Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on the changes over twenty five years in the ways a woman living in a Rio de Janeiro favela talks about her house, her life, and the houses in which she and her mother have been working as a domestic.

Paper long abstract:

In the context of a discussion about « worthy life », Vânia, a woman living in a Rio de Janeiro favela, ironically states that her house is still the one I had known back in 1994. While at the time she expressed her hope that one day her house would be better, she now says : « either I eat, either I decorate my house ». This contrasts with the changes in the houses of her neighbours, who have considerably expanded horizontally and above all vertically in 25 years, as most houses in Rio's favelas. Brazilian donas de casa (mistresses of the house) usually put their pride in taking care of their house, seen as an image of the moral worth of the person. Vânia's case provides a puzzling counter-example.

Vânia's relationship to her house makes sense when placed in a « specific configuration of houses » : her own, the one of her mother, who is also a domestic worker, and the the houses in which she and her mother have been working as a domestic, and been fed since her childhood in a rural part of Brazil. This is based on a a long term ethnographic relationship with various families in a favela of the Northern Zone of Rio de Janeiro.

Paper short abstract:

Co-housing means to spend most of domestic life negotiating space, time and rules with people who are not your relatives. How do these special domestic communities emerge and grow up, and in what do they diverge from traditional ones? An ethnographic insight into practices and stories of sharing in.

Paper long abstract:

Co-housing is more and more widespread among students and young precarious workers as a response to the uncertain socio-economic situation which, after the 2009's crisis, affected especially southern Europe. Living with other people who are not members of your family is a way to share a rent, but it has also some very deep interpersonal implications. In fact, co-housing means organizing and dividing duties and tasks; cooking and cleaning up together; negotiating domestic spaces and time.

Aesthetic and ethical collaboration (and co-definition) makes these houses a peculiar social laboratory in which is possible to observe an immersive and real microcosm featuring similar problems and characteristics as a large-scale multicultural society. Objects, rules and their incessant relocation define the peculiar 'structure of feeling' of its inhabitants in a both personal and collective way.

How are these special communities formed? How do their inhabitants decide and organize the most personal space (The House) in a collective and social way? How does this organization affect their personal way of living and 'feeling' domesticity?

In this paper I reflect on some examples and themes of my ethnographic fieldwork about co-housing in an Italian city, focusing on practices and stories of participation and sharing.

Paper short abstract:

What effects has post-Soviet privatization had on the relationship between materiality, personhood, and politics in a place that has been defined by precarity? Wooden houses in Vilnius are not so much sites of security but rather nodes of tension as they become the targets of new market forces.

Paper long abstract:

This paper traces the effects of post-Soviet Lithuanian privatization policies in Šnipiškės, a neighborhood of 19th century wooden houses in Vilnius that served as temporary housing stock during the Soviet period but is now slated for redevelopment as a modern city center, with portions to be preserved as 'heritage'. After decades of expecting demolition and a move into modern apartments, housing privatization since the 1990s has impacted residents' relationships to their built environment, to the state, to infrastructure, and to their neighbors and kin as they have navigated the dynamics of determining real estate value in the transition to a market economy. These dynamics have been crucial for residents as they evaluate their options to claim ownership, to stay or sell, or to settle into aging houses by investing in material improvements. The patchwork-like facades index multiple inhabitants of heterogeneous social positions who renovate their space according to their preferences, aesthetics and means, but in doing so, impact the desires and possibilities of their neighbors. Based on narratives and details of domestic life collected through ongoing ethnographic fieldwork, this paper considers how residents come to understand themselves as property-owners by engaging in various practices that assert either their dignity or distinction in a context of material, social and political agents that encourage, delimit, or thwart their efforts. It is through privatization that commodified houses come to occupy kin relations, not as objects ensuring continuity through inheritance, but rather as nodes of generational tensions and sites of familial rupture and revenge.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I explore the relation between domestic life and everyday consumption in Madrid in the years that preceded the financial crisis in Spain and ideas and practices concerning self-worth and aspirations of my interlocutors in the present.

