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# Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture
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I don’t dare go on the bus again in Åtvidaberg since I was yelled at by elderly passengers the one time when I happened to take my sick child and baby carriage on the bus to the hospital . . .
Mother in Åtvidaberg4
The field of mobility has become a vital arena of research activity in the humanities and social sciences over the course of the past decade. This is a subject of study in which vast amounts of work have already been conducted on subjects ranging from international migration and the life circumstances of migrant laborers to tourism and transnational travel. However, in light of how much time most people spend commuting, a review of the literature reveals that this is an activity (and form of mobility) which has attracted surprisingly little scholarly attention.5 At least part of the reason for this can be found in a comment made by an anthropological colleague when the subject was broached recently. As he said, ‘The problem with studying commuting is that it is just so damn boring.’ The problem here, however, is not an issue of boredom. It is an issue of moving into, and challenging, the realm of the taken for granted.
As Elizabeth Shove has argued (2003: 1), social scientists have been highly preoccupied with studying that which is explicit and dramatic, but less interested in the inconspicuous routines and praxes that saturate daily life. Turning our attention to the routines and rhythms of daily life implies a shift in focus that takes us into the world of what Joe Moran (drawing upon Georges Perec) has called the ‘infraordinary: that part of our lives that is so routine as to become almost invisible, like infrared light’ (2007: 3). And as Edward T. Hall has demonstrated (1990), it is a world that has been ritually organized to the degree that, if it seems to be invisible, it is because the rituals we engage in have nearly become embedded in our biological being and sense of self. But make no mistake about it. The rituals and rhythms of activities we are dealing with here are not genetically inherited or passed down. To the contrary, while they may produce actions that seem nearly instinctive, they are thoroughly cultural. And if commuting seems like a dreadfully boring subject for the anthropologist to approach, it is because the organization of these rituals is so thoroughly complete that it usually works to disguise the dramas and tensions ever implicit in the commute – dramas which can become vividly apparent when one least expects it.
Take, for example, the local commuter buses in Åtvidaberg, a small, economically hard-pressed, rural mining town in Sweden. Over a period of nearly four years, the municipal authorities had provided the local population with free bus services. These services proved to be highly popular, particularly (but not exclusively) amongst the elderly, who otherwise found it difficult to travel into the centre of town to purchase food and conduct their errands. But by October 2006 the situation on the buses had gotten out of control as people began fighting over the seats and standing space within the buses. As the local paper reported on the tensions surrounding the buses, the cultural dynamics of the commute quickly came into view. Among other things, arguments erupted as to who was the most ‘handicapped’ and thereby had the rights to the special seats designated for the physically impaired. Mothers with small children complained about the verbal abuse they encountered as they brought their children and baby carriages onto the bus – taking valuable space which could otherwise have been used by people with walkers and impeding the ability of everyone to enter and exit the bus. Others were accused of joyriding and just using the buses as a means of killing time. And finally there were those passengers who wondered if it was really fair that youths used the buses, taking seats, and thereby forcing some elderly to stand with their walkers. At issue here were questions concerning such things as rights of access to transportation, personal identity in relation to specific places and spaces, and presumptions about particular rhythms of the commute (such as those related to the processes of entering and exiting the bus, finding or giving up a seat, or for determining the ‘appropriate’ duration of time for which one could ‘fairly’ claim a space on the bus).
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Ultimately, in an attempt to regain control over the situation, the municipality of Åtvidaberg opted to cease providing the local community with free bus services and replaced them with fee-based services. But the complaints and criticisms coming out of Åtvidaberg remind us of the degree to which routines, such as the particular practices associated with regularly performed commutes, can come to have such meaning to people that they are willing to fight over them when those routines become disrupted, and the identities associated with them are thereby brought into question.6 Beyond this, the example from Åtvidaberg also points to the fact that commutes are embedded in a wealth of ritualized activities that we normally take for granted (concerning such practices as boarding buses, finding seats, maintaining social distance, etc.) that need to be maintained even in shifting conditions, such as those caused by overcrowding. Without them, even the most routinized forms of travel quickly degenerate into chaos. The question is: how is all of this structured, and how can any semblance of order be maintained in light of the fact that no two commutes can ever be exactly the same? In order to approach this question, let me turn to the specifics of the train ride between Lund and Helsingborg.
