ABSTRACT
What does globalization mean in terms of the quotidian? Of course, built into this question is a certain notion of the quotidian or the customary derived from Hegel’s well-known discussion of spirit which starts from what he calls ‘Sittlichkeit’ (customary or conventional). Since social life is ordered by customs we can approach the lives of those living in it in terms of the patterns of those customs or conventions themselves – the conventional practices, as it were, constituting specific, shareable forms of life made actual in the lives of particular individuals who had in turn internalized such general patterns in the process of acculturation. The more recent concept of the everyday, defined by one of its ablest exponents as ‘a transformational process by which macro-structural categories are ongoingly translated into manageable structures of sense at human scale’ (Frow, 2002: 633), goes a long way towards rehabilitating Hegel’s Sittlichkeit. The only problem is that it is very difficult to remain faithful to a certain notion of ‘custom’ at a time of rapid social change, if by custom one means something unchanging. Under late-capitalism, everyday life does indeed change even in the not-so-long-run – say a lifetime – and the recent theoretical shift towards micro-sociology of the Tardeian variety has been rather enabling in thinking out my project of rethinking the street culture in Calcutta. What I want to do here is to study the ensemble of practices associated with street food in Calcutta, the broader aim being the discernment of the recent mutations in these practices which could be connected, however tenuously, to ‘globalization’.
