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- Convenors:
-
Giacomo Pozzi
(IULM University)
Paolo Grassi (University of Milano Bicocca)
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- Stream:
- Everyday Life
- Location:
- Aula 28
- Sessions:
- Monday 15 April, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
We state that the politics, poetics, ideas, and practices of dwelling represent a privileged standpoint for uncovering how contemporary transformations are materialized, embodied and felt in everyday life.
Long Abstract:
Carsten recently argued that anthropology should be more engaged in "listening" to homes, not considering them just as objects, but as "interconnections between individual trajectories, kinship and the state" (Carsten 2018: 103). Taking into account Carsten's call, we state that politics, poetics and practices of dwelling represent a privileged standpoint for uncovering how contemporary transformations are materialized, embodied and felt in everyday life.
Anthropology has interpreted houses, on one side, as complex results of societal dynamics. On the other side, houses have been seen as active loci that promote changes in society. Without falling into determinism, we want to explore how societal transformations influence perceptions, praxes and ideas of house and, dialectically, how certain perceptions, praxes and ideas of house can retroact on those same dimensions.
These dialectical dimensions invite to consider houses as part of a wider process, that we could defined as "being at home". Many factors promote the theoretical necessity of interpreting different "being(s) at home": transnational migrations, social media, economic crises, wild urbanization, touristification, represent some of the phenomena that are changing the experience of dwelling.
In this panel, we are interested in tracking social changes - in a global perspective - from the peculiar point of view of houses. We are interested in papers that ethnographically explore the relationship between houses and everyday practices, between the broader "built environments" and their social contexts. In particular, we are interested in dwelling experiences that show how people deal with changes, in the forms of precarity, risk, and vulnerability.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 15 April, 2019, -Rosalie Stolz (Heidelberg University)
Paper short abstract:
What can we learn from the wide-spread transformations of houses? By taking the house and its transformations in upland Laos as a starting point, it is argued that houses manifest aspirations in particular intimate ways and are vital sites of future- and world-making projects.
Paper long abstract:
Modern houses and their "conspicuous construction" (Thomas 1998) are among the most prevalent and tangible manifestations of aspirations in contemporary Asia. The prominence of the house as a site of future-making project is related to its being "one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind" (Bachelard 1994 [1957]) The ways in which we experience and envision houses is related to how we experience and envision life more generally. Houses embody, as Janet Carsten (2018: 103) recently stated, "the interconnections between individual trajectory, kinship and the state" and "encapsulate traces of lives previously lived and reveal how these are forged in the shadows of wider structures". The new imaginaries of worthwhile architecture provide insights into transforming visions of the past and future.
The case of upland northern Laos will be of particular interest to this inquiry: Closely tied to the ubiquitous claims for progress and prosperity in developing Laos is the image of the villa. Made of concrete, with gabled roof and front veranda, this image triggers aspirations of development and is a prominent background image for retouched family portraits. While the current processes of socio-economic change in Laos have received increasing attention by social scientists, the role of local aspirations and their manifestation in ʻmodernʼ houses is hitherto unexplored. By focussing on the materiality of modern houses in relation to the transforming social processes and imaginaries, this talk will illuminate aspects of current socio-economic change in upland Laos and beyond.
Claudius Stroehle (University of Innsbruck)
Paper short abstract:
Globalization, tourism and migration lead to an increasing number of multiple homes, which link different parts of the world and evoke new practices of belonging. Based on an ethnographic research, this paper aims to analyze the history and present of cross-border dwelling within Austria and Turkey.
Paper long abstract:
"Double Homes, Doubles Lives?" was the key question of Orvar Löfgren and Regina Bendix in the 37th edition of Ethnologia Europaea. Globalization, tourism and migration lead to an increasing number of multiple homes that link different parts of the world. Which new practices of dwelling evoke in the process? How do residents of so-called double homes unite them in their everyday lives? Based on an ethnographic research, this paper aims to analyze the history and present of cross-border dwelling of Austrian-Turkish migrants.
