New Ethnicities As Lived Experience

Abstract

One key concern in this book is the question of how to effectively centralise informants’ voices; to listen to and interpret the significance of some of their low key everyday utterances and self-representations. This consideration indicated a desire to depart from the tradition, in British Cultural studies of youth, of concentrating on the spectacular and the subcultural. One way of addressing the problem of how to simultaneously capture a sense of individual agency and a sense of social structure is offered by approaches developed by Georges Perec which, Howard Becker states, attempted to, ‘characterize a culture and way of life, both the relevant beliefs and their coordinate activities by the accumulation of formally unanalyzed detail’ (Becker, 2001: 72). Perec’s declarations at the head of this chapter provide an apt articulation of the nub of the issue. What follows is an attempt to realise the effect of a cumulative sense of both individual agency and the spatial and temporal ecology of a specific social and cultural formation. To achieve this effect and to emphasise the unspectacular, commonplace, everyday nature of the informants’ selfrepresentations, I deliberately defer to later chapters detailed interpretation or analysis of their accounts. At this juncture the reader is instead invited to feel new ethnicities in construction as the selected individuals represent their patterns of language use.

What speaks to us, seemingly, is always the big event, the untoward, the extra-ordinary; the front-page splash, the banner headlines … Behind the event there has to be a scandal, a fissure, a danger, as if life reveals itself only by way of the spectacular, as if what speaks, what is significant, is always abnormal: natural cataclysms or historical upheavals, social unrest, political scandals … How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs every day: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infraordinary, the background noise, the habitual? … To question the habitual. But that’s just it, we’re habituated to it. We don’t question it, it doesn’t question us, it doesn’t seem to pose a problem, we live it without thinking, as if it carried within it neither questions nor answers, as if it weren’t the bearer of any information … How are we to speak of these ‘common things’, how to track them down rather, flush them out, wrest them from the dross in which they remain mired, how to give them a meaning, a tongue, to let them, finally speak of what is, of what we are … Not the exotic any more, but the endotic.