{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","title":"Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","id":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","uuid":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","title":"Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture","normalized_title":"timeconsumptionandeverydaylifepracticematerialityandculture","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"isbns":[],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":236,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Time%2C%20Consumption%20and%20Everyday%20Life%20Practice%2C%20Materiality%20and%20Culture","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/search"},"page":{"printed_page":106,"pdf_page":109,"physical_index":109,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"e3064f629f6e30c91b9538b18d860c9a16c00808cd8e35da060c29c45b166615"},"chapter":"List of Tables and Figures","content":"A Cultural Battleground\n\nAs new couples try to build up routines together, they synchronize interests and habits. When they create a shared choreography of working together in the kitchen, and keeping a certain order in the bathroom, another aspect of routines comes into the foreground: their potential as a battleground.\n\nThe derogatory dimension of a word like routine or habit (see the discussion in Highmore 2002) can be used to ignore or devalue the activities of others. ‘It’s only a habit’ can be stated with a shrug of the shoulders, ‘nothing to fight about’. On the contrary it is the taken-for-grantedness of routines and the ways in which they are anchored in our bodies that make them important. ‘They are just a part of me!’ If they are challenged or questioned, as often happens in a new domestic partnership, this is no little thing.\n\nIn her study of couple making Sarah Holst Kjær (2009) discusses the ways in which everyday routines easily are transformed into my good habits and your bad ones. She follows young couples from the kitchen sink to the TV-sofa and the bathroom and shows how important it is for them to synchronize their individual habits into common routines. They try to find a shared rhythm and get into a lot of discussions about what kinds of everyday behaviour they find ‘immensely irritating’.\n\nAt the same time stereotypes of male and female are reproduced and often used as argument for what is important or not. Who takes the role of the expert of how things should be done in the kitchen and what kinds of arguments about right or wrong are used? In this early manoeuvring, life-long divisions of labour or hierarchies of the importance of routines may be established. (For other discussions of such domestic conflicts, see Kaufmann 2006 and Pink 2004.) Again, we may follow how certain routines are seen as crucial or central to people’s ideas about what kind of person they really are.\n\nAs households and families develop steady routines, there are still challenges that can make even the tiniest difference irritating. You can hear who is coming or going by just listening to the way the door is closed, and there might be endless negotiations about what doors should be kept open or closed. In a study of conjugal conflicts there was the couple who waged a constant battle about the door to the kitchen (Lindvall 1983). As sure as the husband kept it open, the wife closed it with an irritating slam. Their different routines turned out to have to do with their class background. He had grown up in a working-class family where the kitchen was the centre of the home, where everybody congregated and all kinds of activities occurred. In her upper-class childhood the kitchen was a territory strictly reserved for cooking and the smell of food seeping in through the rest of the flat was a sign of vulgarity. Everything must have its own place and time!\n\nSarah Holst Kjær recounts another situation. She is visiting an older woman whose husband has just died. The woman is sitting at the kitchen table with bruises on her forehead and tells Sarah that it is only now she realizes that her husband silently went around and closed all the kitchen cabinet doors that she used to leave wide open.\n\n106\n\nBilly Ehn and Orvar Löfgren","previous_page":105,"next_page":107}