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- Convenors:
-
Lizette Gradén
(Lund University)
Jessica Enevold Duncan (Lund University)
Eleonora Narvselius (Lund University)
Tom O'Dell (Lund University)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- SUSTAINABILITIES
- Location:
- Room H-204
- Sessions:
- Thursday 16 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel revisits the topic of homemaking against the background of current socio-cultural conditions and through the optics of the ongoing debates about sustainability, heritage, and home in ethnology, anthropology, folkloristics, critical heritage studies, and memory studies.
Long Abstract:
In many representative domains, particularly the cultural heritage sector, re-conceptualizations of domesticity detectable in changed approaches to planning, design, and presentations of the home have been a focus of discussion for a long time. The dominant cultural discourses that tend to view the home as a singular space, located in one place and time, clearly gendered and beyond the reach of big politics, have been challenged multiple times.
This panel revisits these topics against the background of the current socio-cultural conditions and through the optics of the current debates about home in ethnology, folklore, anthropology, critical heritage studies, and memory studies.
In a time in which sustainability issues are of extreme importance, how are homes being pulled together in new ways to address sustainability challenges, and how do conceptions of identity and heritage inform the choices people make as they get on with the business of homemaking?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 16 June, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
Building upon interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, this paper focuses upon a thatcher, and his role in waking and maintaining a wider public interest in a fading craft. This paper focuses upon homes with thatched roofs, cultural entrepreneurship, and heritage making in museum settings.
Paper long abstract:
Gamlegård, Kulturens Östarp, von Echstedtska Manor Värmland’s Museum, and Oktorpsgården, Skansen. These are three disparate farmhouses scattered across Southern Sweden whose histories have very different trajectories. What unites them are their roofs, a craft, and a man. They are all buildings that are understood to be important expressions of Swedish cultural heritage with thatched roofs that have been laid by the same thatcher. For visitors to these museums, the farmhouses and their thatched roofs constitute a picturesque and somewhat romanticized representation of the Swedish past. For the thatcher, roofs mean a livelihood and a crafting process that has been used for thousands of years, all over the world. For an increasing number of customers outside of the world of museums, the thatched roofs are sought after as a sustainable and environmentally friendly manner of covering a home. The relationship between the individual craftsperson, the material, and the crafting of traditional knowledge is central to the dynamics of culture, implied in studies of humanities and lucid in studies of ethnology and folklore. Building upon interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, this paper focuses upon a thatcher, and his role in waking and maintaining a wider public interest in a fading craft.
Paper short abstract:
In this presentation, we will scrutinize home as a constellation of materiality and affects, considering what kinds of objects might be crucial in reconceptualizing the feeling, sense, and atmosphere of a sustainable home.
Paper long abstract:
The Western way of life overflows with objects; they are literally everywhere. In our everyday lives, we deal with an abundance of items, most of which are saturated with numerous social and cultural meanings. Some of the objects surrounding us are everyday necessities, practical items, or tools, but many are objects of consumption that serve to build status, strengthen identity, or express taste. The objects we have at home also refer to many, different places, and times. Certain objects are related to a specific memory at a certain point in life and remind us about a past event or important people in our lives.
In our research project SENSOMEMO, we scrutinize sensory and affective experiences that are intertwined with personal memory in the context of both voluntary and forced relocation. We ask what kind of role do materiality and objects have for recreating a feeling of home? How do we value material objects, and make decisions about keeping them? And what kind of questions do we need have to think about in the future, if we wish to set off towards ecologically and culturally sustainable lives: Can we keep as much in the future as we do now? In this presentation, we will scrutinize home as a constellation of materiality and affects, considering what kinds of objects might be crucial in reconceptualizing the feeling, sense, and atmosphere of a sustainable home.
Paper short abstract:
Living a rural life is a commonly held ideal in Latvian society. This study of the informal dwellers of Lucavsala island in Riga shows the adaptation of this ideal to an urban environment. Their choice is a legally unstable, but economically and environmentally sustainable housing solution.
Paper long abstract:
Lucavsala is an island in Riga, the capital of Latvia. Despite its proximity to the city centre, this territory of 150 hectares is mostly underdeveloped and covered by cultivated and abandoned allotment gardens. Lucavsala has gained media attention in recent years because of the tensions between professional urban developers and the gardeners and many cases of gardener houses suspiciously burned down. The focus of this study is the informal dwellers of the island who live there permanently and seasonally. This study contributes to other recent scholarly discussions on informal dwellings in Europe (Gagyi, Vigvári 2018, Hilbrandt 2021). The Lucavsala dwellers’ motivation to live on the island often corresponds to the ideal of a rural and nature-based lifestyle that is generally admired in the Latvian society. The inhabited garden houses are small-size, mostly DIY folk architecture examples created using recycled materials. Modern technologies, alternate power sources and simple communal organisational solutions deal with the lack of electricity, water pipes, sufficient waste disposal, and security system. This type of housing is both low-cost and exclusive, considering the closeness both to the urban centre and the natural landscape and resources. The gardening allotments rely on short-term one-year contracts which contradicts the economically and environmentally sustainable living solutions of the dwellers.
Paper short abstract:
How can techno-sensory ethnography be used to grasp hidden dimensions of domesticity? I will extend the role of atmosphere in the home to include that which is beyond normal human perception, that which can only be noticed and felt through technological enhancements of the human body.
Paper long abstract:
A home is as much defined by its flows as its walls. What flows in, out and through a home, and how does the beyond seep into the interiorities that are conceived as the domestic? How could we grasp these flows?
This presentation extend the discussions of atmosphere in human habitats to include dimensions that are beyond human perception, and that can only be noticed and felt through technological enhancements of the human body and its cognitive registers. It will explore hidden dimensions of domesticity. This methodological approach will be discussed as a kind of techno-sensory ethnography.
As part of this exploration I will also discuss the concept mundanisation, and address the importance of ignorance and perceptive filtering when establishing feelings of domesticity. I will then demonstrate how mundanisation as well as domesticity can be challenged through probing and techno-sensory experiments that might unveil even uncanny dimensions of the home.
Paper short abstract:
The topic is ‘Urban Jungle’ homes, which refers to how young people furnish their homes with a huge number of green plants. These may be regarded as a way of creating a home atmosphere and a life in urban areas surrounded by nature. The close relationship to plants is regarded as of importance to save nature and the planet.
Paper long abstract:
Urban Jungle is an expression referring to how young urban people furnish their flats with lots and lots of green plants. This paper addresses questions of how plants have become increasingly important in the process of creating a home atmosphere, a place to belong. The topic invites many aspects; plants may be a hobby, a DIY-project where creativity is a way to make personal and individualistic homes while at the same time, through social medias, make them part of global subcultures. Relationships between plants and plant owners are also important. Sometimes plants are treated as children and friends whilst some envisage their plants as part of a family. Thus, the boundaries between plants and people are blurred and the plants’ roots transcend both time and space. Offshoots link them to other landscapes and other generation. Plant-owners express satisfaction with living an urban life surrounded by nature. Some of the most profiled green jungle enthusiasts stress how green plants are vital; they have power and they must be protected. They breathe life. As a green wave flashes over the globe, green potted plant may be regarded as sustainable element in everyday life: the green potted plants in urban flats express a way of living that helps protect the planet. Theories connected to atmosphere, emotions, and entanglements are important in the study.