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Accepted Paper:
Making one's home: an ethnography of the material transformations in Romanian blocks of flats
Maria Salaru (University College London)
Paper short abstract:
This paper will explore post-socialist material transformations in Romanian urban space and energy consumption practices inside and outside the home.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will explore post-socialist material transformations in Romanian urban space and energy consumption practices inside and outside the home. My aim is to reveal multiple, fragmented, contradictory processes of meaning formation around the material culture of the apartment. Based on on-going participant observation and innovative visual methodologies, I will discuss the manner in which inhabitants appropriate their block of flats in Piatra-Neamt, my current field site. I will focus in particular on the changes in the infrastructure of the buildings, which thus exemplify "processes of making". A central issue I would like to raise is how energy saving practices, such as wall insulation, that transgress the boundaries between the inside and the outside of the home, have resulted in a production of new forms of status distinction and citizenship in the local community. The focus on material flows instead of made objects will enable me to bridge discussions in material culture studies and ecological anthropology, which are both "broadly concerned with material conditions of social and cultural life", but have developed disparate theoretical languages (Ingold 2012). By building on on-going anthropological debates in architecture, ecology and economic anthropology, my project will contribute to understandings of rapidly changing everyday life in post-soviet cities through a study of material transformations in and outside urban homes.
New directions in anthropology, architecture and design
Session 1