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THIS STORY HAS BEEN FORMATTED FOR EASY PRINTING
| Running gamut from mundane to routine
By Matthew Fordahl, Associated Press, 3/19/2000
LOS ANGELES - The silence of passengers in office elevators. The
political significance of a morning shave. The cultural impact of plain
talk among friends.
Do those sound like boring subjects? Not to the editors of the Journal
of Mundane Behavior, which tries to fill a void in social science research
with scholarly analyses of the ordinary, earthy, and just plain normal.
''We're trying to make it so that we look at everyday life as something
that's valuable and to understand how it gets constructed,'' said Scott
Schaffer, the journal's managing editor and a sociology instructor at
California State University at Fullerton.
Schaffer and a co-editor, Myron Orleans, started the online publication
in response to what they say is sociology's emphasis on deviancy - sort of
a Jerry Springer takeover of their field. Instead, Mundane Behavior's
theme might mirror ''Seinfeld.''
Like the popular sitcom, the journal seemingly about nothing strives to
find something deeper in all the little things in ordinary lives.
''Most of us don't live Jerry Springer lives,'' Schaffer said. ''We get
up at some ungodly hour, live in a 6-foot-by-6-foot cubicle for eight or
more hours, reverse the insane commute, and go home to our lives.
''This amounts to probably 60 percent or more of our lives,'' he said.
''And the editors here think that this vast amount of energy, effort, and,
in some cases, sheer drudgery, deserves some attention.''
In the first edition of the journal, an article on shaving analyzes how
facial hair defines masculinity. Another report shows how small talk
promulgates a culture. And a third speaks of how the Japanese see an
elevator ride as a ''respite from a norm-governed society.''
Sociologists say the study of mundane behavior is nothing new, and
mainstream journals devote many pages to such analysis.
''The idea is to sort of step back from everything we take for granted
and say, `What's really going on here, anyway?''' said William Roy of the
University of California at Los Angeles. ''A fish is the last creature to
ever notice water.''
But Schaffer and Orleans want to expand the journal's scope beyond
sociology to include history, political science, literature, art, and
anything else touched by normality. The idea sprang from a 1998 article
published in the journal Sociological Theory. Wayne Brekhus of the
University of Missouri complained that there were many journals devoted to
extreme behavior but nothing concentrating on the mundane.
Brekhus, who studied the lives of suburban gay men, said many of his
subjects had suggested he talk to gays in New York.
''They saw little in their lives that would be of interest to a social
scientist and attempted to direct me to where I might find the `type of
gays' that social scientists write about,'' he said.
Brekhus's half-joking call for a journal to study the mundane caught
the attention of Schaffer and Orleans. They sent out e-mail notices six
months ago requesting papers and launched the Web site,
www.mundanebehavior.org.
They received a handful of e-mails wondering if it was a hoax. They
also got three times as many submissions as they could use for the debut
issue. The next journal will be posted in June.
This story ran on page A22 of the Boston Globe on
3/19/2000. |