Terminus
Commuting may not be an activity that many people actually look forward to, or initially speak of appreciatively, but as one speaks with commuters in southern Sweden, it turns out that most people are actually fairly content with their commutes, and even go so far as to say they would not like to live a life without any commute at all. They may bemoan the pressures which the train’s timetable places upon them, or the unreliable degree to which the trains keep their schedules. But by and large, the commute is an important segment of time in the rhythm of people’s days. And while it is tempting to view commuting as a monotonous, mindless activity, or as dead or wasted time, the empirical evidence offers a much more complex picture.
This is a world that is not only strung together by a series of small routines with very different rhythms and tempos of their own, it is also a world which people have come to adapt to their own needs as best they can – and which they expect to encounter. It is a world of micro-calculations, each of which may seem meaningless at first glance, but which come to be highly meaningful when woven together in the pulse of daily life. And this is not an insignificant insight. In a time in which employers are increasingly ‘allowing’ their employees to work from home, and politicians are prepared to expend millions of dollars to shorten people’s commutes by a few minutes, there is reason to pause, and reflect not only upon the significance commuting may have in people’s lives, but, as social scientists, also upon the state of our understanding of the most elementary activities in which people engage – the routines of daily life. It is here, I would argue, that the structure of the larger cultural world starts to take form. And if the study of rather inconspicuous routines seems trivial or uninteresting, the problem is not the field of study, but our perspective on it. This is where the drama of daily life is anchored, and understandings of it begin to emerge.
Notes
- Here I would like to thank Susanne Ewert, who, through the auspices of the Folk Life Archives in Lund, spent the better part of two months travelling the local commuter lines, conducting interviews with train personnel and passengers, and photographically documenting ‘the daily commute’.
- In the eyes of some, this may raise questions concerning subjectivity and the gendered position of the scholar. My choice to include other materials than my own personal commuting observations is an attempt to address this concern, but, clearly, these are questions that are not completely resolved through polyphony, and which therefore need to be borne in mind. See Reed-Danahay (1997) and Marcus (1998: 246) for a larger philosophical and methodological discussion of auto-ethnography.
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Tom O’Dell