Paper long abstract:

During the mid 2000s I carried out an ethnographic project in Madrid in which I addressed the ways in which domestic life and consumption constituted fundamental -if overlooked- aspects of the senses of personhood, sociality, and life in the city more broadly. In those days, during the housing bubble in Spain, my interlocutors belonging to the young generation of adults expressed discomfort and distrust towards their political leaders and financial system, while they were sceptic about their possibilities of reaching their parents' quality of life and material achievements in the future. These feelings operated as the background of a generation of adults orchestrating their lives with parental support of various kinds including money, housing, childcare and food.

The 2008 crisis and then the 15M Movement hit the lives of these persons in various relevant ways, marking their biographies and life trajectories in identifiable "before and after". At a distance, I have maintained contact with many of them for more than a decade, observing their various ways of moving and staying through migration or long periods of unemployment. I have also heard many stories about everyday adjustments involving the present and the future. In this paper I the ways in which pre crisis domestic life, consumption and a specific sense of co-presence can inform current senses of self-worth of these interlocutors. I pay close attention to the notion of aspiration as a heuristic tool for understanding continuity and change in the life trajectories of Madrid inhabitants.

Paper short abstract:

The paper takes recuperation both analytically and conceptually, looking into contextual notions of recovery in Lisbon, as well as taking this term as a theoretical operator applied on ethnographic data (with a series of interviews and descriptions).

Paper long abstract:

This paper offers insights into what could be termed politics of recuperation — focused on how the Portuguese society rebuilds the scaffolding that helps to navigate through life by remaking connections and relations. Specifically, it accounts of different repair activities in Lisbon with attention to how people organise themselves in a context of uncertainty relying on both traditional practices and new idioms and modalities of social participation. The research foregrounds, therefore, the organicity of societies, their continual porosity and resilience, as well as their capacity for self-repair.

Recuperation has a double meaning, an active transitive sense, synonymous to reviving something. And an intransitive sense, which refers to regaining a former condition. Ethnographically, the research presents multiple registers of recuperation that go from transformative actions to the material and the organisational. In this light, it helps to think about the socio-cultural resources that people rely upon on the margins of what has been traditionally assumed as politics, economy and welfare.

The paper contributes to an anthropological understanding of recuperation by paying attention to everyday practices of recovery and value allocation, and how they may produce an unpredictable patchwork of services, provisions, repair practices, networks or even infrastructures. As demonstrated by the anthropological research, the recuperation of relations creates something transcendental (such as a life narrative), adds a human dimension to the public sphere, and expands our conception of what constitutes the political.

Paper short abstract:

What is the relationship between the meaning of old age and the projection of quality of life for elderly women according to their life trajectory and associated lifestyles? What are the cultural conditioning factors that guarantee a better quality of life?

Paper long abstract:

The conditions of quality of life have expanded in the technological, communication, domestic tasks and daily life. All of which has not been accompanied in an equivalent way in the symbolic inclusion where social relations, inequality and less access to society of opportunities means that advances in quality of life in this area are less developed.

Many aspects of this symbolic universe contain protective factors for self worth health. The change in lifestyle is one of the turning points in the deepest transformations in societies in transition, the notion of lifestyles is the condensation of cultural determinations by which people guide and shape their life projects.

The lifestyle of contemporary seniors is largely installed in the tradition because these are the generation prior to the massification of communications and technologies, being representative of an aspect of intangible cultural heritage. In this sense, a significant generational change takes place as the expectations and conditioning factors increase the optionality of people to make their decisions in the field of affectivity and consumption, among others.

These practices are far from the patterns of market consumption that are part of everyday life.

What is the relationship between the meaning of old age and the projection of quality of life for women according to their life trajectory and associated lifestyles

by adopting lifestyles imposed by this new way of life?