Infraordinary Ties and Place-Making at a Convenience Store in West Los Angeles

Abstract

This article focuses on the quotidian interactions taking place at a seemingly unimportant location—a convenience store—and how these interactions animate the space as one of multiple frames. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at a convenience store in West Los Angeles, I argue that an important part of what makes an urban space such as the convenience store viable is how space and crowds align in a way that allows for relational fluidity. This argument is developed by a depiction of the coexistence and intersection of five different interactional units at the store, which facilitate “infraordinary ties” that cut across the interactional units. Mediating between the interactional units and the everyday trajectories that take one to other parts of the city, the infraordinary ties allow the individual to obtain a role that endures over the immediate interactions. As these ties allow interpersonal connections that can morph from one form to another, they animate the space as one of multiple frames. An appreciation of this mechanism of mutual intensification between space and crowds furthers understandings of the relationship among space, interactional patterns, and forms of sociality.

Everyday without exception? Making space for the exceptional in contemporary sociological studies of streetlife

“… 6. For another example of this analytical disconnect see Hung’s (2016, pp. 536–537) interpretation of ‘occasionally’ observed instances of customers using a West Los Angeles convenience store in unintended ways as instances of everyday place-making. …”