Chapter 9: Common Sense and Routines: Everyday life Intimacy

Intimacy has been commonly associated with dyadic or, in some cases, smallgroup interactions. Following the perspective of cultural psychology (Valsiner, 2019) and socio-phenomenology (Giannini, 1987; Schütz, 1967), this chapter aims to show that intimacy could also be experienced as a collective, culturally rooted phenomenon. Collective, as intimacy could be experienced by larger groups of people. Yet not just by random people, as they have to participate in shared meanings and actions—thus intimacy is rooted in culture. For developing the former approach to intimacy, the notions of common sense and routines are taken back from the oblivion in which contemporary human sciences have placed them. As it is shown, by looking beyond their elusiveness to empirical, quantitative methodologies, these concepts provide a vantage point to everyday life and its meanings. A vantage point since common sense and routines are prime examples of how collective, culturally rooted phenomena are intertwined into personal experience, and vice versa. Following this idea, this chapter proposes to understand intimacy as a phenomenon that occurs at the liminal space intersecting personal and cultural dimensions of experience.

The familiar, precisely because it is familiar, is for that very reason unknown.

—G. W. F. Hegel (1807), The Phenomenology of Spirit