A volatile everyday life and ways to study the changes

Abstract

The emergence of the psychology of the everyday life as a new research direction is due to three factors: the logic of the development of science, the challenges of a specific sociocultural situation, and the epistemological turn in the scientific community. The historical and methodological prerequisites of the psychology of everyday life are the emergence of anthropological optics, focusing on the phenomenon of man, on changes in his subjectivity, the dynamics of cultural movements and social groups, on the diversity of life styles in modern society. Sociocultural prerequisites are reduced to the general humanization of culture and the importance in psychology of its current transformations (leading trends). Epistemological prerequisites are the design of methodological approaches and research strategies that allow one to explore the interconversion of subjectivity and everyday life from the standpoint of growing diversity, uncertainty, and supercomplexity. Interest in the everyday life arises primarily where changes enter the subjective world of man, and the transformation of everyday norms becomes a matter of reflection. Shifts of everyday life are made imperceptibly both for the layman and for the researchers. The most effective means of analysis here is the ethnographic method, which acquires the status of transdisciplinary in the social knowledge. The study of everyday life is revealed as a transformation of the social reality, highlighting in it the leading socio-cultural tendencies; as an analysis of modernity from the standpoint of its heterogeneity and inconsistency. The strength of weak ties, the "soft power", the movement from the paradigm of conflict to solidarity, the civilizational trends in humanization and the global decline in violence are seen here as significant characteristics of everyday life. Modernity is mosaic and heterogeneous: this blanket unevenly covers all corners of the planet, there are enough holes in it that throughlooks traditional and archaic ways of life. The study of everyday life brings to the forefront the phenomenology of marginal behavior, combining the inconspicuous and extraordinary, routine and spontaneous, viewing diversity as the norm of life. To monitor the current transformations, it is necessary to change the old patterns of thinking, as well as a combination of different markers, to involve research strategies of related sciences.