In the late 1930s; the anthropologist Tom Harrisson, the surrealist poet and film-maker Humphrey Jennings, and the journalist Charles Madge conceived a project called `Mass Observation', a collective anthropology of the present, built out of the observation of the masses by themselves. It was to be a technique for recording the `subliminal stirrings of the collective mind of the nation; through the images thrown up in such things as advertisements, popular songs, themes in the press, the objects with which people surround themselves (have on their mantelpiece for example)'. The curriculum of possible subjects which Harrisson, Jennings and Madge advertised in a letter-manifesto to the New Statesman in January 1937 mingles traditional subjects of sociological attention with the oblique and bizarre:
Behaviour of people at war memorials
Shouts and gestures of motorists
The aspidistra cult
Bathroom behaviour
Beards, armpits, eyebrows
Anti-semitism
Distribution, diffusion and significance of the dirty joke
Funerals and undertakers
Female taboos about eating
The private lives of midwives
Mss Observation began in a fragile, combustible mixture of surrealism and social responsibility. The more utopian side of Mass Observation was never realised, perhaps because, with the advent of the war, it was drawn into more immediately useful projects. Humphrey Jennings spent his war years making public information films. The work of Mass Observation continues, and its archive is maintained by the University of Sussex. I think Mass Observation might suggest to us ways of organising investigation into aspects of individual and social life that routinely fall below the threshold of academic attention.