My Soul for a Seat
Taking the train to work every day takes an enormous amount of energy. Two hours of glum faces, crowdedness and sweat, and on top of it all, a lot of worry – you sit there like a sardine in a can, if something should ever happen . . .!
Anna
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I think it’s tragic that you have to pay 2000 Swedish Crowns every month to stand two hours a day, and you just don’t stand. Usually you have some unknown person’s breath working as a fan in your face, and in the morning it’s not all that fresh. I can promise you.
Johanna7
Commuting by train is not a phenomenon that many people regard very highly – if you ask them. Some may speak appreciatively of being able to bike or walk to the train, of getting fresh air, and perhaps even a little exercise. But press people on their experiences of commuter trains, and one enters a realm of frustrating delays, crowded cars, obnoxious passengers and uncomfortable proximities. From this perspective, the commute is a ‘necessary evil’ of sorts, whose negative reputation has long been reinforced and further denigrated by a prevalent flora of popular representations found in films and books in which commuting works as the ultimate symbol of drudgery: a space of flow inhabited by ashen grey and alienated faces, staring blankly into nothingness. This is a morally charged genre of popular folklore wherein train lines are all too easily likened to zones of transit in which machines transport the empty husks of humanity, so ravaged by the pressures of work and the intensities of the rat race that their bodies are hardly capable of registering the impulses to which they are exposed. The train is here not only a means of transportation, but also a jungle of micro-mobilities in which the social order and the sanctity of one’s own identity are ever threatened, and on the brink of oblivion, as bodies are jammed together, jarred around, intermixed and hurled forward along the trajectory of the tracks.
But implicit in images of the rat race are not only notions of the threat of flux and disorientation, but even the overwhelming and crushing weight of structure as people engage in the exact same routines day after day. This is also an aspect of life on the rails to which Michel de Certeau has drawn attention. His observations were based upon rail travel in general and not commuter travel specifically; nonetheless, his insights can work as a fruitful point of departure for a consideration of the role that structure plays in relation to routines. In Certeau’s view, trains were anything but chaotic; to the contrary, train travel was a phenomenon he referred to as ‘Travelling incarceration’:
Immobile inside the train . . . The unchanging traveller is pigeonholed, numbered, and regulated in the grid of the railway car, which is a perfect actualization of the rational utopia. Control and food move from pigeonhole to pigeonhole: ‘Tickets, please . . . ‘Sandwiches? Beer? Coffee? . . .’ Only the restrooms offer an escape from the closed system. (1984: 111)
In Certeau’s eyes, the railroad car was little more than a rolling tyrannical prison. Once aboard, there was little chance for escape. Everyone had an assigned place, and the conductor carefully checked to make sure that everyone was in the right place and remained there.
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Listening to complaints coming from passengers on the Lund–Helsingborg line (as well as those coming from the buses in Åtvidaberg), it is interesting to note that most of the grievances that are voiced focus upon the moments in which the flow of daily routines break down and cease to comply with any laws of predictability. Day after day, people like me leave their homes at approximately the same time,8 have a more or less predetermined tempo with which they proceed to the station, and even specific places on the platform at which they stand and wait for the train. But the rhythm of the commute is broken here, and a moment of unpredictability is injected into the routine as commuters stand anticipating the train. As the train approaches, the cultural energy on the platform thickens. Newspapers are folded, bags are picked up and idle daydreams dissipate.
Ben Highmore has described the daily commute as a phenomenon which people engage in ‘as if on autopilot’ (2004: 310), but as the train approaches, commuters in Lund seem collectively to shut off their autopilots. While each person’s commute may be an individual project, this is the point at which it becomes tangibly entangled in a larger collective movement. People draw together and collect in front of the train’s closed doors waiting for them to open – rubbing, touching and pushing one another. The normal boundaries of what Edward T. Hall described as ‘personal distance … [the] small protective sphere or bubble that an organism maintains between itself and others’ (1990 [1969]: 119) collapse into ‘intimate distance’ (the distance at which the presence of another person is ‘overwhelming’ (1990 [1969]: 116). With the sanctity of one’s personal space disrupted, the atmosphere on the platform shifts from the lull of waiting, to a more competitive and aggressive mode. But even here, in the chaotic moments before the doors open, ritualized rules of engagement still apply. Backpacks, bags and elbows are all employed strategically to ensure an optimal position, but only within clear limits (physically brushing someone aside is allowed, inflicting pain is not). The eyes of commuters remain either fixed on the doors, refusing to acknowledge the presence of the bodies that at this range must be included in peripheral fields of vision, or peer directly into the necks and backs of heads of those directly in front of them who have successfully jostled their way into the best positions in front of the train’s doors.9
It is the presence of the train which catalyses the sudden burst of activity on the platform, but in order fully to understand the cultural mechanisms behind this tightening emotional atmosphere, an appreciation of the materiality of the train is necessary. For as it turns out, the trains along the Lund–Helsingborg line feature padded and upholstered seats with retractable trays; they lack hand straps, or poles to hold onto for those who might have to remain on their feet. While commuters in many parts of the world generally expect to stand (and just hope to be able to get on the train), the success of the commute in southern Sweden is entirely dependent upon one’s ability to quickly find a seat, claim it and thereby reconstitute the boundaries of one’s personal space. Indeed, when one of the local newspapers ran a critical series of articles on the state of the commuter services in the region, it was immediately bombarded by readers’ complaints – and their number one complaint was the lack of seating that forced many people to stand on their way to and from work. The commuter rail authorities responded by lengthening the trains, providing much more seating.
