Popular Culture as Everyday Life

Read chapter 20, it rocks.

You know you’ve been abroad too long when…you read this book and everything sounds familiar, but surprisingly little has to do with how you live your life. As an expat in Europe for well over a quarter of a century, reading this collection of essays about everyday existence in North America, particularly in the USA, I turned the pages with mixed feelings of nostalgia and alienation. I picked it up, because of my strong sense that the lion’s share of the work being done in the intercultural field has been very narrowly limited to professional survival abroad rather than the texture of everyday life. The title suggested a way out of this.If my opening paragraph sounds like negative criticism, it is not. Waskul and Vannini have gathered extremely well-written descriptive studies of facets of life that are so “everyday” that we fail to pay attention to them, and even further have little sense about how strongly they shape who we are and how we live – they both create and stem from our individual and cultural narratives of identity. Most importantly, this approach confirms our assertions about the invisibility of culture because it deals with matters that are so visibly obvious that we pay little or no attention to them, while we can also spend enormous effort to make sure that their imperatives are maintained. What we read, what we watch on television, soaps, commercials, sports are part of everyday culture, as well as what we do and have in our bathrooms from toilet paper to toothpaste and make-up, how we choose and use them, or perhaps, even more accurately, how we mirror what cultural mediators have told us via commercials and publicity about how to select and apply them.So, this book is exotic because it is so everyday and, while academic in intent, is firsthand reporting, not abstract theory. Its many authors document their daily experience and that of those around them as they take selfies, make videos, play games, have sex, keep house, drink coffee, celebrate Halloween and go to sleep. I find it also to be a seminal piece of work, a model for future intercultural work, in the sense that effectively sharing such stories of everyday experience has an enormous potential for helping us understand each other and find commonalities in difference, as well as acculturate, should we be on the move. While the chapters have modeled the sharing of behavior, everything from kicking ass to having pets to watching the snow fall, they tell us how what we extol as our freedom is more than likely a set of mini-decisions that occur within a very determined larger framework of fixed and compelling mental paradigms and behavioral imperatives.Paradoxical as it sounds, the book’s content is so banal that I couldn’t put the book down. The picture it paints forces the reader to examine her or his everyday existence from a cultural perspective, to see the hidden norms and rituals that may simultaneously produce comfort and conformity, or perhaps more accurately comfort in conformity, and which may seem so strange to others at the gut level. No doubt it is the challenge to our everyday assumptions and comportment that creates the sense of foreignness, or even conflict, when we have betaken ourselves to another cultural context and are trying to get a foothold. We learn what we define as normal when what we find as normal is missing. Part of culture shock, if there is such a thing, is the unconscious need to make ourselves feel at home in the many areas described in this book. It is in these less than obvious differences and absences of the familiar that emptiness and malaise are rooted. In the longer-term perspective, when one is actually adjusted to the rhythms and minutiae of a different cultural setting, it is precisely this everydayness that has rewritten our self narrative and ultimately leads us to discover that, no matter how hard we try, “we can’t go home again.”