The everyday life

The Everyday Life alludes to a dual temporality. On the one hand, it is the temporality of the material and physical framework of a day. It corresponds to the ordinary present moment whereby the fleeting nature of the instant-like time vanishes: as such it is perceived as a prosaic time, devoid of interest, of importance or of a sense of vertigo. On the other hand, it alludes to the endless repetition of days, of so-called “daily” tasks, of schedules rooted in the socio-historical forms of a physiological and material reality. Around this phrase a network of images and values take flight. It is, on one side, the space of the secular profane, and on the other of the world of spiritual orders, of normative “sacred” ecstasies, of frenzied journeys and extraordinary adventures.

It is thus a challenge to describe the Everyday Life. How can the continuity and repetition, but at the same time the mundane and the exceptional be accounted for? If literature seems better equipped to nail it down, the everyday life has never ceased to be an object of inquiry for social sciences. From the sociology of Henri Lefebvre to the anthropology of Michel de Certeau, to the semiology of Roland Barthes, this reflexive analysis unfolded in the context of the “Thirty Glorious Years” (ie. The post-war economic boom in France). In the continuity of these works, but relying on thematic and theoretical renewals on the subject, this issue offers a space for the dialogue between history, sociology and ethnology. It endeavours to grasp the historical and current forms of the everyday life in such varied spaces as the hospital, the city, homes, and through diverse registers as constraint, disaster and freedom.