Living Everyday and Studying Everyday

Abstract

When we look around us, we find visual images, vibrant and vivid. The experiences we have form the basis of our subjective understanding of these visual images and ways of studying our every day. But when we study these vivacious but mundane, routine everydays that we live it becomes an object and subject of study. In anthropology engaging in experimental forms of writing there ushered in new ways to represent sensory embodied and visual aspects of culture, knowledge and experience. This encouraged the use of other modes and media of representation, including ethnographic film and photography, performance anthropology, and exhibition. Significantly it was during the 1980s and especially the 1990s that, as academics gradually converted their office practices to the use of computers; digital media became an increasingly normal part of everyday anthropological practices of writing and communicating. Within this context, the development of a theory and practice of hypermedia anthropology began to emerge in the 1990s. Since the publication of the first edition of the Handbook, in 2000, methods that go by the generic name of everyday experience methods have matured from the status of promising innovations to standard tools in social-personality psychology. By everyday experience methods, we prefer not to a specific instrument or procedure but rather to a paradigm for studying socialpsychological phenomena as they occur in the ebb and flow of everyday life – to “capture life as it is lived” (Bolger, Davis & Rafaeli 2003: 580). Everyday experience methods offer more than just another methodological alternative; their focus on ordinary, spontaneous activity allows researchers to evaluate theoretical models and hypotheses from a perspective that differs fundamentally from traditional methods. The payoff is a detailed, accurate, and multifaceted portrait of social behaviour embedded in its natural context. This paper shall discuss possible ways on how this can be done.