Journal of Mundane Behavior - Quotes

Quotes

• What sorts of subjects will make the cut? "If it's inconsequential in nature, it will fit," says Myron Orleans, a professor of sociology at Cal State at Fullerton and one of the journal's co-editors. He'll also settle for the "ordinary," the "habitual," and the "quotidian" -- anything, he says, that "apparently has no significance beyond itself." His premise, naturally, is that the opposite is true: that the overlooked trivia of, say, everyday conversation, workplace behavior, or family life can illuminate how power and conformity shape social relationships. — The Chronicle of Higher Education, 29 October 1999
• All around us are ordinary phenomena that can astound us if only we attend to them with the seriousness they do not typically receive: letters and letter-writing, street scenes, routine family life, artistic and cinematic depictions of how we live our lives, everyday work and commercial situations, sociable occasions, nonprofessional sports activities, transportation contexts, venues of legal and political action, viewing televised entertainment, consuming information from various media, and so on. The study of the extreme, outlandish, and "profane" aspects of late 20th century existence has been well-developed and has given rise to many useful theoretical and research tools. Here, we want to turn these analytic tools to the level of everyday life, to examine in microscopic and graphic detail the more mundane, habitual, and quotidian aspects of our existence - including how we define what is "mundane". These unnoticed, unmarked aspects of our lives are often the most political and yet depoliticized, and it is one of the goals of this journal to expose these processes. — taken from JMB's mission statement