You want to study every day culture in a serious way. Food, drink, clothing, social customs. But then you also don't want to subject this culture to an overly pretentious theoretical metalanguage. What makes it pretentious is the mismatch between the everydayness of the experience, and the pretensions of the language.
It is an interesting question, I think, to look at other types of mismatches. An analysis of a poem that is written in an anti-poetic way, for example. Maybe these aren't even mismatches? Maybe it's that our expectations are wrong, and that pretentious language should be welcomed in any academic subfield, as a way of guaranteeing its seriousness.
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