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For the good people of Vietnam and Thailand

Mundane people have found a vehicle where their activities and characteristics are explored and honored. JMB provides a channel for the expression of the qualities of the ordinary and the public and media response has been heartening. One of our goals since the establishment of JMB has been to, in effect, "democratize" the production of knowledge about everyday life and to encourage conversation between the scholarly and public communities. In an effort to do this, we will soon be creating a forum that will permit members of the public, who are the real experts on the subject, to directly participate. We invite all interested parties to contribute simply and easily to discourses regarding the mundane. So, we will be launching a moderated discussion list, MundaneTalk, in mid-November. You can check it out at: http://mundanetalk.listbot.com/. Please express your thoughts and comments regarding our journal, its contents and any other relevant matters by participating in the forum.

Low Politics

I am writing these introductory comments during the high politics of the presidential election campaign. As co-founder and co-editor of this journal I am using this opportunity to ask candidates for high office as well as high intellectuals to express genuine respect for the characteristics that ordinary folks regularly demonstrate in daily life.

Allow me to employ imagery of the campaign to work toward a loose agenda for the future direction of Journal of Mundane Behavior. I wish to suggest that we might begin to think of the journal as a way of rectifying the inauthenticity of representations of ordinary folks in political and academic discussions. By examining politics as a phenomenon of mundane life I want to promote the notion that it is in the realm of everyday life that true character, courage and charisma are more likely displayed than in the arena of high politics.

I call this the study of ‘low politics’ and urge politicians, scholars and writers to consider mundane life as more than an arena from which to mine data, anecdotes and rationales for particular positions that have little relevance to the way people are in the world. Ordinary people are tired of the condescension they experience at the hands of those on high, who either pander to them or assume their mindless vulnerability to every new technological threat to autonomy and well-being. Surely the life patterns of ordinary folks are undervalued by so many in politics and neglected or rendered ineffectual by the academy.

It is rare that the low politics of claim and negotiation, pressure and persuasion, resolution or tabling, fulfillment or abandonment of tasks is perceived as worthy of mention. But it is the mission of the editors of the Journal of Mundane Behavior to sponsor the exploration of how the trivial business of our lives is conducted, even though high issues receive the great proportion of attention. In a sense, ordinary folks are kind of like candidates — scrutinized, evaluated, demeaned and lauded, but only dimly aware of the micropolitics going on around them. Our journal will provide a socially useful service if we look at the mundane arena of low politics where there is unrelenting pressure to perform complex interactive tasks with skill and style that is only noted when absent.

Character Displays

The question of character is invariably an intriguing aspect of candidacy in low as well as in high politics. Issues of moral virtue and faithfulness more or less underlie the notion of character. Trustworthiness, adherence to principle, and strength of conviction further signify character. How does one respond to the unexpected moral challenges of ambiguous circumstance, hazy surround and undefined horizon? We feel we need to know whether a candidate will demonstrate character by maintaining composure under pressure and we are continually testing.

More than a decade ago my young son of 4 sagely tested my composure, i.e., my candidacy for parent of the millennium, by spilling a large bottle of cranberry juice on the kitchen floor. Some will say, "accident!" I say it was his way of testing me. I submit that this spill was a kind of character test of my resolve to remain unflappable in the face of his exploration of the parameters of unconditionality. Would I stick to the principle of nonpunitive childrearing I had vehemently espoused? I did! I did! Like hell, I did! That is, I muttered away my anger barely containing myself and dismally failing. Of course, the game is to not become flustered as a way of demonstrating character.

How does an individual make their claim for performance competence? We are screened off from the candidates of high politics and are rarely privy to their routines unless mediated and thus transformed. With perhaps the exceptions of the Nixon audiotapes and the eventuality of webcams in the Oval Office, we never know the unfiltered behavior of persons we elect to the very highest office. But observers do have direct access to the actions of ordinary people and can note the moral structure of their character in stance, comportment and demeanor. Character is demonstrated in matters of virtue by common kindliness and decency, nothing too obscure. Track records surely must stand for something in low politics. More importantly perhaps, might be the person’s demonstrated efforts against injustice and on behalf of justice. Moral decision-making is, of course, the trickiest dimension here.

