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- Convenors:
-
Michael Ann Williams
(Western Kentucky University)
Gabrielle Berlinger (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Send message to Convenors
- Stream:
- Home
- Location:
- VG 3.107
- Start time:
- 29 March, 2017 at
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
Investigating the ways in which individuals build and interpret their domestic spaces, panelists draw upon contemporary ethnographic fieldwork, historic preservation efforts, and archival research to question the meaning of "home" from the ground up.
Long Abstract:
From the perspective of American folklore studies, this panel investigates the ways in which individuals across the world build and interpret their domestic spaces. How do actual circumstances and ideal desires come together in the design, construction, and use of ordinary dwellings and landscapes? Exploring the reaches of the category "vernacular architecture"— the everyday structures and landscapes that we shape and that shape us in return — panelists draw upon contemporary ethnographic fieldwork, historic preservation efforts, and archival research to question the meaning of "home" from the ground up. Case studies emphasize the adaptation of home design and redefinition of "traditional" construction in the contexts of migration, socio-economic distress, and gentrification to demonstrate how varied notions and manifestations of "home" are necessary to mediate between individual will and social circumstance. Local histories and marginalized voices come to the fore as the physical spaces of family dwelling and community gathering are analyzed as objects of material culture, revealing builders' and dwellers' values, customs, and beliefs. This panel is sponsored by the American Folklore Society.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
The sukkah is a temporary architectural form built to symbolize the domestic space. Its construction is the foundation of the observance of the annual, week-long Jewish festival of Sukkot. This paper examines the contemporary material and interpretive diversity within this tradition of Jewish home-making.
Paper long abstract:
The sukkah is a temporary architectural form built to symbolize the domestic space. Its construction is the foundation of the observance of the annual, week-long Jewish festival of Sukkot. This paper examines the material and interpretive diversity within this tradition of Jewish home-making. For seven days, inside this ritual shelter, observant Jews eat, pray, socialize, and sleep. Builders and users of these shelters construct them according to religious prescription and informally-learned practice, but their decoration and interpretation are shaped by individual experience and creativity. Offering examples of these vernacular constructions across the United States and Israel today, I consider the construction, re-construction, and deconstruction of historic, current, and future circumstances through this dynamic Jewish material practice.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the role of ornamental ironwork as an instrument of spatial mediation between growing fears of violence and the desire to conserve the porch and other traditional spaces and their uses within the Puerto Rican home during the twentieth century.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores three functions of ornamental ironwork found in modern Puerto Rican homes; security, creation of beauty, and the preservation of customary uses of space. Ornamental iron railings were installed as screens that covered home porches and open roofed carports (marquesinas) between the 1960's and 1980's as a response to increased violence. As a result, residents were able to conserve traditional uses of the liminal spaces between the interior and exterior of the buildings with highly ornate railings. Building technology changed rapidly during the twentieth century through ambitious modernization projects that sought to replace wood and thatch dwellings with more durable concrete structures modeled on the International Style. Houses from all economic levels would adopt these new forms. The ornate ironwork introduced in the latter half of the twentieth century had not been part of the previous vernacular or modernist vocabulary. Ironworks limited physical interactions yet allowed for air, light, and sound to pass. This created a semi-open space that allowed for relaxation and entertainment, a function traditionally associated with the front yard made up of padded earth known as the batey. Aesthetic considerations were taken into account in the railing designs and patterns were often adapted to elegantly fit specific buildings. Long a staple of the Puerto Rican urban landscape, concrete buildings covered in ornamental ironwork became a rarer sight in the late 1990's as dwellings abandoned the open porch and carport and became hermetically closed, once again changing people's relationship with domestic space.
Paper short abstract:
In the 1960s and 70s, the New York City Puerto Rican tradition of building casitas began as a grassroots response to urban renewal’s effect on the urban landscape. Transforming abandoned space into places to feel at home, this paper examines Casita Rincón Criollo, one of city’s best-known casitas.
Paper long abstract:
In New York City, "casita" (or "little house") refers to the small Puerto Rican structures and community gardens that dot landscape, tucked amongst the high-rise structures that dominate the skyline. In the 1960s and 70s, urban renewal, industry relocation, and other factors created a growth in vacant and abandoned property. Concerned individuals began to take action. It was against this backdrop that the New York Puerto Rican tradition of creating casitas and gardens on vacant city lots began. Turning these spaces into places to feel at home, casitas were designed to physically evoke the vernacular architecture and environment of Puerto Rico. Sites included wooden structures as well as gardens and other recreational amenities as places to gather and share. Casitas tended to be built as impermanent structures because community members often erected them illegally on abandoned lots. Such was the case with Casita Rincón Criollo, built and founded by José "Chema" Soto around 1970. One of the city's oldest and best-known casitas, Rincón Criollo is known most significantly for its role as an important incubator for the musical genres of bomba and plena in the region and nation. In 2011, the American Folklore Society Working Group in Folklore and Historic Preservation Policy began a pilot project to recognize Rincón Criollo on the United States National Register of Historic Places. The on-going project, despite its many challenges, has important ramifications for Rincón Criollo, as National Register listing is a cornerstone in US preservation policy.
