Paper short abstract:

Both disciplines in question could contribute much to an understanding of architecture as a process through which people create world and self. Emphases upon the temporal, experiential and the material, from both anthropology and archaeology, might be able to lend to such understandings.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores anthropology's relationship with architecture and argues that the former has, to date, largely neglected the study of the process of architecture. Building and dwelling, the experience of architecture, and the sensory and temporal aspects of our built environment and their construction and maintenance, have all gone relatively unexplored despite their centrality in social life and in the relationship between persons and their environments. I argue that with its sights turned less towards the symbolic interpretation of given architectural forms and their correlation with kinship structures and social organization, anthropology might have much more to contribute to a study of architecture. Archaeology may already have embraced the subject of the process of building from its own disciplinary perspectives, as it is perhaps oriented towards the processual by way of its particular emphases on the temporal and the material. This possibility shall be discussed in order to ascertain what an interdisciplinary approach to space, place and architecture - bringing anthropology and archaeology together - might look like.