Thankfully, most of us stand up quite well to moral scrutiny, mainly because we do not have all that much chance to make immoral or amoral decisions. Everyday life is replete with opportunities to make morally correct and socially approved choices. Character as it appears in mundane life is generally benign if not downright good. The costs of petty theft are high, as any retailer will tell you, but it is likely that the vast majority of folks can be trusted not only not to pilfer but also to conduct themselves with honor while performing the routines of life. Low politics is only possible because we trust one another in mundane locations, e.g., on streets, in offices, schools, public conveyances, etc., and notable disturbances are so rare as to be newsworthy. The vast majority of mundane experience demonstrates that trust is widely implemented because most ordinary folks are of good character.

Ordinary Courage

Courage is usually considered only in the domain of the extraordinary, the above and beyond realm. Courage to perform duty is surely neglected. Who is honored for fulfilling obligations of everyday living? Is not courage reflective of behavior that excels?

In the imagery of low politics, a concept of courage is called for that recognizes and credits the heroism of performance of everyday routines. If modern mundane life were subject to close scrutiny, its challenges would prove daunting even to the great heroes of mythology. We respond everyday to the arduous tasks of controlling impulses, enduring the jeopardy of public scenes, encountering the trivial unexpected social and physical maneuvers of others, and facing with aplomb the challenges of our intimates, but all so apparently inconsequential that they don’t measure up to the ordeals that great heroes resolved. A kind of ordinary courage is required to adapt to the new, the different, to engage effectively in the low politics of everyday life. Survival on the road, negotiating a parking lot, responding to the unforeseen challenges of shopping, deciding on a meal and ordering a dinner are all matters of little note, yet these acts require an inner strength and skills that are only apparent to outsiders.

Not so many months ago, I had the pleasure of experiencing traffic in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) Vietnam. Anyone who’s been there knows what’s coming next: There do not seem to be any rules guiding the process. All sorts of vehicles go in all directions simultaneously. A motorbike could as well be driven on the sidewalk as on the street. They might be driven inside a restaurant; on the ground floor one can never know when and where a vehicle might appear. Only the hardiest visitor will venture solo on a bike, let alone on a motorbike. Foreigners are mercifully forbidden to drive automobiles. Yet the locals just seem so cool and capable. One wonders how they would handle Los Angeles traffic or conditions in Rome. We can see great mettle in everyperson’s decisiveness, vigor, and adaptability in familiar environments.

Again this modest journal of the humble stuff of life examines that which hardly deserves scrutiny. Let us note the common bravery needed to muddle through the trials of ordinary existence. This capacity establishes the measure of a person. And so many of us are really quite capable of such heroism, and exhibit it so frequently that it fails to garner its proper name — courage.

Courage on the grand scale may be viewed as conducting oneself with the kind of grace under pressure that invites the admiration of all. On the other hand, how do we understand mundane courage? For many, it starts with the heroic act of getting out of bed (not to understate the courage it takes to face to the challenge of going to sleep the night before). The ordeals of washing the sleepfulness away, brushing teeth, evacuating, coercing the body into clothing, setting one’s face for the world and leaving one’s abode, encountering others: these are courageous acts. Forget about winning even the bronze for doing low politics effectively. Only the agoraphobics appreciate the true caliber of the courage demanded by mundanity, and, in this light, their "disorder" becomes entirely understandable as a fitting response to the terrors posed by ordinary life.

The course of high politics is frequently dependent on the unguarded moment, the open mike, and the "boxers or briefs?" story where the true colors of the candidate are thought to emerge. We want to know what the candidate is really like. We must know the human person beneath the façade of the candidate. We presume that the inside dope reveals true feelings and true nature. Yet we hold candidates for high office to a standard that breeds the suspicion that frailty or confidences will be publicized. There is a courage of low politics that allows us to cede to others the spaces needed to alternate personas. Perhaps we could adopt the same principle in the realm of high politics and spare ourselves the illusions of truly knowing these candidates.

We have the courage to be kindly to our peers in the low political realm and most frequently cooperate to maintain situational ease. We ordinarily have the courage to repair our damaged relationships and each other by explaining, apologizing, attributing, chatting, and overlooking. Low politics is thus so much more of a decent game than is high politics.

