You have full access to this open access article. Homing in on the embodied and sensory aspects of common, taken-for-granted knowledge and the habits of perception that inform it, this article demonstrates how culturally entrained listening practices structure rights to the city and the exercise of citizenship. By tuning into the significance of ambient religious sound, it offers an empirical, ethnographic investigation into how common sense, in dialogue with constitutional and municipal law, shapes practices of citizenship and participation in French public space.
So, let us be thoroughly discrete and stop all these bells. Scholars of France often point to French politicians, media, and public intellectuals as the actors with the greatest ability to impact discursive framings and guide debate on hot-button issues of the day.
These pillars of elite discourse, largely centralized in Paris and sharing common educational and class background, hold disproportionate sway, it is claimed, in shaping public attitudes and dictating the terms of public debate Suleiman ; Bowen : 3; Gumbel Footnote 2 This actant may be understood as common senseβwith an analytical emphasis on the sensory connotations of the term.
Common sense escapes notice both because it is empirically difficult to isolate and because it is so normalized as to be taken for granted. Yet other scholars, too, have pointed to the salience of common sense in shaping political outcomes. To this end, I invite readers to pause and reconsider the perceptive and interpretive acts embedded in the production of discursive knowledge, using contemporary France as a case study. In this reading, common sense, or collective sensing and knowing, is generated at the nexus of ambient sensory stimuli, human perception, and interpretation.
Embodied knowledge on a range of civic topics may be derived from everyday experience in public space, yet the active role of this structuring force is often missedβnot only in research on citizenship and religion but in political science literature more broadly. This article offers an empirical, ethnographic investigation into one way common sense, in dialogue with constitutional and municipal law, manifests as a political actant that shapes practices of citizenship and participation in French public space.