Paper short abstract:
Archival documentary resources provide rich resources for analysis of place and space
Paper long abstract:
Ethnographic archives provide rich resources for the examination of regional/local place-making, community aesthetics and practices of self-representation through a focus on built spaces and sites as revealed in collections material. A corollary is that the examination of content in collections is inextricably linked to a conjoined analysis of the possibilities and limits of the ethnographic imagination and documentary practices that underlie the production of that content. This paper introduces an ongoing mass digitization and access project at the US national library that will provide rich, multi-layered views of the practices of everyday life in local settings for use by research scholars, communities of origin and the general public. The analysis of visual documentation contained in field surveys conducted over the course of three decades (1970's- 90's) aims to generate a conversation about place, space, cultural production and re-production in rural and urban communities across the United States in late twentieth-century America.
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on the changing manifestations of domestic spaces, from temporary roadside dwellings to permanent housing structures, in Ireland. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, it explores the intersections of folklore, memory and modernity in ways of dwelling and meanings of home
Paper long abstract:
Diverse ways of dwelling in the landscape, transient versus permanent structures, nomadism as opposed to settlement, and competing interpretations of 'home' have particular resonance in modern Ireland where issues surrounding homelessness are prominent in social and political discourses.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork and folklore studies, this paper explores the concept of home from a nomadic perspective. It details the design and building of such 'temporary' structures and the conceptual constructions of home, public space and landscape. This study also examines the transition from temporary to permanent dwellings and how issues of marginalisation and ideologies of progress impact on different communities' representations of home.
It will be argued that these temporary dwellings were not, in fact, temporary in the minds of those who inhabited them but resonated with history, familial and community relationships, cultural continuity and attachment to particular landscapes. The control and restriction of geographic living space, economic developments and the socio-political drive to modernity have impacted on both the physical dwellings themselves and the ideological representations of home. Yet, for some marginalised communities the ongoing construction of a narrative of home on the road provides a challenge to those dominant discourses which privilege permanence over transience and settlement over mobility.
Paper short abstract:
The changed physical environment of living changed the way of life of those who moved from the countryside to the city. They were forced to change their notion of home, and I was curious what kind of change was this and how is it represented nowadays, almost 40 years after they moved to the city.
Paper long abstract:
Socialist blocks of flats in Romania were built in 1960-1989 specifically for those who moved from the countryside to the city because of the industrial growth. Newcomers brought their furniture, objects, and in addition their customs, habits, beliefs and tried to domesticate the new areas. They changed not only the way of spending their work and spare time, but their household objects too. The differences between the rural house and the new flat were significant: tight spaces in the new flat, unified rooms and kitchens, low-grade materials. On the other hand, they had the advantage of the bathroom and the central heating. Ideal desires of living - formed and determined by the traditional community - and the circumstances did not match. They tried to shape the environment, and the structure shaped them in return.
The case study investigated how people from a block of flat built their homes: what remained from the traditional way of life and got new meaning, and how many and what kind of new elements came into the everyday life. Teachers, engineers, factory and office workers with rural origins and their homes were investigated.
Paper short abstract:
Important places (i.e. specific points in space) matter when people experientially form their conceptions of home. Important events (specific points in time) matter, too. Home is a personal relation to both history and geography at the same time.
Paper long abstract:
The role of historical consciousness could be easily seen when people's perceptions of their home were studied in Merafong municipality in Gauteng, South Africa in 2015. The research data were created by ethnographic methods in twelve group discussions and one outdoor group walk with a total of more than one hundred informants. The project is implemented by the University of Helsinki and the South-West University, South-Africa.
The informants were heard in groups. Instead of interviews we preferred pictorial and verbal elicitations. Special interest was shown in personal memories and the descriptions of homely landscapes. The memories and landscapes revealed in the data were understood as interpretations of home. These are important places (geographical interpretation) and events (historical interpretation). A third group of interpretations was found in meta-stories that are collectively present in society and in personal experiences of people. The most striking of such meta-level factors in Merafong was the importance of mining.
Paper short abstract:
Based on fieldwork-data on Neopagan witches in Berlin, the paper explores the ways the protagonists of a still marginal form of religiosity dwell in the city and creatively (re)interpret the rather secularized urban landscape as a manifestation of “home” of their beliefs and self-understandings.
Paper long abstract:
Based on ethnographic material on Neopagan witches in Berlin, the paper explores the ways the protagonists of a still marginal form of religiosity dwell in the city and creatively (re)interpret the rather secularized urban landscape as a manifestation of "home" of their religious belief and self-understanding, with sites where they most intimately can communicate with their deities and ancestors. By "Reclaiming" the divine in the urban habitat witches hope not least to experience a form of "wholeness" in their everyday structure of life - an experience that witches so dearly feel missing in the modern era. Analyzing the ways witches "reclaim" the divine in the urban context as a form of creating "home" and thereby a feeling of "wholeness", the paper draws close to the places of rituals and divine encounters in the city: the domestic spaces as well as public places, i.e. parks, and communal grave yards. How are these sites aesthetically designed and constructed via ritual practice? What kind of religious material culture and thereby imaginations come into play and get transferred into witches` ´ordinary` life routine? How again, does the protean (symbolic/physical) landscape of the city of Berlin seem to insist with intensity on itself, so witches have to adapt their religious ideas and performances to it. As the analysis should make clear: Neopagan witches might be part of a global movement, however, by negotiating between their worldviews and the immediate urban environment, they create a specific "Berlin" way and everyday structure of witchcraft and thus find home in Germany`s capital.