Charismatic Folks

A question regarding charisma of candidates for high office is inevitable. Somehow we magnify charisma to the level of civilizational achievement and give examples of dead people of history, with few alive to fit the concept, and certainly not any candidates standing for high office. This is an entirely restrictive notion of charisma. Is not charisma a gift attributed to an individual by those in need of inspiration? Charisma is associated with the quality of interaction between people and those who elevate, enlighten and excite them by vision and example. The notion of charisma could well be broadened to recognize the gifts and contributions of ordinary folks in their everyday lives as they endure cruelty and hardships, persist through obstacles, and grasp for the higher aspirations of their callings. All of the following are in some sense charismatic: the parent who addresses their child’s needs; the child who encounters the terrors of schooling with calm demeanor; lovers and spouses who daily demonstrate their adoration in small ways; the gardeners who judiciously weed; house cleaners, powerfully massaging surfaces clean; the teachers, coaches, ministers, lawyers, medical personnel who conduct their professional lives with panache; and business persons who broker deals that impact the fortunes and welfare of unseen and perhaps unadmiring audiences. Charisma is itself value neutral but omnipresent in the world of low politics, even if we perennially deny it among our active candidates and leaders.

We want to know that the candidates for high office will fight for us, represent us before powerful interests, oppose and rectify injustice and do right by us. In the domain of low politics we must react to the routine injustices we suffer, the petty abuse and minor mistreatments as well as the greater devastations visited upon us by the invisible structures of power. How do ordinary folks handle being mishandled when the real scenes of life unfold? Do we in our world of low politics exhibit the character, courage and charisma we futilely demand of our candidates for high office?

Living as we do, subject to ever more potent forces beyond our personal horizon, oppression is increasingly obscured in the administrative fog of complexity, scale and misrepresentation. A challenge of mundane living is to marshal one’s resources of character, courage and charisma to struggle against conditions that make no sense. The everyday charismatic fights despair, burnout, and apathy and infuses others with a sense of capability. Charismatic people are all around us, diminished by the term "role models" but best understood as those who bestow their gifts on others reciprocating for the gifts they have received. They do not need trophies or certificates, for the meaningful rewards are intrinsic to the giving and doing that constitute their charisma. Mundane living elicits heroics and virtues that largely remain unmarked because of their banality, not because of the lack of merit. The responsibility of the editors of this mundane journal is, without gushing or losing our minds, to accommodate the magnificent variety of ordinary folks who deserve identification and treatment as charismatic.

We are all engaged in service to others in our daily labors. More often than we acknowledge, we conduct ourselves with a poise that would be taken for heroism if the activity were scripted in a movie. Very many of us are everyday charismatics, extraordinarily decent human beings who are for each other in the low politics of everyday life.

We are all engaged in low politics in terms of assessing and expressing our character, courage and charisma. And most of us measure up most of the time. We generally exhibit character, which makes orderly social life possible. We usually do not damage or diminish each other, but rather allow each other reasonable respect. We are heroic in many senses of the term even if not usually worthy of a Homeric ode. We do things in a taken-for-granted way that time-travelers and Martians would think are awesome. How do we negotiate the terrain of mundane life with so few incidents and accidents? We find in each other the inspiration, guidance, stimulation, and motivation that enable us to successfully engage in the low politics of daily life. If only high politics were as laudable!

This Issue

The current issue of JMB is fatter than its predecessors. We offer more articles of a scholarly nature where some terminology is used that might not be familiar to the layperson. Nevertheless, we are confident that the essential messages are accessible to the informed reader and the professional reader will find the substance expected of an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal.

This issue looks at a wide range of mundane phenomena using quite varied perspectives. You will read critical, socio-historical, cross-cultural, phenomenological, phenomenological, socio-psychological, cultural and aesthetic approaches to the study of money, dust, toilets, shopping, shame, religion and interiors. This issue provides an array of innovative and provocative essays that illustrate how the study of the mundane can valorize its subject.

An excerpt from Joseph A. Amato’s book, Dust: A History of the Small and Invisible tells us about "dust’s role as a condition of life." Amato‘s work links the microcosm of the smallest particles of everyday life to the structural transformations of western civilization. He analyzes how conceptions of the miniscule impacted health and well-being and how the war on dust epitomized and drove industrialization.

