Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture 第97页

3 April 2009). I have translated all quotes which originally appeared in Swedish.

http://www.corren.se/asikter/forum/archive/2006/10/43/ix6lndqpfwc4n7t. xml?category1=1097835189-26&category2=1100702641-0& (accessed 3 April 2009).

Admittedly, the car, and act of commuting by car, has received a growing degree of scholarly attention in recent years (Laurier 2004; Miller 2001; O’Dell 1997; Thrift 2004); however, the cultural dynamics surrounding commuter trains and buses has remained largely overlooked in the literature (although see Evans and Wener 2006 for a psychological consideration of stress amongst rail commuters). In contrast, there is a great deal of literature of a more technical nature focusing on such things as air quality in trains, risk management, engineering advances, and so on (see, e.g., Letherby and Reynolds 2005).

For example, fights over the seats for the physically disabled were, if nothing else, fights over the cultural identity of being not only ‘disabled’ but even ‘most disabled’.

In November and December 2006, one of the local newspapers in southern Sweden carried a series of articles that critically described the crowded conditions on the commuter trains running in the region. The two quotes presented here are parts of letters that were sent to the newspaper in response to their articles, and later published on the newspaper’s homepage (see http://sydsvenskan.se/skane/ article199243.ece?context=print, accessed 3 April 2009).

This ritual of departure is so exact that some of the people the Folk Life Archive in Lund interviewed reported that they even set their clocks and daily rhythms based upon the departure time of neighbours (see Ewert 2007).

It is interesting to note that while Swedes generally regard themselves as a conflictavoiding people (see Daun 1996), the ritualized form of aggressivity expressed here is strongly bound to the public sphere in times of crowding. It would never be tolerated in the home or amongst friends.

References

My Soul for a Seat