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Nonetheless, the rush for seats still exists. Commuters can hardly do more than shuffle aboard, but these are the few seconds in which the commute really is a race. And it is the anticipated opening of the doors that releases this unique cultural energy, emanating from the upholstered seats within. Somewhat ironically, these are seats that were placed on the trains to make passengers’ trips more comfortable and relaxing, but which paradoxically have a haunting effect upon everyone boarding the train.
As Kevin Hetherington (2004) has pointed out, consumption is not just about processes of acquisition, use and having. It also concerns issues of absence and disposal (see Munro 2001). And the seats within the commuter train constitute a sort of disposable good that consumers strive to acquire every morning, but which they gladly forfeit every day (twice a day) upon arriving at their destination. But unlike paper plates and Styrofoam cups, which we generally think of as ‘disappearing’ after we have used them, train seats are relinquished in a way that we hope will only be temporary. The seats are, in other words, perpetually entering and exiting states of ‘secondhandedness’ (Hetherington 2004: 170–172), of allure and ‘used-upness’. They haunt the bodies of passengers through the corporeal memory of how it feels to stand the distance of the commute as opposed to sinking down into a soft seat. And even as commuters get off the train, and leave their seats behind, they presume at some level that the seat (or its equivalent) remains stored on their monthly passes – ready to be reclaimed and pulled out of storage upon the pass’s re-invocation at the end of the day. In a sense, the pattern of consumption here is a perpetually cyclical one of acquisition, divestment, longing and attempted reacquisition, in which the dynamics of return are as important an aspect of the consumption process as the actual acquisition and use of the object in question (the seat).
Rituals of Transformation: Between Home and Work
Once on the train the rhythm and intensity of the commuter’s routines shifts yet again. As Christena Nippert-Eng (1996) has argued, this phase of the commute provides people in the morning with the opportunity to re-orientate themselves away from the home and the routines of the private sphere towards work – and the process reverses itself in the evening in a manner that is highly visible.
Take the commute home from work, for example. Compared to the morning commute, this is an emotionally ‘lighter’ trip. While the morning commute may be characterized by people getting ready for work, reading papers, working on laptops, consuming coffee to get them focused and ready for the hours ahead, the evening commute features buttoned-down collars and loosened ties (which are immediately jettisoned and replaced by leisure clothing upon arrival home). This is a commute in which alcoholic beverages tend to replace caffeinated ones (more so in the US than Sweden), as people talk, joke and prepare themselves mentally for the arrival home (Nippert-Eng 1996: 125–135).
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In Nippert-Eng’s view, the commute is a liminal experience, something of a bridge between home and work, in which a wide range of ‘transitional activities’ (1996: 113) take place as people move from one place and realm of daily life to another. It is, in other words, a very important corridor for ritualized processes of identity transformation. Indeed, as one listens to the phone conversations people engage in on the evening trip home, it is obvious that the commuter train is a vessel of anticipation as people coordinate dinner dates and evening get-togethers. But it is also the equivalent of an airport control tower as parents endeavour to locate children and spouses, plan the evening meal, delegate chores and coordinate the shuttle schedule between hockey practice and riding school. To some extent this is indeed a liminal space between home and work in which people begin to shift their mental disposition as they leave one sphere of daily life and proceed to enter another. But to some extent it is also more than this, as the boundaries between home and work are perhaps more blurred than is acknowledged in Nippert-Eng’s writing (cf. Tietze and Musson 2002).
