The Mundane Seeks Equal Time With the Weird and the Deviant
New York Times, Saturday, May 20, 2000
"Thank Tank" column in Arts & Ideas section, page A19
by Emily Eakin
Imagine a Martian anthropologist coming to Earth, reading the tabloids,
watching a couple of talk shows and taking in a few movies. He might well
return to his planet persuaded that humans beings are a freak race beset by
murder, rape, incest, kinky sex and the like.
This is the scenario proposed by Scott Schaffer, a sociologist at
California State University at Fullerton, as a rationale for his Journal of
Mundane Behavior, a new scholarly periodical devoted to the banal aspects
of everyday life. Mr. Schaffer and a coeditor started the journal in
February to counter not only the trend toward sensational news stories but
also what they call an unhealthy fixation on the deviant in the social
sciences. Rather than studying pornography stars or doomsday cults, they
say, why not examine office workers or a suburban Sunday school?
Sound boring? Perhaps. But if the abnormal can have its own library shelf
(The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology and The Journal of Abnormal
Psychology and Deviant Behavior, to name two), then why not the normal?
The idea for the journal came from an essay two years ago in Sociological
Theory by Wayne Brekhus, a sociologist at the University of Missouri at
Columbia. Though the humdrum characterizes the bulk of our social
experience, Mr. Brekhus wrote, sociologists disproportionately favor the
outlandish. The result, he argued, is group stereotyping: a tendency to
equate, say, gang life with poor urban African-Americans, punk rockers with
youth culture, or drag queens with homosexual culture generally. "Although
there are many deviance journals to explicitly analyze socially unusual
behavior," he lamented, "there is no Journal of Mundane Behavior to
explicitly analyze conformity."
After reading Mr. Brekhus's essay, Mr. Schaffer and his Fullerton colleague
Myron Orleans decided there should be such a journal.
Available only online at www.mundanebehavior.org, the journal's inaugural
issue (a second issue is planned next month) features articles on the
social implications of male facial hair, the function of casual
conversation ("plain talk") in Israeli culture and Japanese elevator
etiquette. In this last, Terry Caesar, a professor at Mukogawa Women's
University, ponders why Japanese are uncharacteristically friendly in
elevators. His conclusion: the close quarters and fleeting duration of the
ride encourage passengers to deviate from the rigid social scripts that
govern Japanese public life.
"Most of us don't live Jerry Springer lives," Mr. Schaffer observes in the
journal's introductory essay. "The editors here think that this vast amount
of energy, effort and in some cases sheer drudgery deserves some attention."
Yet even the journal's creators admit that the study of the everyday is not
that abnormal after all. "There is a long-term foundation for studying
everyday life," Mr. Orleans concedes. He cites the groundbreaking work of
Erving Goffmann, whose "Presentation of Self in Everyday Life" (1959)
encouraged researchers to use natural settings and observational research.
While Goffmann's own study of life in an insane asylum did not take the I
normal" as a subject, his naturalistic approach ended up destigmatizing
madness by portraying the institution from the inmates' point of view. More
recently, sociologists have applied some of Goffmann's techniques to
investigate the largely unconscious verbal and nonverbal conventions of
everyday social interactions. Even seemingly banal exchanges - with the
grocery store cashier, the postman or a passing stranger - yield valuable
insights into how human social life is organized, they say. "The attention
to everyday life in American sociology has surely increased over the past
decade," says Mitchell Duneier, an associate professor of sociology at the
University of Wisconsin at Madison and the University of California at
Santa Barbara, who has studied conversations between panhandlers and
passers-by in Greenwich Village. "What has emerged is a concern with
looking at how large social systems shape and are constituted by the social
interactions we engage in daily."
When Duneier and a colleague analyzed encounters between black panhandlers
and middle-class white female pedestrians, they learned something about
what causes mistrust in social situations. The women were not only upset by
the words the panhandlers used ("Hey pretty" or "I love you, baby") but
also by the silences between words, speech patterns that disregarded the
tacit conventions of small talk.
Despite this surge of interest in conversational minutiae, however, the
editors of the Journal of Mundane Behavior insist that the sociology of
everyday life remains a minor current in the field. "Students are drawn
more to study problem areas so they can sell their skills to the government
and education," he says. "We're supposed to fix social problems; we're
social repairmen."
One objective of the Journal of Mundane Behavior is to convince aspiring
sociologists that one can study everyday life and still be a social
repairman. "I've worked in prisons, and people tend to speak of the
compelling quality of drugs and crime to account for recidivism," Mr.
Orleans says. "But it's difficult for former prisoners to conduct
themselves in the mundane world. It's a mystery to them. You want to help
people recover the ordinary, and perhaps we can be of use to those people."
