Öznelerin Deneyimleri Üzerinden Günlük Hayat: Eleştirel Bir Yeniden Kavramsallaştırma

Abstract

This thesis takes for its subject how agents organize their daily lives depending on when and how they act out certain activities which themselves are based on the meaning said agents attach to these activities and aims - to distinguish and re-conceptualize the original nature and characteristics of daily life, taking into account its productive and re-productive dimensions in which repetition stands out as a distinguishing feature of the principle concepts of work, labour, free time and leisure. The intensive research method was followed in the research and the empirical data were compiled through in-depth interviews with 47 individuals, of which 26 were women and 21 were men. Based on the analysis of the data, the main claim of this study is that it is inaccurate to conceptualize daily life on the basis of opposing dichotomies such as everyday/non-everyday, working/non-working time, working/leisure or working/free time. On the contrary, daily life is the most basic part of life, and it is an aspect of life that is resistant to becoming ordinary even if it is repetitive, as continuous as it is split, where agents work to produce benefits for themselves or someone else in a purpose- and value-oriented way throughout any unit of time starting and building up from a single day. Although repetition is the most basic founding feature of daily life, repetition of activities does not inevitably result in their monotony. In the case of monotony, agents produce and re-produce daily life by making deliberate and altering interventions, that is, by manoeuvring. The definition reached indicates that qualities such as “ordinary”, “usual”, “monotonous”, “routine”, and “unimportant” attributed to daily life are not the founding characteristics of daily life, therefore, they form a concept couple (daily life-life) in a part-whole relationship with life, free from the daily/non-everyday contrast. For this reason, in this study instead of the term “everyday life”, which reinforces these qualities by implying these very qualities, has been re-conceptualized as “daily life” in order to express that the latter is a phenomenon referring to "that day" instead of "every day" since it is not limited to 24 hours, on the contrary it starts from a day, expands to a week, a month and continues with the repetition of the years which does not have to be rhythmic.