Everyday Life, Geography and

As a basic definition, the term everyday life refers to those ordinary, taken-for-granted, habitual thoughts, activities, and settings that are close and familiar to all of us but that are rarely measured by governments or scholars or endowed any particular significance. Henri Lefebvre used the metaphor that everyday life is like fertilizer: It functions as a source of life-giving power, but it largely goes unnoticed as it is tramped underfoot. According to Lefebvre (1991), “a landscape without flowers or magnificent woods may be depressing for the passer-by but flowers and trees should not make us forget the earth beneath, which has a secret life and a richness of its own” (p. 87). Lefebvre also famously coined the phrase “the familiar is not necessarily known” to capture the understanding that while an activity such as shopping or walking may be ubiquitous, it lacks meaning if it is not recognized—by naming, counting, researching, and assigning value to it.

Not only does the essence and substance of the life we live each day largely go by without us consciously thinking about it, but when we do turn to scrutinize ordinary, individual moments, taking these fragments out of their background context, they tend to assume an unrealistically distinct, abstract, and spectacular status. This highlights a tension that has recently emerged in academic scholarship, between descriptions of everyday life as myriad phenomena to be recorded and interpreted from diaries, biographies, ethnographies, and the like; theories of the everyday relating to personal, emotional, and normative compulsions; and the politics of everyday choices and behavior with respect to production, consumption, and social reproduction. For instance, the decision to buy or boycott a particular brand of good or to shop with a reusable shopping bag assumes a symbolic political function in affluent societies today.

Accepting that everyday life is a contested concept, John Eyles implores us never to treat it as unproblematic or unimportant. This plea to name and critically consider the sum of forces and events that create and sustain human existence owes much to efforts by feminist economists to demonstrate that everyday life has to be reproduced—socially and materially. Feminist scholars have long recognized the moral and political significance that what is most frequently omitted from, or trivialized within, the formal economy are the tasks of unpaid, home-based work, largely performed by women, representing all that it takes to keep individual workers, families, and human societies fed, clothed, housed, educated, and cared for. For example, in a book called The Secret Life of Cities (alluding to Lefebvre's metaphor above), Jarvis and colleagues conjoin the concept of everyday life with that of social reproduction to examine them both as a category of practices and as unconscious knowledge supporting the reproduction of human society—and the biographic techniques of analysis required to bring this issue to public attention.

Recent years have witnessed the idea of everyday life entering the popular imagination. For instance, the phrase “part of everyday life” is used to advertise public transport in the English city of Newcastle. Across the social sciences, the term has been variously adopted to convey a shift [Page 1043]in scale (to the body, household, street, and locale), greater emphasis on qualitative methods, and a reconnection of humanistic geography with the temporal rhythms of age, history, calendar, and clock. As with the coinage of any umbrella concept (e.g., sustainability or globalization), there is potential for precision of meaning to be lost to the illusion of an all-encompassing understanding of the everyday as everything, all the time, everywhere. The definitions provided here identify parameters key to the use of this term.

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