Social event occurs in some wider social context. They include family work, consumption, education, religion, leisure, sport, etc. All require different behaviour and mode of interaction.

4. Social event occurs in certain locales which have similar contents because people do similar things. At university, to study and at a place of worship to pray.

5. Social events assume more complex configurations. Different individuals in different roles perform together in a coordinated manner.

Piotr Sztompka (2008) ‘The Focus on Everyday Life: a New Turn in Sociology’

Georg Simmel and everyday life

German Sociologist (1858-1918)

‘there is no such thing as society “as such”…for there is no such thing as interaction “as such” – there are only specific kinds of interaction’.

Viewed society as constituted by interactional ‘forces’ between individuals.

Concerned with various forms of human behaviour and interactions.

Forms arise as people interact with one another for the sake of certain purposes or to satisfy needs. They are the processes by which individual combine into groups, institutions, nations or societies.

Animated by the question of what the social conditions are that make it easier for persons to discover and express their individuality.

1. The concept of the stranger 2. Metropolis and mental life 3. Philosophy of money

 Ethnomethodology a research method associated in particular with Harold Garfinkel Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967).

 Ethno =people; method =means; ology= study of ( the study of how people make sense and meaning out of the chaos of social life.

 Crucial point for ethnomethodologists is that they think that while social life appears very orderly, in fact it is potentially chaotic.

 Social rules are not fixed and therefore have to created and recreated constantly in everyday social interaction.

 (People make and reinforce the rules by responding and acting in certain ways in everyday situations).

A Bow is a Bow – authentic Bow and an inauthentic bow

•Ethnomethodology associated with ‘micro’ studies of human society (everyday situations).

• Ethnomethodological studies analyse everyday activities as member’s methods for making those same activities ‘visible-rational-reportable’.

• Ethnomethodology interested in ‘reflexivity’ and ‘agency’ i.e.: it is an actor centred approach to understanding social life.

• Focus of the research: The indexical properties of everyday interaction ( i.e.: what is implicit of unstated in conversations).

• Research technique: breaching experiments (deliberately breaking the rules of social interaction) used by researchers to decode the rules.

Curb your enthusiasm - dog and bag

The victim waved his hand cheerily.

(S) How are you? (E) How am I in regard to what? My health, my finances, my school work, my peace of mind, my. . . ?

(S) ( Red in the face and out of control) Look I was just trying to be polite. Frankly, I don’t give a damn how you are.

Breaching Experiment example Studies in Ethnomethodology ( 1967) – Case 6

Curb your enthusiasm – Trick or Treat

Symbolic Interactionism

. People act towards things, but they do so on the basis of the meanings those things have for them.

. These meanings stem from our interactions with other people.

. People are also able to modify them through interpretative process.

. People rely on symbols – we can give meaning to stimuli.

. People reflect on themselves and what they do and, therefore, shape their actions and interactions.

Curb Your Enthusiasm – Pig Parker

Who was Erving Goffman?

• Canadian born sociologist, Erving Goffman (1922-1982) is renowned for his

capacity to unmask how social actors ‘present the self’ to others in social life.

‘Dramaturgical’ theory – social life as drama or theatre play.

• His most famous books include The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

(1959), Asylums (1961) Stigma (1963), Frame Analysis (1974), Gender

Advertisements ( 1975) and Forms of Talk (1981).

Goffman’s sociological tools

• Goffman is famous for offering a dramaturgical model of social life.

• In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, he claims to be studying how ‘the individual in ordinary. . . Situations presents him or herself and his activity to others’ (Goffman, 1959:p.xi).

• In what sense is this process like a drama? For Goffman, the kinds of interactions that individuals enter into involve the ‘performance’ of ‘roles’ and the social situations that shape those performances are termed the ‘stages’ upon which social life is enacted.

• Goffman’s example of ‘front stage’ and ‘back stage’ behaviour: the performances of a waiter working at a restaurant.

• Goffman’s point is that in our everyday interactions we switch from role to role as we move from stage to stage and most people do so with all the proficiency of a trained actor.

Curb your enthusiasm – casual Friday & fashion tip

Social interaction as ritualised behaviour

• In the Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Emile Durkheim (1915) had proposed that ritual is important in separating something ‘sacred’ from the ‘profane’.

• Goffman proposed that ritual cannot be thought of as just a religious thing – rather all forms of interaction are ‘interactive rituals’ (Goffman 1972).

• For e.g.: Greeting each other and sexual intercourse are ritualised forms of behaviour for Goffman because they involve the repetition of behaviour and involve very explicit rules about what is acceptable and unacceptable.

The Interaction Order

• Goffman focuses on the ‘Interaction Order’ – i.e., upon the ‘interactional aspects of social life.

• By interaction he quite literally means how people do things together and respond to each other.

• In a technical sense, ‘social interaction can be defined narrowly as that which uniquely transpires in social situations . . . In which two or more individuals are physically in one another’s response presence’ (Goffman, 1983:2).

Curb your Enthusiasm – Bluetooth guy ; LOL; Sorry Window

Why base the study of social life on the analysis of the ‘interaction order’ ?

• Goffman( 1983:2) reminds us that it ‘is a fact of our human condition that, for most of us, our daily life is spent in the immediate presence of others’ Our activities, even the most mundane ones, tend to be ‘socially situated’.

• The best way of describing it is by a ‘micro analysis’ (meaning a focus on small scale social worlds) of how people observe those moments of being in each other’s presence.

• The researcher should ask: how do participants respond to each other’s gestures, attempts at eye contact, bodily comportment, and communication through speech?

• The real benefit of Goffman’s ‘microanalyses’ of social life is that it forces us to think about the concrete ways in which things get done.

• Focuses our attention on the experiences of everyday life, and our emotions and the way these experiences and responses shape our identities in active ways.

• What Goffman directs us to is the way we interact with each other and what we are doing during our time in joint social spaces.

• How do we use our bodies, gesture and facial expressions to achieve the desired performance?

• In forcing us to focus on such concrete details, Goffman is saying that the drama and comedy of social life is rich and varied. Our analysis of it need to be too.