ABSTRACT
In the 1930s, social psychologists Marie Jahoda, Paul Lazarsfeld and Hans Zeisel undertook a deep ethnographic analysis of everyday life in Marienthal, a community outside of Vienna, Austria, where villagers suffered individually and collectively from what was then called the Worldwide Economic Crisis (2003). Offering a biography of what they called a “weary community,” beleaguered by recession that lasted for years, these researchers captured the impact of global recession on the lives in the village which had been a stronghold for the Social Democratic Labor Movement, where one would find the Workers Library, newspapers, rich civic participation – all of which came to a halt when the factory closed. Using ethnography and time charts and conversations with and observations of everyday people, Jahoda and colleagues sought to understand the everyday discourses, embodiments and behaviors that derive from economic oppression. Refusing academic language that would distance them from their informants, Jahoda and colleagues wrote through the words and metaphors of the people to demonstrate the devastating material, psychological and existential consequences of severe and collective unemployment in Central Europe. A window on their theoretical and methodological innovation comes in their analysis of the embodiment and subjectivities of time, noticing that while employed people would walk briskly across the street, those carrying the burden of unemployment carried the weight of time, stretching passively over a day. One man, without job or hope of employment narrated, in the passive voice, the seeming lethargy: “In the meantime, midday comes around.”
