Everyday Life - Everyday Antiquities, The Everyday In Academic Discourse, The Discovery Of The Everyday, The History Of The Everyday
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When everyday life was first considered a proper subject for reflection it is obviously impossible to say, but an increasing interest in the subject can be traced over the last few centuries, at least in the West. Mystics have long regarded everyday things and everyday routines as a way to become closer to God. From the fifteenth century onward, painters in the Netherlands in particular paid more attention to everyday objects and to the everyday lives of ordinary people, creating new genres such as the still-life and the genre painting. Whether painters or their patrons were becoming more interested in daily life for its own sake, or whether their aim was to look beneath the everyday surface for moral or mystical meanings, remains controversial. For example, Louis Le Nain's painting of peasants having a meal (Le repas des paysans, 1642), now in the Louvre, has been variously interpreted as an example of realism and as an attempt to sanctify the everyday in the manner recommended by the religious writer Jean-Jacques Olier a few years later in his La journée chrétienne (1657).
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The antiquarians of the Renaissance were another group who were taking an interest in everyday life in the fifteenth century as part of their attempt to revive the culture of ancient Rome. Writing about "antiquities" exempted them from respecting the principle of the "dignity of history," a principle that ruled out references to ordinary people or things. Antiquarians w…
It was only in the first half of the twentieth century, however, that the everyday became academically respectable across a whole range of disciplines. Freud was well aware of the value of studying everyday events such as lapses of memory or slips of the tongue as evidence of an individual's psychological
The Peasant's Meal (1642) by Louis Le Nain. Oil on canvas. Works of art depi…
From the 1950s onward, the everyday or the "ordinary" was discovered in the sense of becoming a focus of interest as a
way of inserting human experience into an increasingly abstract social theory and social history. Alfred Schutz, in studies of "the world of everyday life," bridged the gap between the philosophy of Husserl and the practice of sociologists, like the Hu…
The history of everyday life, once the preserve of amateurs, was taken up by academic historians after World War II. In the 1960s, Fernand Braudel produced an ambitious comparative study of material life in the early modern world, viewed as the sphere of routine, as opposed to economic life, the sphere of change. In Germany a little later, there was a movement of social historians such as Hans Med…
Boas, Franz. Race, Language and Culture. New York: Macmillan, 1940. Braudel, Fernand. The Structures of Everyday Life. London: Collins, 1981. Translation of Les structures du quotidien. A pioneering study of material culture in early modern Europe, first published in 1967. Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Stephen Rendall. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Cali…
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