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Everyday life
The study of everyday life requires a micro perspective. In the nineteenth century, social and historical researchers developed an interest in ‘ordinary’ people moving away from a macro perspective on society (Löfgren 2002). As Löfgren rightly remarks, the study of everyday life is more a research ideology than a perspective, analytical tool or empirical field. Theorists of everyday life argue that studying the banal and the ordinary can produce great insights into larger social and cultural issues, and they have therefore focused on the interactions between the micro and the macro (see Sandywell 2004 for an overview of perspectives). Here, I use the framework Michel de Certeau developed in his The practice of everyday life (1984).
De Certeau aims to produce methods and conceptual tools that allow the articulation of everyday practices. Central to his framework are strategic and tactical entities. Strategics are places of power and authority, such as an institution. They operate through imposing order in certain spaces. In his reading of De Certeau, Fiske discusses a landlord to explain the strategic:
‘The landlord provides the building within which we dwell, the department store our means of furnishing it, and the culture industry the texts we ‘consume’ as we relax within it. But in dwelling in the landlord's place, we make it into our space; the practices of dwelling are ours, not his.’ (Fiske 1989, 33)
The landlord is a subject of will and power that, in a way, ‘sets the scene’ for the individual users, who then has to make do with this space (De Certeau 1984, xix). These uses/users are tactics. They have no power, no space, but instead ‘insinuate’ themselves into strategic spaces. A study of the everyday must thus start with an investigation of space. My first sub-question is: What are the spaces in which 8th form everyday youth culture takes form? To De Certeau, many everyday practices (he gives the examples of reading, shopping, cooking) are tactical. Investigating daily practices has long been the domain of ethnography. It involves submergence into a particular culture, taking in traditions, habits, routines and rituals.[4] My second sub-question is: What are the routines and rituals of 8th form?