Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the enduring values and meanings within ordinary contexts of 'maintenance, mending and repair' in relation to houses, homes and buildings, and which enable for 'the past' to endure and remain in our contemporary modern world that normally constantly aims at 'newness'

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents research on ordinary contexts of 'maintenance, mending and repair' of houses, homes and buildings, which may be seen as bearers and upholders of endurance and socio-material cohesion. The practices of maintenance, mending and repair mediate temporality (enhancing the past-in the present, for the future) in a way that indicates an a-modern and anti-modernist production of the material world. They are what Thrift (2009) referred to as 'glue' amounting to a resource in the face of the anthropocene. These contexts of concern comprise laypersons or officers providing particular knowledge and skills, as well as craftsmen/women. Theoretically our research is framed by the concept of "orders of worth" developed by (Boltanski and Thèvenot 1999). Instead of considering taken-for-granted routine interactions and conflict resolution, we approach the modes of justification, institutionally linked discourses embodying specific orientations generating actions and evaluation, as well as "regimes of engagement" (Thèvenot 2007). Empirically, we aim to identify the core sets of values and meanings of mending, maintenance and repair of buildings, and their interplay. We will evaluate the contribution of these core values in their material entanglement and in relation to the global challenges of sustainability and the survival of the earth. Moreover, we aim to frame the common contexts of 'mending, maintenance and repair' in terms of ethics. In particular, we will explore how the experience of repair may entail a capacity for reconciliation, sharing features with ethical and political decisions -- material, social and emotional attachment.

Paper short abstract:

The reuse of American style houses and ‘half a skyscraper’ from the 1950’ies in a rural Norwegian landscape is a tourism attraction about displacement. Is is also about maintenance and renovation and repairing the recognition of a community's own migration past.

Paper long abstract:

Between 1910 and 1980 many Norwegians from the peninsular of Lista in Southern Norway, travelled to Brooklyn, New York City, America. They worked as carpenters, construction workers, house-keepers and service-staff in shops and restaurants. Many crossed the Atlantic several times as migrant workers.

The local Norwegian dialect became highly affected by American language. When they went home from 'Junaiten' (United States) they brought along new status symbols of the American lifestyle: cars, furniture, kitchen appliances, industrialised food, clothing and household articles.

Around the rural Norwegian landscape, they build private suburban homes - American style houses. They re-settled and repaired their Norwegian anchoring on American dollars, styles and measurements.

Tourism often shed light on local traditions and local peculiarities. This Lista-Brooklyn community in Southern Norway participated in a heritage tourism research project where the goal was to re-use the American style houses homes and 'half a skyscraper' as attractions for tourists visiting.

This paper discusses what kind of repair-processes the community had to deal with in order to create a total heritage destination. 'Repair' is in this sense defined as maintenance and renovation of heritage buildings, but repair is also understood as emotional and social processes: the community negotiated the need for preserving the buildings; the relevance of autobiographical history and the recognition of one's own past although it pointed towards social conflicts.

Paper short abstract:

By looking into an old house inhabited by her owner since 1950, this research aims to analyze the "long life cycle" of objects and its relationship with the making of home. Particularly interest is given to the stages of this cycle: arrival, maintenance, repair, storage, reuse, forgetting, and disposal.

Paper long abstract:

Not many years ago in Santiago-Chile, it was a great deal to buy a brand new refrigerator, a new carpet, or the latest drill. Prices were significantly higher and the availability and variety was generally reduced to a few stores in Santiago´s commercial district. Additionally, purchasing was an exceptional practice in a domestic economy where it was common to owe things that were second hand, exchanged, inherit, found, self-produced, re-adapted or received as a gift. Furthermore, low purchase frequency was in direct association with objects that were usually designed, produced and, maintained for a long life cycle.

Today, changes in the market and new consumption practices have dramatically shortened the path from new to obsolescence, and multiplied the amount of objects passing through our houses. Although disposal and replacement are seen as new critical paradigms of contemporary life, subaltern practices holding on to old domestic objects, still remain strongly among elder generations and territories remote from capitalism.