William Cummings’ paper strikes close to the recent experience of this returned traveler. He takes the conventional anthropological approach to task for neglecting an important subject area of the discipline, the performance of bodily function. Cummins calls attention to the toilet as a site where important cross-cultural distinctions can be examined in relation to the treatment of bodily functions. (I was reminded of the power and "cultural sensitivity" of American industry when I came across a "Made in America" tag on a squat toilet in a small Vietnamese village.)

Michael Palamarek examines how private and governmental financial manipulations reflect the resurgence of irrationality that is the presumably rational world of money management. He contends that through the implementation of smart cards and government sanctioned gambling, mundanity would be impoverished by the de-objectification of money, by marketers’ appropriation of information regarding consumer behavior, and by the mythologies of financial salvation. Put another way, there is more to "the disappearance of money" than meets the eye.

Cesar Dominguez’s piece, "More Than Two Days," reflects the kind of personal analysis Journal of Mundane Behavior lives for. In it, Dominguez examines the different versions of and transitions through "normalcy" he underwent in his lives as a single/multi-unit retail manager, a drug addict convicted of residential burglary, an inmate in a California penitentiary, and as a "renormalized" member of society. Dominguez pays particular attention to that which the editors of JMB could never do — the absolutely crucial impact that forgetting what "normal" life is can have on one’s future.

Thomas Scheff and Suzanne Retzinger broadly conceptualize the notion of shame as perceiving that others see oneself negatively and inducing the feeling that the relational bond is at risk. They argue that shame is a central emotion responsible for the regulation of self and social relationships. The essay solicits the involvement of readers in deciphering the invisible meanings of simple discourse and in so doing applies introspective and interpretive methods to an understanding of the social impact of emotion.

A phenomenological approach is employed by Chris Nagel and Jim Williams in their demonstration of how shopping becomes meaningful and how we become shoppers. They take us through a number of different types of shopping environments to uncover the ways that that experience and context interact to simultaneously produce the situations and identities that are commonly viewed as natural and obvious. More significantly, Nagel and Williams show us how shopping is a defining feature of contemporary everydayness.

Russell McCutcheon’s essay examines the practice and practitioners of religion as mundane phenomena. He delineates the boundaries of a form of scholarship that views religion as cultural discourses that structure consciousness. The author discusses how classificatory schemes and devices developed within religion are directed toward a particular realm of meaning that serve to reflect back upon and shape the meanings of the social world.

A photo essay by Shauna Frischkorn breaks new ground for the journal by integrating different media to expose the meanings underlying interiors of human built environments. Specifically focusing on the surfaces of objects, the author/photographer seeks to turn the viewers’ attention toward personal recollections rather than to the actual places depicted. In an effort to cast new light on the familiar and "to capture the duration of the commonplace", the photos call attention to those aspects of the mundane that usually escape notice.

Finally, continuing our series of "mundane manifestos," Nadine Wasserman questions the boundary western society maintains between "art" and "everyday life," and argues that the approach taken by mid-twentieth-century artists — namely, inverting the hierarchy between art and quotidianness — is the approach we need to utilize in understanding our everyday lives.

By way of closing, I relate a more personal experience. After spending about four months organizing a comparative research project on ordinary family life in Thailand and Vietnam, I have a renewed appreciation of the beneficence of mundanity. I was deeply affected by the friendliness and hospitality shown to me by scholars and ordinary folks in these countries. Certainly, if receptivity to a stranger is a barometer of cultural maturity, what I experienced in these countries are powerful testaments to that attainment. I learned that character, courage and charisma are universal achievements of ordinary folks, all in culturally distinct modes. I found adaptive resources within myself that I never suspected were present. I further learned that: 1) I understood precious little of the monetary systems in the two countries; 2) my hostility toward dust and dirt were excessively robust for my own good; 3) I may never be able to perform using a squat toilet as it was intended; 4) shopping can soften loneliness; 5) feelings of shame could well have destroyed my mission if I allowed; 6) religion remained more impenetrable than family; and 7) I ain’t no photographer of the mundane. I owe the personal accomplishment of this venture to my wife, my children, the managing editor of JMB and my friends.

 

About the Author: Myron Orleans is a professor of Sociology at California State University, Fullerton, and Founding Co-Editor of Journal of Mundane Behavior. When not skipping 'round the world to further his expertise in the banal, Myron tries to find the "ordinary courage" to compete with TV's "Friends" for the affection of his 14-year-old daughter.