The Mundane Matters
The Mundane Matters
复制标题
世俗的事情
DOI:
10.1111/j.1749-5687.2011.00145_2.x
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发表时间:
2011
影响因子:
2.4
通讯作者:
C. Enloe
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
C. Enloe
By definition, the “everyday” appears inconsequential. How could paying attention to who makes breakfast add to our analytical powers? How could monitoring laundry take us deeper into causality? Surely, assigning weight to casual chats in the elevator or before meetings begin would be a waste of precious intellectual energy. The everyday is routine. It is what appears to be unexceptional. Devoid of decision making. Seemingly pre-political.
For an embarrassingly long time, I didn't pay attention to the everyday. I, of course, lived it. My relationships with others—parents, friends, colleagues, interviewees—depended on my everyday routines somehow meshing with theirs. But I didn't think to spell them out when I engaged in formal analytical efforts. I presumed that my task was to reveal the workings of—and consequences of—power, and that those workings would manifest themselves by standing out from the mundane. If this were true in my attempts to understand ethnic politics in Malaysia (my initial research), it would be, I imagined, all the more true when I began to investigate the causes and consequences of international politics.
I was wrong.
It was feminist analysts who opened my eyes to how wrong I was and what exactly I was missing in the dynamics of international politics by naively imagining that the everyday was pre-political, analytically trivial, and causally weightless.
The most famous late twentieth-century feminist theoretical pronouncement is, “The personal is political.” Its crafters were calling on women (and any men who had sufficient nerve) to look to the everyday dynamics in their lives to discover the causes of patriarchal social systems’ remarkable sustainability. This call would have profound implications, we gradually learned, for understanding the flows of causality, the constructions of political cultures and the inter-locked structures of relationships between those actors we so simplistically call “states.” The sites for research, …