Anthropology and the Everyday, from Comfort to Terror

Author: Nancy Ries (Colgate University)
Year: 2002 (New Literary History 33(4))
Source type: article
Raw file: raw/articles/ries-2002-anthropology-everyday-comfort-terror.md

Summary

Ries draws the concerns of everyday-life theory into anthropology, and foregrounds non-Western ethnographic material to breach the "West-centeredness" of everyday theory. She moves from the everyday as "prosaic tools of comfort" (Bachelard, Giard, "worldkeeping" — the mundane labor that grounds society and individual life) to the everyday under terror-war ("prosaic tools of power ... world desecration"), showing how terror deliberately destroys "the rhythms and small securities of everyday practice" by turning quotidian objects (mortars, grills, hoods) into instruments of atrocity. She positions the everyday as "a refuge from history, even from time itself," encroached upon by power, terror, and death.

Key Claims

• The everyday vs. West-centered theory: major theorists of the everyday (Lefebvre, de Certeau) are absorbed with the West; Ries draws on Ndembu (Turner), Huichol (Myerhoff), and Trobriand (Weiner) ethnography to show an everyday "worth theorizing" beyond wage labor, consumerism, and media — one that is "symbolically charged," habitual yet creative, "juicy," and concerned with nurturance, death, and loss.
• Worldkeeping / prosaic tools of comfort: "The recursive rhythms and disruptive punctuations of everyday labor and sociality are the grounding points of social structure, social reproduction, the structuration of consciousness, power and domination." Cooking, gardening, feeding, and care "battl[e] entropy, foster growth"; following Bachelard, everyday labor "registers ... an object officially as a member of the human household."
• Ritual enshrines the everyday: ritual "exaggerates the quotidian" — the ritual meal "exaggerates the quotidian meal"; "almost everywhere, ritual ... in fact enshrines nothing as much as the local practices of the everyday."
• World desecration / terror and the everyday: "The fundamental strategy of terror-war wherever it occurs is to undermine the rhythms and small securities of everyday practice"; "the normal and the life sustaining become deadly weapons" (Nordstrom). Torture "turns ontology itself against their victims" (Scarry) — "there is no wall, no window, no door, no bathtub, no refrigerator, no chair, no bed." The everyday is thus "the place where the most powerfully important things in life occur": "Surely the everyday is a refuge from history ... And alongside power, history and time are those things that most violate the everyday."

Connections

Concepts: Everyday Life · Everyday Architecture · Dwelling
Authors: Nancy Ries · (Michel de Certeau — not yet paged)
Debates: (theory of the everyday)
Related source notes: The Politics and Potential of Everyday Life (Colebrook) · Everyday Life in the Modern World (Lefebvre)

Direct Quotes

"The normal and the life sustaining become deadly weapons." (Nordstrom, as quoted)

"Surely the everyday is a refuge from history, even from time itself. And alongside power, history and time are those things that most violate the everyday."

"[T]he room ... is converted into a weapon ... there is no wall, no window, no door, no bathtub, no refrigerator, no chair, no bed." (Scarry, as quoted)

Open Questions

• Does the anthropological everyday (comfort→terror) require a different theory of dwelling/place than the Western philosophers — and how does terror's desecration of the quotidian reframe the everyday's "resistance" and its architectural ground?