Representing Everyday Life

In December 2012 at the UCF I organized a Giornata di Studio (one-day workshop) on “Explorations of Everyday Life.” A selection of the papers delivered at that meeting is the core of this special section in AJHCS. “Explorations of Everyday Life” puts together a group of scholars that are interested in addressing everyday life from different perspectives. How is the everyday experienced within a Catalan/ Spanish context? Are there particular experiences that achieve a specific and unique representation or theoretical response in art, film or literature? Other research questions included: how and to what extent issues of identity, space, historical memory and immigration, have affected everyday life in Spain, and how have been represented in literature and film. The focus was on Spanish/Catalan culture, but the long-range goal was that our findings would be applicable to other European countries. The main reason to organize such a meeting was the fact that there have been very few examinations of this kind in an Iberian setting. Rafael Abella’s La vida cotidiana bajo el régimen de Franco (Everyday life in Spain under the Franco regime) (1985), or Sánchez Vidal’s Sol y sombra. De cómo los españoles se apearon de las mayúsculas de la historia dotándose de vida cotidiana (Sun and shadow. How Spaniards got out of history with capital h and endowed themselves with daily life) (1990) are two of the few examples available, though none of them makes a consistent approach to define from a theoretical perspective what everyday life is. Both books tackle the issue in a very different way. The latter tries to solve the riddle of several coincidences such as the simultaneous arrival in Spain of The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s record and the use of credit cards. Sánchez Vidal is willing to emphasize the consequences brought about by these and other minor events, always giving them preference over the great historical event, the most seemingly nondescript fact, with the aim of reaching a convincing interpretive synthesis of the past.

Interestingly enough there have been many more studies devoted to the study of the everyday in Modern ages (Medina Arjona). “Post Scriptum: A Digital Archive of Ordinary Writings” is a project that aims to collect and publish Portuguese and Spanish private letters written during the Modern Ages. These are epistolary unpublished documents, written by authors from different social backgrounds. These documents survived by chance because the Inquisition and the civil courts used them as criminal evidence. These textual resources treat everyday issues related to past centuries. Everyday life has also been addressed from a philosophical point of view (Agís Villaverde). Historians have paid attention to the renewal in everyday life after Franco’s dictatorship (Díaz Barrado). This last author’s point is that culture and daily life have been radically altered in the last quarter of the twentieth century by the combined effect of technological change and the impact of mass media. Díaz Barrado pays attention to what has been razed and the new habits that set the course into the twenty-first century.

Critical examination of everyday life began approximately between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was during the twentieth century that this attention became more focused on the social sciences, first by Lefebvre, and then followed by de Certeau—previous findings by Benjamin and Simmel are included in their conceptualizations. The social sciences reflect an interest developed in philosophical approaches (from Kant on), or literary products (Poe and his invention of the detective novel and Baudelaire and his street poems or innovative prose poems), or artistic avant-garde (Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism) and include the advent of psychoanalysis, particularly Freud’s investigations. By the end of the nineteenth century many thinkers in psychological studies began to question the idea of society as an organic whole, and governed by general, shared principles. Nowadays social scientists tend to focus on ways in which human beings develop their intuitive knowledge of particular social processes and how they use this knowledge in order to act in a creative...