Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the massive investments – both psychic and economic – people make in the construction of a home in southern Benin. Indeed, building a home is locally a crucial marker of self-accomplishment and social distinction that many men experience as a site of acute pressure.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the massive investments - both psychic and economic - people make in the construction of a home in southern Benin. Indeed, building a home is locally a crucial marker of self-accomplishment and social distinction that many men experience as a site of acute pressure.

In fact, having one's own 'home' is, in Benin, a major source of social recognition, against which men are likely to evaluate their place in the social world. This is why everyone invests in a house that can become a real showcase for their success. In the upper classes, large multi-storey houses are built, increasingly surrounded by barbed wire walls. In the working classes, aesthetic concerns take a back seat, but efforts are made to build at least a few rooms, to install a false ceiling that would provide some insulation from the heat of the tin roof, and perhaps later to tile the living area.

The scale of the investments that working-class men make in the construction of their own homes also suggests a clear awareness of what is at stake, both in terms of differences in living conditions and in terms of the subjective distinctions that divide local social space. In fact, the economic strategies and social experiences of the men involved in the construction of these houses, in often uncertain conditions, reveal a dialectic between internalized norms and social pressures, whose entanglements support the urge to ‘realize’ a house which will testify to the social value of the owner.