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- Convenors:
-
Filipa Ramalhete
(Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa)
Maria Assunção Gato (ISCTE- Instituto Universitário de Lisboa)
- Stream:
- Home
- Location:
- A113
- Sessions:
- Monday 22 June, -, -, Tuesday 23 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Zagreb
Short Abstract:
Panel focused on the concept of home and material culture considering that the social and architectural expressions of values and inhabitation manners are an expressive portrayal for multiple changes which characterize contemporary societies and a base to ethnographical studies of home and dwelling.
Long Abstract:
Despite the widespread recognition that Home is a highly relevant subject - in social, cultural, identitary and symbolic terms - and the extensive disciplinary tradition on this topic, there seems to be an apparent resistance of contemporary anthropology (ethnography and ethnology included) to work on domestic space in Western societies (Cieraad, 1999).
However, in recent decades, relevant work about the house, its material culture and the relationship between architectural and cultural changes has emerged (Löfgren, 2003). The studies reveal, on one hand, the complexity of the relationships established between home, residents and objects, and, on the other hand, that both domestic space and manners of inhabit embody important changes that are taking place in contemporary societies (e.g. Carsten and Hugh-Jones, 1999; Miller, 2001; Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton, 2002).
This panel invites researchers to present papers on studies regarding houses, objects, forms, values, practices, relations and other aspects involving the culture of domestic space. We specially welcome papers crossing different disciplinary frameworks, allowing diachronic analysis, comparing traditional and contemporary values, demonstrating evolutionary meanings, and portraying different social and economic contexts.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 22 June, 2015, -Paper short abstract:
Rebuilding postwar Northern Norway was based on ideals of equality and wellfare. A unform settlement gave the impression of a homogenous society. Social and ethnic diversity was no longer visualised. To what degree were ideals as these realized and how did the population experience the process?
Paper long abstract:
Home means a lot to most people's lives and the way people organize their daily life, but the right to a home is not a given right. All over the world we learn that people lose their home, due to economic causes, actions of war or natural disaster.Loss of home often reveals what home means to people. So does the homes that replace the lost ones.
At the end of WWII the population in Northern Norway was forced to evacuate the region. Buildings and infrastucture were burnt down and destroyed, a major catastrophe to the region and its population. Soon after the liberation of Norway, central authorities startet planning to ebuild the region, and the population gradually returned home. Rebuilding Northern Norway was carried out as a big scale planned and regulated project. Plain, colorful, functional houses were built, chracterized by plain interiors and modest use of building materials.
The new built houses were based on ideals of equality and wellfare for everyone. The rebuilding of Northern Norway still has many unanswered questions. A major question is to which extent were the ideals of equality and wellfare reached. Another is whether society became more homogeous, or social and ethnic diversity were concealed and maintained.
Paper short abstract:
This paper looks at the inflationary practice of home-renovation (remont), the perforation of the home by new communication technologies and the increasing importance of cars as alternative private spaces that requires us to rethink conventional notions of home as a spatially bounded entity.
Paper long abstract:
During socialism, housing and people's efforts in making a home were largely regulated by the state and socialist ideology. The shortage of housing in urban centers had a serious impact on processes of home-making, too. Architects were required to make use of apartment space in the most economical way possible. Thus, interiors and material objects -the way a proper home should look like- were subject of the state's interference in people's everyday life and privacy. With the privatization of houses after 1991, newly gained freedom in designing home-interiors resulted in dwellers' inflationary practice of remont, i.e. renovating and transforming homes according to personal taste and newly emerging standards of interior design. This practice has become the main strategy to personalize formerly standardized dwellings but also a strategy to increase the market value of apartments by using nuanced labels of differently hierarchized remont-activities. Based on my fieldwork in Baku/Azerbaijan, I will discuss changing notions of home and what different meanings it can acquire in different social contexts. On the basis of such meanings, I argue, that the home is transgressing the spatial boundaries of the house in distinct ways. The materiality of technologies such as internet and smartphones have led to the perforation of homes in a way we should ask ourselves in how far ideas and values of home are changing with regard to people's actual use of it. Furthermore, I will demonstrate how and why cars have to be considered as integral part of the home, accordingly.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how contemporary migrants from Eastern Europe in Scotland negotiate emotional and physical distances through materiality and everyday practices, and experience interrelated imaginaries of a future, restlessness and actuality.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on the theory of lines that Tim Ingold suggests, which brings understanding of how people move, and think, and expresses the power of connection between actuality and imaginative reality, I am exploring through biographical narratives and personal things how Lithuanians in Scotland re/create and experience home. I am researching how objects, routines, memories, affects and media flows are interlinked in a domestic space, how individual struggles and coping strategies are in correspondence to new (imaginative or not) opportunities in the process of migration.
