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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:
We approach clutter as a trigger to critical reflections on the value of things and autobiographical materiality, thing-body assemblages that have a special meaning in people’s lives analyzing the ways in which people adhere value to objects and materiality in the everyday life.
Paper long abstract:
Domestic mess and abundance of things have become a problem in Western homes, which are full of things and new commodities. At the same time, mess, clutter and over-consumption have a strong moral charge: they have become signs of laziness and individual failure of organizing the house, and personal lives (Löfgren 2017; also Woodward 2021). It could be argued that there is a constant battle between chaos and order going on in Western homes. Recent research on clutter has emphasized, however, that we should not approach clutter as a nuisance or meaningless (Woodward 2021) but rather as something that forces people to engage with materiality, making decision about what to keep and what to throw away and thereby to reflect over the questions of materialism, wastefulness, consumption and everyday familial norms. In this vein, we suggest that clutter could be analyzed as a trigger to critical reflections on the value of things and autobiographical materiality, thing-body assemblages that have a special meaning in people’s lives. Scrutinizing interviews of 12 individuals (8 women and 4 men) about meaningful objects, we analyze the ways in which people adhere value to objects and materiality in the on-going processes of selection and safeguarding of things in the everyday life.
Literature:
Löfgren, Orvar (2017) Mess: on domestic overflows. Consumption Markets & Culture, 20:1, 1-6
Woodward, Sophie (2021) Clutter in domestic spaces: Material vibrancy, and competing moralities. The Sociological Review, 69: 6, 1214-28.
Paper short abstract:
When people become minimalists, their households and belongings change visibly. But in their everyday practices and narratives, their relationships to the things they now own is predominant. Building on an ethnography in 45 minimalist households, the talk will enquire this “new” balance of things.
Paper long abstract:
In an era of affluence and overflow, minimalism presents a way to live with mindfulness and care. Minimalists research and evaluate their surrounding and adapt it to a lifestyle of less, both in a material and social level (Derwanz 2022).
In the research project “Textile minimalists. Pioneers of sustainable action?” we have been researching 45 minimalist households in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, been on minimalist meet ups and a minimalist convention. We found that becoming minimalist is a process often described as a personal way. The first phase is the most recognizable when a massive amount of things is sorted out. But the minimalist everyday changes too when the relationship to the things that are left becomes closer. Two other sets of practices come into view, care and alternative forms of consumption that all re-arrange things (Derwanz and Strebinger 2021).
As relationship to things in the Global North have been framed through mass- and overconsumption in the last decades, things are evaluated for a different set of qualities, their lifecycle and the things that are needed to sustain them in the minimalist process. The talk draws on the notion of Dinguniversum (universe of things, Hahn 2015) to describe how things in a household are also depended on each other and visits other concepts in Material Culture to research their social lifes.
Paper short abstract:
A new kind of surfaces has emerged concerning the things and interiors of Danish homes. Increasingly, the aesthetics is oriented towards cleanness, practicality, transparency, and flexibility. When surrounded by surfaces that reject traces of the past, what happens to the capability of remembering?
Paper long abstract:
In Danish homes, something new is happening. The order of the interior gravitates towards fewer and more efficient things and rooms. A significant part of this change has to do with the surfaces becoming still smoother and more hygienic, dust refusing and easy to clean, qualified by their newness and lack of ability to receive information from their surroundings, and produced to reject wear and tear. Furthermore, many of the things are produced to be replaced if they are marked by traces or stains. IKEA-furniture, nano treated windows, TVs, and I-pads have in common that the patina of old age is rejected by their surfaces, lowering their level of remembrance-capabilities. This recurrent trope in my fieldworks in Danish homes over the years (1996-now) gives rise to some dilemmas. What happens when things are broken or scratched? What if the home is haunted? How do you recognize the inhabitants, if this surrounding is generic and flexible and stays hygienic and shiny? How to deal with time passing, when the social web of thing-space-inhabitants is challenged by smooth surfaces? All of this points to new perceptions concerning the social role of things and homes. How is “hygge” integrated into these settings? How do time-refusing things become part of social life? What are the balances between tableaux and secrets? Where is the clutter? These changes point beyond the social life of homes, suggesting that much more is in transformation towards efficient, practical, smooth lives, where oblivion replaces remembrance.