Friday, September 7

 
The Ethnography of a Neighborhood Cafe

Monty Python meets academia, and the result is the Journal of Mundane Behavior. In the June issue: You might think they're ne'er-do-wells hanging out at the Flaming Cup Cafe, but they're really researchers, taking everyday actions and turning them into complicated theses. Well, okay.

Here's the abstract: "Café society is something that many of us as customers and/or social theorists take for granted. Cafés are places where we are not simply served hot beverages but are also in some way partaking of a specific form of public life. It is this latter aspect that has attracted the attention of social theorists, especially Jürgen Habermas, and leads them to locate the café as a key place in the development of modernity. Our approach to cafés is to ‘turn the tables’ on theories of the public sphere and return to just what the life of a particular café consists of, and in so doing re-specify a selection of topics related to public spaces. The particular topics we deal with in a ‘worldly manner’ are the socio-material organisation of space, informality and rule following. In as much as we are able we have drawn on an ethnomethodological way of doing and analysing our ethnographic studies."

Hmmm. Well, you do get an interesting history of cafes and bars. You know what they say about tough jobs: someone's got to do them, and it might as well be academicians who have figured out how to write off the time they spent away from their offices and classrooms.
posted by Unknown 10:59 AM