Paper short abstract:
The home as sphere of private freedom and individual self-fulfilment in fact is regulated from ‚outside'. This can be demonstrated investigating heritage-protected residential buildings. Tenants eligible for social housing are involved in a the struggle for good taste against ordinary 'bad taste'.
Paper long abstract:
Buildings sometimes exist, simultaneously in different ‚value spheres' (Max Weber), have different social meanings and ‚lives' at the same time (Appadurai 1986; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998). This particularly applies to lived-in monuments. Taking the case of the Vienna Werkbund Estate (1932) this paper addresses these different lives of modernist model homes and raises the question of how the ‚second life' as heritage affects the ‚first life' as home and habitat. Based on ethnographic fieldwork the impact of the houses' upgrading to heritage status on the residents is examined. In what way has heritage status changed the residents' attitude and relationship to their houses? Can practices showing acceptance or resistance be identified? How do residents deal with restrictions of monument preservation? Based on the assumption that heritage is not a "thing" but a social process involving power relations (Smith 2006), this paper reveals the hidden structures behind monument protection. The process of ‚purifying' preservation is presented as a cultural struggle in which a normative aesthetics (implicitly incorporating notions of architecture as ‚original' and ‚correct' habitation) is enforced against culturally destitute residential groups. It is argued that heritageization not only fosters identification, i.e. the residents' pride to live in much-valued cultural objects, but also has exclusionary effects.
Paper short abstract:
The purpose of this paper is to understand how technology has been assimilated within the Portuguese household insofar as in the everyday lives of the interviewees who accepted to be part of this endeavor.
Paper long abstract:
All interviewees belong to the middle/high-class for three generations and live in Oporto, in a prestigious neighborhood (Foz).
This social class is a criterion, established from the beginning, based on the assumption that families with higher purchasing power shall have earlier access to technological goods. In addition, by not belonging to the wealthier class, and consequently not being able to afford many servants, these families may have felt an earlier need and/or curiosity for instrumental items. The narratives of members belonging to the three generations were analysed individually and comparatively, in order to understand the effects of the uses of technological artifacts in the relationships between them, the spaces they live(d) and the different times of their lives. Reshaping of practices and values were perceived, along with the changing uses of the domestic and personal spaces.
Paper short abstract:
During the last 15 years the cave-houses have evolved due quickly from a traditional house to a touristic product. In parallel to this "evolution" the cave-houses still inhabited by locals have also changed in order to resemble the urban housing.
Paper long abstract:
The cave-houses were a traditional house in south-eastern Spain until the 1980´s, but due to emigration, new housing and the pressure of local and regional governments, underwent a process of abandonment during almost two decades. However at the beginning of this century, the cave-houses began a process of revival thanks to the arrival of British immigrants looking for a vacation or retirement home and also thanks to local promoters who transformed the caves in rural hotels.
On one hand, the new inhabitants have introduced a new use of rural elements and a new aesthetic, which have not been fully accepted by the locals. This aesthetic recreates an idealized rural past, using both tools and elements of agricultural work, as modern materials not fully compatible with the underground dwellings.
On the other hand, those neighbors who still live in cave-houses have adapted their homes to urban standards, so that at present there are two types of cave-houses coexisting. This parallel evolution is developing without involving a clash between two movements.
Meanwhile, local and regional authorities have been considering the caves as a kind of substandard housing, to promote them as a traditional and heritage item.
Paper short abstract:
The paper aims to carry out a genealogy of some features of domestic décor processes in late modern Madrid (1986-1999), so to draw the traits and ambivalences of the private imaginaries and symbolic economies emerged from making-home cultures in a recently democratic and incipiently globalized city.
