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Scott Schaffer denies that the staff of the year-old Journal of Mundane Behavior dozes at the conference table during editorial meetings. He denies it three times, in fact.
First of all, says the maverick academic journal's managing editor, JMB is primarily an online, peer-reviewed, quarterly publication operating from the virtual offices of the Internet, so the unpaid staff and the editorial board that spans from North America to the United Kingdom and Sweden meets mostly by e-mail. Second, production of the quarterly journal is on a shoestring ($600 in costs to date) and requires many sleepless nights instead of sleeping.
And, third, "it is not boring," states Schaffer, a sociologist at California State University, Fullerton, who with Cal State sociology professor Myron Orleans founded and edits JMB.
"Or let me restate that: It should not be boring, because it constitutes so much of our day . . . the minute details of each day, our commute to work, our work. We think of that as boring and apparently inconsequential? That would mean 95 percent of our lives is boring and inconsequential."
Motivated by a case of quotidian fever, Schaffer and Orleans are two scholars who march to the beat of a different humdrum. Finding insight and answers in commonplace human behavior such as the silence on elevators or male shaving rituals, they have a working definition of mundane that includes the earthly, the ordinary, the everyday.
"I understand the mundane as that territory that is rarely examined because it appears so pointless to do so," says Orleans, whom Schaffer describes as a micro-sociologist and senior member of the mundanity duo. "Why look at the usual, the routine, the daily? What significance can be derived from scrutiny of what we all experience every day? Well, of course, it is just that usualness of mundane experience that is important in itself."
Orleans is both amused and piqued by the notion that some people might find academicians studying everyday life outrageous. "We live in the trivia and that is what we are condemned to understand," he says. "Oh, how sad for us as scholars and intellectuals to be reduced to the banal! But that is where we all live and our task is to understand how we live."
How deep into the banal abyss does JMB delve? The journal's February issue (www.mundanebehavior.org) contains a thoughtful analysis on how historians have distorted the past by concentrating on the dramatic and extraordinary; a social-psychological look at Latin American TV soap opera viewing practices in post-communist Bulgaria; findings of mundanity in the lyrics of the Beatles; and an article on the stereotypical portrayal of psychiatrists in motion pictures.
"It is just that usualness of mundane experience that is important in itself."
-- Myron Orleans, educator and sociologist
Its previous pilgrimages to the prosaic include an essay on squat toilets in Indonesia, an excerpt from historian Joseph Amato's book "Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible," an article on "photographing the everyday," and an examination of modern television as an "invisible" family medium.
While JMB is operating within solid scholarly traditions, Schaffer and Orleans don't limit the journal's perspective to sociology: Besides sociologists, in the current issue a historian, communication scholars, a psychiatrist, social psychologists, a marketing analyst and a philosopher contributed.
After a little more than a year, Orleans and Schaffer appear to have the run of the field. JMB has received 95 submissions from six continents in that time, plus another 15 to 20 articles already sent out for the peer-review process, says Schaffer, adding that the Web-based journal has received more than 140,000 hits. "The majority of the submissions are from academics. But if we take the demographics from our online Mundane Talk Discussion List, 60 percent of the people on it are not involved in academics."
But talk about mundane: For days, members of Mundane Talk wrangled over alternate definitions of the word "mundane," one of them proposing "stereotypical behaviors" and another recommending "things I do on automatic," before things collapsed into a semantic debate on the appropriateness of the words "mundaneness" and "mundanity."
Another message parodied the whole concept with a fabricated sales pitch for a computer program that teaches one how to act mundane -- with lessons ranging from "how to look at the ground and toe the dirt" to "how to quit your insidious habit of reading, without a patch" and how to learn "the correct pronunciation of 'huh'?"
"I love telling people about the journal and have them ask me, 'Is this some kind of a joke?'‚" says Naomi Mandel, who teaches contemporary American literature and culture at the University of Rhode Island and manages JMB's newly announced editorial section, Outburst, which will run shorter, less formal and more quirky essays.
"Some of us at the JMB harbor fantasies of using the mundane as a tool to instigate socially responsible action," says Mandel, whose upcoming Outburst contributors include a composer who draws her material from the most mundane things and a woman whose life has just been radically changed by not having a dishwasher. "What I primarily want Outburst to do is make people laugh, make them think, maybe even make them angry."
While Orleans and Schaffer are convinced there's something seriously worthwhile afoot in the pedestrian world, they maintain a sense of humor about a mission some people consider droll, even farcical.
Schaffer recounts how the time he first set eyes on the name "Journal of Mundane Behavior" he laughed out loud. That was in 1999 when Wayne Brekhus, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Missouri at Columbia, called for a new "sociology of the unmarked" in the American Sociological Association's journal Sociological Theory.
Brekhus argued that "there are many deviance journals to analyze socially unusual behavior, there is no Journal of Mundane Behavior to explicitly analyze conformity." With Brekhus contributing a "mundane manifesto" to the first issue, Schaffer and Orleans seized the everyday.
"There are all kinds of very serious and scholarly journals," says Schaffer, who calls JMB "the 'Seinfeld' of academic journals" after the TV sitcom that boasted it was a show about nothing. "So to have that title, with that pretension of seriousness, and still be that self-deprecating, we knew from the beginning we would have to keep our sense of humor."
Schaffer and Orleans do want JMB to be taken seriously, however, certainly by colleagues in academia. Reaction so far has been "mildly positive," says Orleans. "We're working mightily to bring attention to the ordinary and having some success. . . . If we puncture some pretension of the more elevated of our profession, well, no offense intended, but we gotta do what we gotta do.
"You have to say, let's not get too pompous about understanding the trivia. Respectability within the profession is not the goal; understanding the raw material of social life is."
What does concern Orleans and Schaffer is the troubling thought that putting mundane behavior under the microscope of science might make something other than mundane behavior of it.
"We will operate in a world of heightened self-consciousness as we bring more light to areas that were formerly 'hidden in plain sight,' " Orleans says. "The world will survive us, I am sure, however there is valid concern for impact" on all things mundane.
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