Mobile Homes
It’s a blurring of the line separating public and private space . . . There are women who paint their nails and those who strip them of paint with cotton balls soaked in pungent polish remover . . . And then there are the clippers, a class of men and women given away by the unmistakable ping in otherwise silent subway cars. Emilia Kelley … watched a woman finish clipping her fingernails only to move on to her toenails one summer morning on the Red Line. ‘She slipped off her shoe, pulled up her foot and started clipping away.’
Layton, quoted in Letherby and Reynolds 2005: 168
Underscoring this fact, it is always surprising to note how readily commuters seem to be able to make themselves at home on a rush-hour train. Rather than being incarcerated in a seat, as Certeau described the situation, the taking of the seat can, I would argue, also be seen as the point at which the micro-processes of home-making are activated. Borders are quickly erected, and flexibly defined personal spaces are established. Closed eyelids, open newspapers, worn earphones, are all effective barriers to the surrounding world, but this is the last line of defence. There are both subtler and more complex processes at work here. As Deleuze and Guattari have pointed out when reflecting upon the notion of home and processes of home-making, ‘home does not pre-exist: it was necessary to draw a circle around that uncertain and fragile center, to organize a limited space. Many, very diverse, components have a part in this, landmarks and marks of all kinds’ (1987: 311).
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Here I am reminded of the events which unfolded around me on one particular morning commute. One of the last available seats on the train was occupied by a young woman’s book bag. The woman who owned the bag made no effort to move it as I stood before the seat, and only did so reluctantly after I asked if I could have the seat – whereupon she moved the bag down to the floor between the two chairs, where it continued to work as a divide. Before I arrived she had already folded down the table tray in front of her, and placed a book and a notebook on it. As the train departed from Lund, she sat and listened to an iPod through headphones, and, having momentarily looked at the book, wrote ‘50 cl = 500 ml, 30 cl = 300 ml’ in her notebook. After this she picked up her cell phone from her lap, and pressed a few buttons. A few seconds later she looked at her telephone again and wrote some more in her notebook. To my surprise, I realized that she was not alone. She was doing her homework with someone else I could not see. We were on a train, but we could have just as well been sitting at a kitchen table.
Her activities were not unique, but part of a larger flexible pattern of routines which most commuters engage in ceremoniously on each commute as they stake out public space and convert it into semi-private space by furnishing it with their personal possessions. In this sense, iPods, laptops, cell phones, books, cups of coffee and papers from work do not just help people orientate themselves towards the home or work. They also help to ‘warm’ (cf. Ger 2005) public space (in ever-shifting contexts), and make it more hospitable to the needs and wants of the individual commuter. But they also do more than just warm space and make it seem more homelike. Part of their ability to make this space feel more hospitable is derived from their propensity to work as conduits of what Erving Goffman referred to as ‘civil inattention’ (1971: 209, 219), the process through which people can engage with one another in an ordered but seemingly disengaged manner. Working as cultural attractors of attention, they implicitly help to define everyone and everything else in our immediate surroundings as incidental and of peripheral interest. They are in other words both buffering tools of disengagement and symbolic fences demarcating the difference between the here and the there of commuter space. And it is perhaps for this reason that I felt slightly uncomfortable as I watched the woman beside me.
On my commute over the years I have watched hundreds of people send SMS messages, and always wondered what they were discussing, and with whom. Planning the evening’s activities? Receiving a grocery list? Announcing an arrival time? This, however, was the first time I had ever partaken of another person’s SMS correspondence, and understood its content. I was surprised by my own response. I felt slightly uneasy and dirty. Like a voyeur. Like someone who had secretly opened someone else’s mail. All of this reminded me of how I felt a few years earlier when I began overhearing other people’s private cell phone conversations. In those days I tried not to hear. I even turned my head away from the speaker, as if that would diminish my ability to listen (strangely enough, I still do this).
