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- Convenor:
-
Tomas Errazuriz
(Universidad Andres Bello)
Send message to Convenor
- Chair:
-
Francisco Martínez
(Tampere University)
- Discussant:
-
Katie Kilroy-Marac
(University of Toronto)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- 6 College Park (6CP), 0G/026
- Sessions:
- Friday 29 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel invites contributions that study contemporary dispositions towards conserving or discarding objects at home. The selected papers describe the practices of care, upkeep, repair, reuse, resignification, and recirculation that we establish with our surroundings at the level of the domestic.
Long Abstract:
We welcome papers that research the social dimension of things, not simply the symbolic and utilitarian one. We intend to unveil different criteria and practices of engagement with materiality, as well as the active curating of what comes in and out from the homes under study. We'll gather reflections on how homes are produced and maintained through specific practices of care and discard. In a cross-cultural, cross-generational and comparative way, we aim at comprehending contemporary uses, positions and relocations of domestic resources. Under the notion of wild ecologies of things, we seek to make visible the rather complex trajectories that objects follow in contemporary home-making, approaching domesticity as an experience made of both enclosure and dynamism. In this vein, we suggest to approach homes as spaces whereby wider socio-cultural transformations are produced, experienced, and negotiated by re-working the existing ecology of things.
Our panel sets out to contribute to anthropological discussions that reflect on how home-making is a process of dwelling that echoes lived experiences as well as orientations towards the future through constant adjustments and accommodations. For instance, Kilroy-Marac (2018) engages with this question by studying hoarding behaviors and the work of so-called 'professional organisers'. Before, Kopytoff (1986), Hoskins (1998), Miller (2008), and Domínguez-Rubio (2016) observed that objects can have their own biographies as well, possessing agency too. But while possessions can be accumulated, they can also be discarded, since ways of getting rid of things are used to narrate identities and social relations (Marcoux 2001; Gregson 2007), developing specific conduits of disposal (Hetherington 2004).
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 29 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
Based on ethnographic work carried out in homes of upper and lower socioeconomic classes in the city of Santiago, this article analyzes how domestic practices, the way the home is produced, and the way it is maintained, can impinge on a greater or lesser propensity towards sustainable forms of life.
Paper long abstract:
This article explores the relationship between the aesthetic ecologies of homes in different socioeconomic sectors, and their disposition towards conserving or discarding objects. More specifically, it analyzes how domestic practices, the way the home is produced, and the way it is maintained, can impinge on a greater or lesser propensity towards sustainable forms of life. Based on ethnographic work carried out in homes of upper and lower socioeconomic classes in the city of Santiago, we could distinguish three relevant dimensions: materiality, functionality, and temporality. Whereas upper class homes are characterized by ecologies that are more closed and restrictive, that strongly resist sustainable practices, working class homes present more open aesthetics, with lineal temporalities and multifunctional spaces that explain to a great extent their propensity towards the coexistence of diverse materials and objects.
Paper short abstract:
When people escape war, the few things that can be brought on the journey contrast with a massive dispossession. This paper explores how objects are kept, discarded, and circulated as they move in and out of domestic, public, and digital archives. Archives engender a potentiality for future uses.
Paper long abstract:
Research on biographical objects has established that the biographies of people and things are mutually constituted. Things are created in social configurations and, vice versa, afford social relations in various stages of life. However, neither people’s nor object biographies are linear but rather fragmented and contingent. My aim is to illustrate the dynamic nature of biographical objects as a consequence of discursive-historical as well as biographical forces: when are objects moved, stored, curated, displayed, packed away, taken out, or discussed? The notion of the archive allows a focus on objects' surplus values for potential future uses as they transit between domestic, public, and digital archives. In my analysis of biographic interviews, I address memory objects in the context of forced displacement from Ex-Yugoslavia in the 1990s. This context raises issues of possession in light of, and in contrast to, dispossession and violence. Based on a cooperative research design, research partners decided on the objects, media artefacts, and periods of life they wanted to further investigate. I will discuss how people retrospectively assess their entangled biographies with objects. Based on two examples, I will demonstrate, firstly, how things afford and strengthen social relations in various stages of life and secondly, how things that are left behind or lost might later be recovered through digitally networked relationships and archives and eventually be re-domesticated. The findings have implications for exploring biographical objects in their many transits and transitions between (and within) domestic and digital spaces, public archives, and museums.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on ethnographic research with biodesigners in the UK, this paper considers different speculations and experiences of care in homes full of alive materiality.
Paper long abstract:
Consider a home that is full of things that are literally alive: walls papered with fabrics embedded with photosynethic coatings, furniture grown in situ from mycelium, electronics powered by microorganisms. Simultaneously objects, artefacts, and creatures, these things would be made, grown, and programmed. They unsettle as much as they delight. I see clear parallels here with Bennett’s ideas in her work The Enchantment of Modern Life. Rejecting the notion that the modern world is disenchanted, rationalized, and inert, Bennett proposes a world alive with hybrids and the possibility for enchantment. Morphing creatures (like these designs) enchant as they “enact the very possibility of change; their presence carries with it the trace of dangerous but also exciting and exhilarating migrations” (2001: 15).
Such spaces are being imagined—and developed—by a growing number of biodesigners within the UK. The creation of living home goods invites anthropological attention: what kinds of care would an environment filled with such objects engender? What forms of self-understanding and relationality? In this paper, I explore how biodesigners developing such objects and materials imagine future ecologies and sociality. Such imaginings, I suggest, emerge from designers own experience of living with alive materiality: as many experiment with such biomaterial innovations within the context of their own homes, their homes become testing-grounds for such novel ecologies and their own expectations for care are confirmed, morphed, and complicated.