Emergent in the wake of industrialization, studies of everyday life endeavor to bring into visibility and somehow make sense of our humble, taken-for-granted, seemingly unremarkable experience of the quotidian. The project has meant subjecting modern Western individuals to the kind of anthropological scrutiny more often reserved for non-Western peoples. The goal has been to explore patterns of behavior not because they are foreign but because they are so familiar as to fall beneath our notice.

Generally speaking, everyday life studies is a science of the small. Though usually framed in relation to larger social structures, the objects of attention are micro-moments and micro-actions: turning a street corner, stirring a pot, feeding an infant. They are actions that take place without rising to the status of event. They are moments in time that leave no historical mark. Such practices are everyday not only because they are ordinary but also because they typically occur every day, perhaps even every few hours.

Theorists of the everyday have taken various stances on the political implications of our daily routines. Some have tied their repetitive nature to the mechanization and alienation of labor in a capitalist society. For Michel Foucault, domination is not restricted to the factory floor; the workings of power are more diffuse and insidious, operating in the very interstices of our seemingly private lives. For Michel de Certeau, the quotidian is a site not of forcible conformity but of micro-opportunities to defy the dominant order.