Everyday Life and Practices: Towards clarification of the sociological sense of notions

• Main Author: O. B. Bozkov
• Format: Article
• Language: Russian
• Published: Russian Academy of Sciences, Federal Center of Theoretical and Applied Sociology 2014-12-01
• Series: Социологический журнал
• Online Access: http://jour.fnisc.ru/upload/journals/1/articles/242/submission/proof/242-61-2520-1-10-20150630.pdf

The essay examines the content and heuristic potential of “everyday life” and “practices” notions. Phenomena of everyday life and practice are the subjects of humanities, such as sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and cultural studies. However, each scientific language reflects peculiar to its language and subject meaning with the help of these notions. The author attempts to clarify the content of these notions in language of sociology.For this reason, interest to everyday life is considered in historic science, cultural studies, and philosophy. The position of sociologist is formulated in terms of the notion of “everyday life”, and related notions of “way of life”, “lifestyle”, etc. The author gives an example of studies from the 70s, where everyday life was the subject, though the word itself was not used.Next section of the essay contains the analysis of another notion “practices”, which is fancy, but not successful. Polemics with the authors of Theory of practices and Michel de Certeau (The practice of everyday life. Arts de Faire) contributes relationships between the analyzed notions. In conclusion, the author resumes undoubted importance studies of considered social phenomena. Qualitative as well as quantitative approaches are relevant for the research. However, success of these studies needs the notions not as metaphors with “floating” meaning, but as scientific terms with categorial content, reflecting certain volume of phenomena from the real world.