ABSTRACT
In the last decades of the twentieth century, anthropologists began enquiries into how to account for the ways in which human history was played out through the practices of give and take, especially as used in the everyday lives of people. There had been increasing concern in the last part of the twentieth century to reflect upon the ways in which routine habits were weighted with meaning. It was especially the case that the habits of everyday life seemed inflected with the experiences of the past, even when those experiences might have held only small meaning to the immediacy of the present. The American anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote in an article for the popular journal Redbook Magazine about how the habits of a woman’s domestic work in the 1960s household often imitated patterns set by her grandmothers. For example, routine tasks that would have been necessary with the household technologies of the early twentieth century – such as ironing linens to dry the faint dampness and to smooth them – did not arise out of necessity by the late part of the twentieth century when new household heating technology removed the worry of finding mildew forming in the laundry closet. By the 1970s a generation of suburban women proclaimed that they did not iron linens and thereby voiced some part of their freedom from domestic drudgery! Mead and her colleague Rhoda Métraux, with whom she wrote many articles, argued that dramatic modern social changes against the past might occur with the alteration of everyday and conventional practices, even among isolated groups of people. She proposed a more provocative alteration to American marriage practices, suggesting that marriage might be contracted for companionship and economic collaboration prior to child rearing, for the work of child rearing and even for companionship and social support after child rearing – a kind of twoor even three-step marriage would be arranged with the purpose of the union clearly in the mind of all the participants. Habits and laws of matrimonial transactions would thus move within the ken of the times. While many would dispute the ‘real’ revolutionary force of Mead’s proposals for lower-middleclass women readers of a popular fashion and lifestyle magazine, they remain good examples of the new awareness of the widespread testing of habits and conventions of social life in the late twentieth century. Like marriage and
household work, the habits of give and take are especially interesting for the anthropologist seeking to understand the force of historical experience in everyday life. The problem in all of this has been to describe in what ways historical experiences can lade habitual social action as non-conscious expressions of the past.
