Chapters are concerned directly with the terms for intense experiences, mostly forms of play and celebration but extending to riots and other forms of social and political resistance. He analyzes how the past enters our present through common experiences and attitudes, through our shared practices and their underlying values.Everyday Life begins with the vernacular terms for 'e old talk'e and offers an overview of the range of practices thought of as customary or traditional. Abrahams ties the everyday to those more intense experiences of playful celebration and serious power displays and shows how these seemingly disparate entities are cut from the same cloth of human communication.Abrahams explores the core components of everyday-ness, including aspects of sociability and goodwill, from jokes and stories to elaborate networks of organization, both formal and informal, in the workplace. He traces forms of mundane experience and the substrate of mutual understandings carried around as part of our own cultural longings and belongings.Everyday Life explores the entire range of social gatherings, from chance encounters and casual conversations to well-rehearsed performances in theaters and stadiums. Here he takes on the systematics of his own culture. Abrahams goes up against the triviality barrier.

A folklorist and ethnographer who has written about the Southern Appalachians, African American communities in the United States, and the West Indies, Roger D.

Everyday Life by Roger D. Abrahams