A number of interesting articles in the newest issue of the Journal of Mundane Behavior, via the Spike Report, include:

Holiday at the Grocery Store: Conversations with a reformed convict

The point of running this interview, as well as Anonymous’ piece, is twofold. First, even for those who run afoul of the law, there is mundanity – trying to score drugs, casing houses, or worrying about one’s safety in a prison shower, once taken out of the media spotlight and made an everyday part of one’s reality, become mundanity.

The second point is to show how tenuous everyone’s hold on normalcy is. Cesar had a promising career in retail management before he lost it all/gave it all up and became a thief.

An ethnography of a neighbourhood café: informality, table arrangements and background noise

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.

The Bride, Off Duty

Great varieties of manners and ceremonies make up the legal and cultural binding called a wedding. The connecting of families, communities, religions and ethnicities is celebrated through a latticework of movements, scripts, foods, and music. Thinking of these ties, values, and communitybuilding found in traditional wedding festivities, I had a thought: what if The Bride were alone?