RICHARD Quinney is a sociologist, and he has authored many books on sociology and social theories. As a sociologist, he writes a book about ethnography, which is commonly known as a systematic study of cultures, using a methodology that allows the social scientist to take into account the total description of cultures.
An ethnography is considered to be more encompassing, limited as it is not by questions to ask and the manner of encoding the answers common in surveys, interviews and structured observation. Still, the new anthropologists and sociologists, as well, are feeling how rigid certain theories and methodologies are that we end up framing realities and individuals, describing communities following the structures we create to facilitate our knowledge of others.
What therefore appears to be a liberating approach to describing realities is really a theoretical underpinning that once more reminds us that we can only see so much, write so much about what we see or write so little.
Quinney, thus, explains the book he wrote, which bears the title, For the Time Being: An Ethnography of Everyday Life. He tells us the book is about the passing of time. The passing of time involves the writer, as well. The writer writes about the time, the things that are happening within time or anything that the writer feels is enclosed in that time. And yet, the writer can always step out of that time.
Everyday, we make sense of life, of those sets of actions that spell life. As we look at the sea, for example, we are looking at the body of water. When we write about that day, it is possible that we remember that day as the day we left for some place. The day becomes a place. Then we pass by the sea and remember that day. The sea disappears because maybe we do not write about the sea. The decision to write is the decision also to describe something to a point.
When you leave, you do not need the sea. You could write about something else, or not write anything at all. When you go back to days, you do not go back to that day that is unwritten or has not been written.
Anything that exists arises from the everyday. Quoting Henry Lefebvre, the French Marxist philosopher, Quinney defines for us the everyday life of ours as “the most universal and the most unique condition, the most social and the most individuated, the most obvious and the best hidden.”
Quinney goes on: “We work, we play, we sleep, we love, we walk the streets from place to place—such an ordinary existence. But if we let the ordinary escape our attention and our care, we miss life itself.”
For Quinney, much “depends upon the mundane.”
Or, there is no mundane at all. “With imagination, the mundane and the sublime are one.”
I was at the gate of the mundane as I wrote this article one evening. With the rains gone, my nephew came in from a long ride from his office. He was carrying food, and it was only for him. He asked me to eat with him, but I knew he bought the food with his taste and hunger in his mind. I was not hungry but I still wanted him to ask me to eat with him. He did ask me, and I politely said, I was not hungry. As he was eating, he told me the old lady a few doors from us had died already.
When we talk of shifts and changes, we never talk about life; we talk about death. The change has to be about death. We forget the in-between, the waking hours, the movement, the life from one life to another life.
In the morning, when we wake up, do we look around and check the skies? Perhaps, we do, but waking up, as we move from sleepiness to wakefulness, what songs are there, what memories accompany us from the bed to the porch?
Beside me now is a pouch of saltine crackers, and a cup of coffee. I am writing, but there is also the sound of the faucet. Leaks. My white shirt bellows outside, and I keep on looking for the sign of rain. The shirt has to dry. It will look good on me tomorrow. Tomorrow, what shall it be? I will wake up tomorrow, look at the walls around me, and the clouds, and remember as I walk from the room to the window that there are other sounds, there are other windows. Perhaps, I will think of a wondrous day. Perhaps, I will write of the wonder of that day with my own modifiers. They shall be my day. It is the thought of one man making sense not of the world but of the moments. When you read about my day, you, my reader, shall have, following Quinney, the second chance, another chance to understand my attempt at an ethnography of the everyday. Removed from it, you will see things, hear things, read your own wakefulness, your day, the shifting of little earths at your feet.
I believe this piece is going to be, in my column, a series: reflections and insights on books I bought from second-hand bookstores worth P25 and P30. I publish the acquisition not so much to diminish—for it will never—the importance of the book but, rather, to highlight my own literary harvest, to marvel at how treasures can be had in stores that purportedly sell stuff because they are cheap, and to celebrate works that transcend commerce and marketing. I started with Gore Vidal’s Julian, and this follows—a work that seems to be a flowing, rambling meditation but, in its real, empirical life, is hailed as a contribution to ethnographic methodology even as it, according to a review by Martha K. Huggins, “provides academic materials for anthropology, sociology, the environment, religion, peace and masculinity studies.”
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Image credits: Jimbo Albano