{"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":144,"pdf_page":145,"physical_index":145,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"40bdabdddf2f458e134922ad51aadc61cf2e313321c56b856a43c4d0686eef06"},"chapter":"List of Tables and Figures","content":"This interplay between my own needs and those of the dog displays one of the most fundamental, yet also one of the most puzzling and poorly understood, paradoxes in the sociology of daily life: what is the relationship between choice and habit? Why do some routines give us a sense of freedom, and act as instruments of choice, while others seem to be so restrictive and keep us from making choices? Furthermore, why are some routines and habits voluntary and breakable, while others are compulsive and seem to drive us beyond our ability to control them?\n\nThis chapter is an exploration in the phenomenology of routines, with the goal of understanding better how daily life has come to feel for so many people like a heavy burden, a maze of relentless demands. Like O’Dell and Ehn & Löfgren in this volume, I am concerned with the subtle and often subjective differences between the routines which make life possible, and those which make living miserable. Is this a recent dilemma of the human condition, or is it something inherent in the way we perceive time and regulate our daily lives?\n\nRoutines and Modernity\n\nBoth Durkheim and Weber associated habitual and unthinking routinized behaviour with animals, and with primitive and traditional societies. Weber thought that uncivilized peoples had not yet developed the capacities for reflexive awareness and rationality characteristic of modern peoples. In this scheme it made perfect sense for anthropologists to focus their attention on ‘ritual’ as the major determining element of behaviour in pre-modern societies, since those peoples’ lives were supposedly ruled by timeless prescriptive rhythms rather than rationality. Utilitarianism and rational choice theory, on the other hand, elevated the act of decision making to the core of human nature, and focus attention on modern societies where this form of rationality is supposedly given free play.\n\nThis equation of habit and routine with the world of animals and primitive people, and of choice and decision making with modernity, has the unfortunate effect of setting time’s arrow on a course where the ‘inevitable’ future will see the complete elimination of ritual and habit, through the advancement of technology. Durkheim and Weber were reluctant modernists, but modernists nonetheless, and they were optimistic in their predictions about the growth in rational choice and transactional logic in social life. One of the great and enduring myths of modernization theory is that modernity ‘liberates’ humans from routine and enslavement to the forces of habit. The imagined future of modernization theory is life based entirely on improvisation, where every day is invented anew. This is a very odd utopia in many ways, for it is based on the assumption that people really do want to be liberated from ‘dull’ routine, that an endless flow of calculated choices is a way of life people would really want.\n\n144\n\n• Richard Wilk","previous_page":143,"next_page":145}