ABSTRACT
When I first read the quotation from the late Pierre Bourdieu cited earlier in this book – concerning the effort it takes to make ordinariness interesting – I was struck by the importance of his misleadingly subtle point. It is important for three reasons, I think: first, it takes seriously the participants’ unreflective understanding of their own social worlds – after all, our object of study throughout the human sciences is people simply doing what they happen to be doing, not people interpreting or communicating the meaning and significance of what they are doing. Second, Bourdieu helps scholars to focus their attention on the techniques whereby some people (scholars included) sometimes actively represent a subset of their behaviors (i.e., what they happen to be doing) as important, meaningful, and worthy of reproduction and transmission (i.e., what they must or ought to be doing). Finally, both of these points reinforce the notion that scholars are not in the business merely of paraphrasing a group’s own articulate or reflective understanding of themselves; instead, we bring our own curiosities, value systems and classifications, and sets of anticipations (i.e., theories) to bear on our human data, leaving us responsible for making this or that mundane cultural act significant and interesting in a whole new way.
