I work at home, which, contrary to popular belief, does not mean I watch television all day. (I prefer computer games.) However, when, on occasion, I do turn the TV on, I’m immediately confronted with bizarre behavior, outlandish personalities, and just plain weirdness, on every program from talk shows to news.
As a whole, our society seems consumed with interest in the unusual and the exotic, while ignoring the day-to-day doings of ordinary people, and that’s as true of science as it is of television. There are dozens of scientific journals devoted to various peculiar behaviors, but there has never been one devoted to the study of ordinary people’s ordinary lives–until now.
The first issue of The Journal of Mundane Behavior appeared in February, and a second issue is scheduled for June.
The editors are Scott Schaffer and Myron Orleans, sociologists at California State University in Fullerton. The journal was inspired by an article by Wayne Brekhus of the University of Missouri, published in 1998 in the journal Sociological Theory. Brekhus complained that while there were many journals devoted to extreme behavior, none concentrated on the mundane.
Brekhus was studying the lives of suburban gay men, and was startled when many of his subjects, believing their own lives were dull and uninteresting, kept trying to steer him to New York City, where he would find the type of gay men “that social scientists write about.”
The first 112-page issue of The Journal of Mundane Behavior is available free at www.mundanebehavior.org. Making it freely available to everyone seemed appropriate, Schaffer and Orleans say: shouldn’t a journal that focuses on ordinary people’s ordinary activities be available for ordinary people to read?
My personal favorite among the articles in the first issue is “‘I’m sick of shaving every morning’: or, The Cultural Implications of ‘Male’ Facial Presentation,” by Michael John Pinfold. (It’s my favorite because I’m currently growing a beard in order to play Tevye in Regina Lyric Light Opera’s production of Fiddler on the Roof in May.) This paper “analyzes the cultural significance of male facial grooming, the arts of shaving, clipping and trimming, and the meanings of full beard growth.”
Even more mundane than shaving is riding the elevator- the focus of Terry Caesar’s article “In and Out of Elevators in Japan.” Apparently, whereas in Japan there is a fairly rigid code of public behavior, that code relaxes inside elevators, where an “improvisational, private character of personal interaction” is possible. The article was inspired by the author’s experience of a strange Japanese woman straightening his collar for him while they were in a crowded elevator, something ordinarily unthinkable in public.
One theme that appears more than once is the idea that mundane behavior is actually more important in the creation and maintenance of culture and society than unusual or extreme behavior: that, in fact, each of us, as we go about our day-to-day lives and have our ordinary, everyday conversations, are artists and actors, helping to construct the common reality in which we all exist.
If that sounds pretty heavy, well, Schaffer and Orleans are adamant that the journal is not intended as a joke. It’s actually very serious. (Maybe too serious: unfortunately, some of the papers are written in that stultifying style known as “academese,” using phrases like “embodied practices and interactional competences,” “semiotic interpretation,” and “reversing conventional markedness patterns.”)
Schaffer and Orleans received three times more submissions than they could use in the first issue, which bodes well for future issues. The current rather narrow focus on sociology may change in the future; the editors hope to expand the journal’s area of interest to include history, political science, literature, art, and anything else “touched by normalcy.”
“Most of us don’t live Jerry Springer lives,” Schaffer says. (For which we can all be thankful.) “We get up at some ungodly hour, live in a six-by-six-foot cubicle for eight or more hours, reverse the insane commute and go home to our lives. This amounts to probably 60 percent or more of our lives. And the editors here think that this vast amount of energy, effort, and, in some cases, sheer drudgery deserves some attention.”
Of course, focusing on the mundane risks being boring. The challenge of the Journal of Mundane Behavior is to find something interesting and relevant in the day-to-day routine of ordinary life, something that lifts it above the mundane.
Which, come to think of it, is pretty much the same challenge that faces all of us.
1 comments
I wished to know if the journal website is down permanently? or will it be back.
Thanks,
Rebecca Culbertson
rculbertson@ucsd.edu