Paper long abstract:
When facing the last three decades, certain milestones seem to have taken centre stage in the historiographical narratives on social and cultural transformations in Madrid: the political transition to democracy, the countercultural movement of the Movida Madrileña and the socioeconomic globalization. All of them have been profusely analyzed and refracted through their crystallizations in the public sphere, overshadowing not just the deep, albeit uneven changes occurred in the private sphere, but even more the heuristic consistency of domestic culture(s). Indeed, a diachronic analysis of the evolution of domestic décor from the eighties onwards, kaleidoscopically carried out on furnishing consumption, aménager practices and décor discourses - the poietics of appropriations, uses and tales (De Certeau, 1980) -, reveals these dimensions of home-making as an unexpected, yet extremely sensitive indicator of social and cultural changes in late modern Madrid. This paper will focus on an inaugural period (1986-1999), combining interviews with the analysis of decoration magazines, domestic scenes from selected filmography and the archives of important furniture retailers. The processes of home-decoration (Garvey, 2001) should help us to decipher the emergence of private imaginaries and symbolic economies of furnishing (Potts, 2006), as well as their ambivalent relationships with the known and the new: the reinscription of familiar legacies and other elements related to moral investitures of home as such, according to traditional politics of belonging; and the incorporation of lifestyles and objects from abroad, fancied from a possibly new-born domestic cosmopolitanism (Nava, 2006).
Paper short abstract:
Taking Viennese co-housing projects from the 1980ies as an example, the paper discusses how utopias of solidarity are materialized in a building and how they are transformed over time by means of material interventions and everyday practices.
Paper long abstract:
Compared to Germany, the Netherlands and other Northern European countries, Austria does not have a strong tradition of collaborative planning and co-housing projects. However, a number of such initiatives were realized in the 1980s and the early 1990s, trying to develop alternative models of dwelling and new forms of community as a critical reaction to the increasing individualization of households.
Taking two of the most influential projects from this period as an example, the paper first analyses how different utopias of solidarity, one evolving from a religious background, the other from a rather left-wing movement, materialized into concrete buildings that were specifically designed to accommodate a certain form of social life. Specific architectural features that will be discussed are, for example, the thresholds between private and shared areas. Having considered these, I will further elaborate on how the ideals of co-habitation have transformed over the past twenty years and on how this is reflected in the material appropriation of the dwelling environment, for example through the implementation of visual barriers as a means of delimiting one`s private sphere, as well as in day-to-day practices such as closing and locking doors.
Paper short abstract:
How older people experience feelings of ‘being at home’ through their negotiation of material, spatial, temporal, ideological and social elements of residential homes.
Paper long abstract:
In their promotional literature, residential homes for older people invite potential residents to 'make our home your home' by encouraging them to bring possessions and furniture from their previous home, so that their room will be familiar and comforting to them. Previous research has focused on how personal belongings can help residents make 'successful transitions' to residential accommodation, and help them 'maintain' a sense of individual identity. In this paper, I suggest that such research pays insufficient attention to how feelings of being at home are experienced and created through everyday practices and future aspirations, as well as through continuities with the past.
I present findings from my own ethnographic fieldwork in two residential homes for older people in northern England. Interpreting my findings within a conceptual framework of home derived from the work of Mason (1989), which suggests that experiences of home encompass material, spatial, temporal, ideological and social elements, I focus on three key themes: how the built environment and care culture influence residents' use of space and experiences of privacy; the use of material culture in developing and maintaining social relationships within the homes; how the objects in their rooms contribute to residents' feelings of 'being at home'.
Conceptualisations of home in older age as being rooted in the past, ignore how homes and identities are dynamic and fluid phenomena. I argue that the residents in this study foster a sense of belonging and feeling at home through ongoing, everyday practices, and future aspirations.
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on the home sharing abroad students’ experience, in result of the students exchange programs, especially in what concerns new ways of living, from lifestyle to house rules.
Paper long abstract:
During the 20th century, European urban lifestyle was rooted on the home sharing tradition of family-based pre-industrial living rules (Löfgren, 2003; Cieraad, 1999; 2002). Nevertheless, these patterns definitely changed, in multiple ways, and are expressed in various phenomena, one of which is home sharing abroad for students exchange programs (Ramalhete, 2014).
Since when young people shared their family homes and lifestyles from birth until marriage - and often after it - until the present, where millions of youngsters (man and women), often from different origins, rent and share a house or an apartment in a foreign country for a limited period of time, times definitely changed, as did the cultural values regarding domestic roles, their virtues and vices. We are now in presence of new mobility patterns but also of new lifestyles and house rules.
The homesharing experience comprises aspects such as the quest for a suitable place to rent, the establishment of house rules, encountering cultural differences, dealing with conflict management on living areas, one's property or on dividing the shelf space in the refrigerator, finding levels of understanding and compromise (often in more than one language), and, of course, usually implies also a lot of fun, as partying plays an important role on the whole studying abroad experience. More or less conscientiously, domesticity is under discussion and new territories of the public and private realms are explored. The presentation will reveal some results from a research based on Portuguese architecture exchange students regarding the domestic use of home sharing.