By looking into an old house located in downtown Santiago, inhabited by her owner since the 1950s, this research aims to analyze objects characterized by a long life cycle, and their relationship with the making of home. Particularly interest is given to the different stages of this cycle, from the object's arrival to everyday practices of maintenance, repair, storage, reuse, forgetting, and disposal. The study suggests that each of these particular phases constantly reinterprets and transforms the relationship between the house, the objects and the residents.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will focus on the repair practices developed by a Portuguese Hindu community to overcome their own group identity crisis, closely linked to marginality and to the financial crisis of the surrounding society.

Paper long abstract:

Invisibility is one of the characteristics of the Indian origin community in Portugal. For Hindus, recent years have seen an increase of this visibility, resulting from complex refurbishment processes that these groups have developed to cope with the financial, cultural and identity crisis of the last decade.

Used to build multiple belongings, younger generations were progressively moving away from the older one, creating a generational gap that threatened the continuity of the group. This phenomenon will be discussed based on the ethnographic reality of a Hindu community of the Great Lisbon area, connected to the expansion the Shiva Temple of Santo Antonio dos Cavaleiros (Loures). This analysis intends to examine the repair practices that allowed the reconciliation of generations and, consequently, contributed to the consolidation of the community ties, previously in crisis.

The confidence in the public space is represented by the efforts to build a temple that will replace the existing temporary building, in a time of social transformations that deepen affected many members of this community and spurred many of them to re-migration processes.

Finally, the relationship of this community's members with things will also be discussed, either the new temple or the small personal items, in order to understand the symbolic weight of things that act as portable heritage, in the identity construction processes of this group, as well as in the interaction with the surrounding society.

Paper short abstract:

Using biographical vignettes and some reflective narratives of Austrian Holocaust survivors, this presentation questions the meanings of repair/recovery in the context of home, loss and intergenerational recreation.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on the idea that repair "entails responsibility, care and expectations about the future" this presentation discusses former Austrian Holocaust survivors' experience with and reflections on the intergenerational memory project 'A Letter to the Stars', conducted in Vienna in 2008. In it more than 200 mainly Jewish survivors/guests, most of them accompanied by one of their grandchildren, returned to Austria for a week to share with the young generation in contemporary Austria their life-stories of suffering, exile and renewal. In their narratives and in the organisers intention, repair featured centrally as an organising albeit contested theme. With agents from various generations, direct and indirect experiences of violence in need of healing and different roles in the narrative process, repair thus turns into a highly complex experience of diverse perceptions.

Starting with some biographical vignettes and survivors' reflective narratives of these intergenerational encounters, this presentation thus asks about the meaning of repair in the context of home, loss and intergenerational recreation. Considering that repair potentially functions as a mediator between a carefully revisited past and a tentatively expected future as well as between imposed centres and peripheries the presentation explores how anthropological notions such as reparation, healing and reconciliation help further our understanding of 'repair' in its manifold manifestations.

Paper short abstract:

The recent increase in sales of Swiss mechanical watches in Hong-Kong has brought a significant number of repair requests. Consequently, firms have transferred skills from Switzerland to HK to secure workforce on-the-spot. How “Swiss” techniques are appropriated by HK workers in dealing with secrecy?

Paper long abstract:

Ninety-five per cent of the watches produced today in Switzerland are intended for export. During the last fifteen years, Greater China has become the first importation market for Swiss watches due predominantly to the growth of the Hong Kong (HK) market. This has especially concerned high-end mechanical pieces, which are perceived as the most prestigious products due to their sophisticated production and maintenance. Their rapid increase in sales in HK has proportionally expanded the number of repair and servicing requests.

This phenomenon has led numerous Swiss, HK and Chinese firms involved in the business to develop new knowledge management policies for providing on-the-spot "Swiss Standards" technical servicing. Consequently, various forms of know-how transfer from Switzerland to HK have been implemented in order to train local workers (e.g. implementation of training courses given by Swiss watchmakers, opening of "Swiss" watchmaking schools).

