Lecture 12: Everyday Life - Tactics & Strategy

Question 1

The importance of the everyday

Answer 1

Human geographers look at the structures that order society, culture and space
But they also look at the specificities, the messy reality of daily life.

Question 2

Michel de Certeau

Answer 2

A Jesuit &; a theologian he had his intellectual life transformed in 1968.
Reported on the Paris protests that summer.
Saw the power of multiple small acts to counter dominant narratives.

Question 3

Structure vs. Agency

Answer 3

Structuralist vs. Post-Structuralist (Knox & Pinch 2-3)

Underlying social structures order our lives Vs. Individual human capacity to effect change

Question 4

Strategy vs. Tactics

Answer 4

De Certeau sees strategy as the techniques of the powerful to effect structure.
Tactics are those actions which sneak around or even challenge these structures.

Question 5

Alimentary agents
Ben Highmore (2008)
What is happening when white men go to curry-houses to order the spiciest curries they can?

Answer 5

“aggressive food consumption” xenophobic?

The possibility for intercultural exchange?

Question 6

Rhys-Taylor (2013)

Disgust & Distinction

Answer 6

The squirm of disgust is linked to distinctions of class and modernity.

Question 7

Cultural sources

Answer 7

Looking at the way that popular culture interacts with society
Beyond institutions of power
e.g. Comic books, Jason Dittmer

Question 8

Material culture

Answer 8

What are the objects that you deal with in day to day life
How to apparently boring objects play a role in society at large?
Ian cook Follow the Thing (2004)
Sarah Whatmore (2006) Materialist Returns

Question 9

Ethnography

Answer 9

Being in the world!!
Studying society from a street level perspective
Focussing on a small scale perspective
Mitchell Duneier Sidewalk (1999)
Pink (2013) Doing Ethnography