Following the ethnological maxim to scrutinize 'big questions' in small and assessable microcosms, the study focuses on the transnational nexus of Stubai Valley in Austria and the region of Uşak in Turkey. Initiated by pioneer migrants and proceeded through family reunion, summer visits, marriages, communication and media, these two areas build a dynamic transnational social space (Thomas Faist). The ties and networks are sustained through remittance practices, i.e. sending and receiving of money, gifts, daily objects, but also of ideas, values, norms and social capital. All these attributes materialize in the migrants´ multiple houses: a confined rented company flat in Stubai Valley, a multi-generation-house in the city of Uşak or a single-family home with garden in the village of origin comprise the history of migration, the (myth of) return, the everyday life of circular dwelling and transnational participation and belonging. By combining material culture approaches with a transnational ethnography, this study examines the self-evidence of living in multiple homes.
José Mapril (Center for Research in Anthropology (CRIA), Universidade Nova de Lisboa)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on a long-term fieldwork among Bangladeshi-Portuguese, the objective of this paper is to show the articulations between households, extended families, transnational migration and notions of home and belonging.
Paper long abstract:
The main objective of this paper is to highlight the way extended families, as moral persons, are transnationalized and how these are associated with ideas (and practices) about the search for a 'good' life and the reproduction of the household status.
This argument is based on a long-term ethnography of Bangladeshi extended families living between Portugal and Bangladesh. Over the past 20 years, Bangladeshis in Portugal have reunited their families, invested in businesses and in their children's education, while maintaining a close relation with their non-migrant relatives in the desh (bengali word for home, in this case Bangladesh, see Gardner 1993), through economic and social remittances, rituals, the circulation of food, among other examples (tangible and intangible goods circulate in both ways, though). These forms of intergenerational participation and mutuality (Sahlins 2013) take place mainly at the level of the household and within extended families, and they reveal how the house, as a moral category and person, is transnationalized in a context marked by a search for a 'good life'.
Stefano Pontiggia (Politecnico di Milano)
Paper short abstract:
The speech will focus on two Tunisian towns grown around the local mining industry and will show how power and state action affect the way homes are built and lived. Three specific buildings will be described to make general assumptions about what homes can tell us about territorial marginalization.
Paper long abstract:
When they think about precarious dwellings, researchers usually refer to shacks, tents, and shantytowns all over the so-called Global South and the peripheries of Western metropolitan areas. Those informal, self-built homes are represented as concrete examples of extreme marginality. But what happens when we turn our sight to cities and territories that suffer from social and spatial marginalization as a whole? What houses and buildings can tell us about the way structural dimensions affect the way people live in their habitat?
The speech will focus on the built environment of Redeyef and M'dhilla, two Tunisian towns grown around the local mining industry. Here, power produced a specific mode of living and changed the territory in a peculiar way.
Three different buildings will be described in detail: the little studio I lived in between 2014 and 2015 during my fieldwork research; the "villa" that a young man living in Redeyef had been constructing for himself at the time of my research; and the houses in M'dhila that bear the signs of the open-air exploitation system.
These three examples will help to shed a light on the extent to which the colonial past, the political economy of independent Tunisia, and the contemporary lack of any urban planning interweave and create the conditions of a disadvantaged and precarious life. Finally, it will be possible to make some generalizations about the links among power, state action, and the way homes are built and lived.
Ana Chiritoiu (Uppsala University)
Paper short abstract:
'Gypsy palaces' have been analysed along external criteria such as appearance, costs, or the statements that they make for others. This paper discusses them as dwelling spaces where transnational financial flows intersect local daily lives and where relatedness is reshaped by spatial arrangements.
Paper long abstract:
Since their appearance in the nineties across Romania, 'Gypsy palaces' have sparked controversy. While the wider public is repelled by their bad taste or frustrated with the contradiction between their opulence and their owners' reliance on social provisioning, artists celebrate these mansions' 'confrontational' style (Gianferro n.d.), and anthropologists read their conspicuousness as the Roma's 'quest for recognition' (Tesar 2016:187). Prompting rumours that their owners do not in fact live in them, but in adjacent huts, these imposing (but often unfinished) houses belonging are usually depicted from the outside, in terms of the statements that they make for others.
