Paper short abstract:

Oikonomia (or 'government of the house') offers a privileged tool for an ethnographic exploration of the house in Land Reform settlement projects in Brazil as object of State policies and focus of everyday living practices, in order to insure life and a 'worthy life'.

Paper long abstract:

Oikonomia, or 'government of the house', offers a privileged tool for an ethnographic exploration of the house as both object of State policies and focus of everyday living practices. Aristotle, usually credited as being a pioneer of « domestic economy », was in fact mostly concerned with « government » in the sense of governing oneself and the other. Oikonomia offers a template to reconceptualize everyday practices, usually seen as belonging to "domestic economy", as "government of the household", thus highlighting the political, moral and affective aspects crucial for our interlocutors in the field. Drawing on a long-term ethnography in Land Reform settlement projects in the Northeast region of Brazil, I look at the ways the house has become a focus of tension between government by the State agencies and beneficiaries' practices. As the State Land Reform program gives a central role to production concerns, Brazilian government agencies set up projects of "housing units" in settlements in order to provide shelter for the labour force in charge of exploiting the land under the regime of « family agriculture ». By contrast with this economic framing, a 'casa', for project beneficiaries, refers to a material and moral construct, whose physical and symbolic boundaries shift across time and changes in family configurations. Concerns for "sustaining the house", as a means to insure both life and worthy life are linked to efforts to accommodate the tension between the double striving for autonomy and protection, and imbued with the claim for the recognition of one's moral worth (reputation).