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From Novelty to Routine
The cell phone worked in new ways to destabilize the boundary between public and private, home and away. As it spread through society, people quickly developed new cultural competencies for handling this border (Caron and Caronia 2007). Here, people speaking on cell phones learned to create walls separating them from the outside world by turning their backs, sinking their voices, speaking while staring into empty space, and avoiding eye contact with others. And while many of these techniques have proven to be effective while using a cell phone on a street corner, they have proven to be of limited use within the confines of a railway car. Here, unwritten rules have slowly begun to take shape, defining how loudly, long and intimately one should speak on the phone. But the routines associated with the cell phone remain something of a contested arena of cultural praxis. The soundscape of the cell phone conversation freely invades the private space of all within earshot. Speakers take hostages, who at times start their own uprisings and protests, or seek refuge in the growing number of cell phone-free railway cars that are appearing on transit lines. At the heart of these tensions lies the simple question of ‘whose space is this, and what rights do I command over in my space’?
‘Overhearing’ my neighbour’s SMS actualized many of these issues and suddenly placed a number of inconspicuous details that I had largely taken for granted in a new light. I tried more than ever to be polite, and not watch her doing her homework. As I did so, however, I found myself accidentally overhearing the other conversations around me. And between us still lay the book bag with which it all began. The bag, as it turns out, was more important in the context of this trip than I had first realized, because in moving the book bag, the woman next to me had opened part of the space on the train that she had reserved for herself. At some level, this was a very small and simple gesture of hospitality – and without reflection we had entered a vaguely defined guest–host relation. After all, she had opened part of the space she had staked out for herself to me, and I had gladly accepted this hospitable gesture – and in so doing proceeded to embark upon the cultural journey that would transform me from a competitor (a person racing to find a seat) to a visitor (claiming my right temporarily to inhabit this space). My discomfort over having ‘overheard’ her SMS (no matter how impersonal it was) was somehow linked to this first gesture – perhaps even by the fact that we had both created small home spaces so close to one another, but that I had then peered over my neighbour’s fence. In so doing, like a guest going through his host’s bedroom drawers, I had transgressed the laws of privacy governing hospitality. As Derrida has pointed out (2000, 2001), hospitality is both fragile and complex:
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Nowadays, a reflection on hospitality presupposes, among other things, the possibility of a rigorous delimitation of thresholds or frontiers: between the familial and the nonfamilial, between the foreign and the non-foreign, the citizen and the non-citizen, but first of all between the private and the public, private and public law, etc. (2000: 47–49)
And he continues,
I want to be master at home . . ., to be able to receive whomever I like there. Anyone who encroaches on my ‘at home,’ on my ipseity, on my power of hospitality, on my sovereignty as host, I start to regard as an undesirable foreigner, and virtually as an enemy. This other becomes a hostile subject, and I risk becoming their hostage. (2000: 53–55)
Train seats do not make for spacious homes, but, nonetheless, notions of home (of having one’s own space and privacy) work as an important ‘cultural backdraft (O’Dell 2006) informing the rules governing life on the tracks. Commuting may be readily equated with the rat race, but once on the train, people tend to demonstrate high levels of tolerance for one another. This works as long as the laws of hospitality are respected. The risk of exceeding the implicit bounds of hospitality always exists, but as Derrida argued (2000, 2001), hostility and violence are inevitably built-in components of hospitality. Absolute hospitality seems to be an impossibility. Hosts always set limits. They do not just accept anyone, for any length of time, to doing whatever they like. And guests always have the potential of becoming threats. This is the dilemma of hospitality, and this is part of the tension built into the commute.
In this sense, aspects of the train commute are more similar to the workings of a motel or apartment building than the prison to which Certeau alluded. It is a place in which ‘room’ is rented by the minute rather the hour or day, and in which neighbours meet briefly before moving on. And perhaps it is this aspect of the commute that so readily lends itself to a whole genre of lore concerning chance meetings and found loves. It is a world in which many neighbours will never get to know one another, but in which the simple movement of a bag has the possibility of leading to bigger things. Seats here are more than pigeonholes, and their proximity to one another is more than incarcerating or claustrophobic. It also throws people into vaguely defined relationships with one another that can be the basis for loose-knit communities of repetition and recognition. ‘There’s the woman who gets off in Landskrona,’ ‘Oh no. That’s the guy who ALWAYS talks on the cell phone. I’m not sitting near him today!, and so on. This type of knowledge that commuters have of one another may seem superficial, but the results of accumulative and repetitive observations do play a role in the production of a sense of both space and belonging. Their presence is a confirmation of the fact that the rules of the game we engaged in yesterday will still apply today – and at some level I understand what this means in this specific context. It is a reassuring and anxiety-diminishing aspect of the structure of the commute.
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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
1. 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’.
2. 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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