Paper short abstract:

Habitat-making is open to a variety of conceptualizations. The ethnographies in this panel show “encounters” between expert and dweller’s practices with a broad range of material, affective, sensorial and poetic implications. I will further elaborate on three features of the poetics of daily life, namely: signature, displacement and closure.

Paper long abstract:

As a concluding comment on the whole panel, I will reflect on ways of figuring “home making”, both at the empirical level –that of the dweller’s practices- and at the meta-level of expert strategies and analysis (where anthropological reflexivity can be placed). More specifically, I will focus on (a) different conceptualizations of the nature of the “encounter” (or “negotiation” or “contact”) between the knowledge, power and narratives embedded in expert and dweller’s practices that stem from the papers presented; (b) the poetic nature of daily life as production of meaning --through practical displacements of signifiers, as well as through discursive and cognitive resources of closure, of which the key notion of “signature” (Szendy) stands as a main instance; (c) the contrast between some of the dominant contemporary tropes for figuring the intimate sphere: the (posthuman) Sinecdotical Body vs. the (classical, humanistic) Holistic Self.