On the basis of an ongoing ethnographic research in a vocational training school and service centres in HK, this paper aims to address two issues in order to shed light on the ambiguous world of Swiss watches: first, how repair techniques strongly associated with Swiss culture are appropriated daily by HK watchmakers? In what ways does the transnational circulation of these skills renegotiate the so-called "Swiss" standards? Second, as Swiss firms have to teach their technical knowledge in Asia for maintaining their profitability, do their members worry about the loss of know-how and copying? How professional secrecy is strategically used in these knowledge transfer initiatives?

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores reparations of dilapidated urban sites in a Serbian copper-processing town. It focuses on how repairs, ambivalently seen as 'fake' and 'at least something', had power to constitute affective "politics of simulation" in the context of the town's industrial revival.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores reparations of dilapidated urban sites in a mono-industrial town in Serbia. After a prosperous period during Yugoslav socialism, there was an economic, social and symbolic decline of the town's copper-processing company during the 1990s. The paper looks at the recent moment of political promise that brought a new horizon of hope for a better life and the promise of economic growth through revival of the rundown industry. The reparations the paper focuses on were carried out by the industrial company in the context of this 'revival'.

The paper explores how these repairs entailed a capacity for parody, mimicry, and simulation since they were seen by the residents as deceits, temporary, partial, fake and superficial, and were still praised as "at least something". I analyse this ambivalence and I argue that it allowed the state and the industrial company to become challenged but also reinvigorated and imbued with expectations. The second part of the paper focuses on the relationship between notions such as "fake", "real" and simulation (of the revival) and on their political potential. I explore how material repairs, which carried moral, social, emotional and affective attachments, had power to constitute the "politics of simulation". I analyse this in relation to the town's peripheral position in Europe and in Serbia.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores narratives about "peripheral repairing" by means of land rehabilitation in the post-industrial, post-mining region of the North Bohemian Basin, Czech Republic.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores narratives about "peripheral repairing" by means of land rehabilitation in the post-industrial and post-mining region of the North Bohemian Basin, Czech Republic. Drawing on textual representations by official and semi-official bodies from the post-socialist period, the paper identifies key features and images/ideas of the newly emerging landscape and its role in creating a new identity of the region. Based on readings of textual representation (methodologically informed by discourse analysis, see Wodak 2001) the paper shows how ideas of land rehabilitation in this region draw on imaginaries about its historically rooted 'natural' substance, referring to its historical backgrounds. The main element that plays a key role in 'inventing' the new identity of the region is water, referring to former existence of small water bodies in the region until the 19th century. The role of water in the newly emerging image of the region is its capacity for reconciliation by smoothing the mined-out surface of the local landscape. By bringing the post-mining region back to the state of natural order, the previous period of socialist 'disorder' is to be effaced. In the process of 'repairing' entirely new identities are emerging and so is the narrative about a future lake landscape or "Czech Finland". I argue, that we witness a construction of both the past and future in an effort at accounting for the creation of a new landscape -- one that is at the same discursively referred to the past and likened to an aesthetically pleasing landscape-to-be in the future.

Paper short abstract:

The recovery of past things is one of the most common symbolic instruments used in negotiating belonging and adapting to changes. This paper examines practices of repair and the ways in which those practices shape new socio-material environments in four cities (Berlin, Tallinn, Tbilisi and Lisbon).

Paper long abstract:

Using qualitative ethnographic methods, the paper builds the argument around case studies from day-to-day mending, personal re-appropriations and affective transmissions, demonstrating that repair is more than a technique: it also entails responsibility, care and expectations about the future, bringing to light coping mechanisms, temporal regimes, inter-generational ties and the correspondence between small scale materiality and the pace of social change. Repair shows anthropological density; the relevance of repair is not that it happens, but the values attached and its existential implications. As my research shows, repair has consequences for how we think for social relations in a form of redistribution of the sensible and ordinary affects through the transmissions occurring between material objects and social actors. In that sense, practices of repair are relevant to understand quotidian answers to economic hardships, but also how different generations come to terms with the past, solidarity knots within communities, and the re-articulation of the public space.