This paper turns the analysis inwards, and discusses conspicuous Roma houses not only as statements of economic prowess and social respectability, but also as spaces of habitation—as homes. Describing the lack of spatial specialization, whereby a room can have several functions (bedrooms become living-rooms, and kitchens can serve as bedrooms) for various people at various times, and accounting for the aesthetic and functional intentions with which inhabitants invest their houses, the paper proposes an ethnography of Roma habitation. I show that these houses exhibit the Roma's preference towards shared and versatile spaces which reflect their view of sociality, and discuss how spatial arrangements reshape the relations between people. Focusing on the flows of personnel and money that intersect inside the house, I analyse Roma houses both as spatial renditions and as modifiers of Roma relatedness and sociality, against the background of wider society in relation to which they stand.
Jonathan Alderman (University of St Andrews)
Paper short abstract:
In the rural Bolivian Andes, personhood is defined by intersubjective relationships with nonhuman beings, including houses. This paper examines how the ontology of the inhabitants of houses and their relationship with nonhuman beings and the state is affected by changing materiality of their houses.
Paper long abstract:
In the rural Bolivian Andes, personhood is defined by intersubjective reciprocal relationships with nonhuman beings. This paper examines the role of the house as a nonhuman being in itself and as a conduit between its inhabitants and local place deities, and following a recent state social housing programme, how houses act as mediators with the state. In the rural Andes, houses are traditionally made from adobe (mud and straw). The house materially connects its inhabitants with the deities that reside on mountainsides, since it is made of the same substance as the mountains themselves, and it is this materiality that Catherine Allen (2014: 74) has described as constitutive of the house as a sentient being its own right. This paper will examine the social effect of changing materiality of houses, following a recent Bolivian state housing programme that has donated red-brick houses to rural families. The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork with the Kallawayas, Bolivian shamanic-healers, for whom the physical and emotional wellbeing of their patients depends on their reciprocal relations with the nonhuman beings around them. I will argue that through the changing materiality of the house reciprocal exchanges become partially redirected towards the state, as an assumed actor in relations of reciprocity through the houses as a "gift" from the state. Where the consubstantiality of the people and the adobe house created one assemblage involving the mountains, the state becomes part of a new material assemblage involving people and red-brick houses.
Francisco Martínez (Tampere University)
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores the way people might extend themselves outwards into the built environment by paying attention to the multiple meanings and maturing of Linnahall arena, putting the emphasis in the correlation between the materiality of buildings, lived experiences and maintenance work over time.
Paper long abstract:
Based on two in-depth interviews with Peter and Rein, maintenance workers of Linnahall, 25 informal interviews with visitors, and my own personal experience in and on the building, this paper examines how this building stands in a process of constant unfolding, being subject to renovation, extension, neglect; processes correlated with individual subjectivities and societal transformations.
The paper reflects about the life cycles of built forms, reconsidering the birth, death, and reconstitution of the built environment by analysing the different relations that emerge between buildings and people.
Linnahall is an iconic place in Tallinn and illustrates the dramatic identity of the city. This palace stands as both scatological and monumental, giving to the site an effectual energy. The consideration of this building as 'Soviet' poses the problem of how to present the biography of the site in specific terms and how to study the simultaneous maturing of people and buildings.
I thus advocate for treating the building as a curated ruin, establishing a set of measures that do not obliterate the offences of time and acknowledge the traces of the past.
Some lines of thought addressed by the paper are:
- What are the recognised stages of a building's life?
- Can we use human metaphors to study the buildings?
- In which ways do buildings store personal memories and social significance?
- How long should a building live?
- What discrete activities are engendered to maintain buildings alive?
- When or what is the ultimate no-return point that marks the death of buildings and their functional discontinuation?