ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an analytical understanding of the everyday lives of ordinary people, with specific reference to contemporary Zimbabwe. It sets out two main interrelated versions of everyday lives as discussed in the scholarly literature. First of all, there is the notion of “everyday lives” as the quotidian, including the taken-for-granted and convivial dimensions of people’s daily lives. This entails recognising everyday life as the very stuff of life and as a crucial foundation for social stability. Secondly, drawing primarily upon the work of Michel de Certeau, the chapter considers everyday lives as tactics, or the manner in which ordinary people negotiate their way in and through the dominant order, which often entail processes of accommodation or resistance. In particular, this involves an examination of the tactics of everyday life in the context of national crises, which is labelled as crisis-living. National crises are not merely the broad context within which crisis-living takes place, as tracings of national crises are embedded in crisis-living. Further, crisis-living in its multiplicity of forms configures and conditions national crises. The chapter argues for the importance of more explicit theorising about everyday lives within Zimbabwean studies.
