Paper short abstract:

Drawing on contemporary research into affects and objects (Frykman & Povrzanović Frykman 2016) this paper explores what affects do more than what they are. Focus is on the conflicts and struggles between siblings when a beloved summer house is to be passed after the death of the parents.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on contemporary research on affects and material culture (Frykman & Povrzanović Frykman 2016) and following the ethnographic tradition, this paper explores what affects do rather than what they are. I look at the conflicts and struggles between siblings that take place when the beloved summer house is to be passed on after the death of the parents. Grief, shock despair - as well as compassion and affinity - create a sensitive space where affects and emotions run wild. Interviews and answers to questionnaires show how the summer house emerges as sensitized, not simply a property to be for sale Frykman 2016, 2018). From childhood on, the house has taken on an existential dimension, like a Foucauldian (1971) heterotopia, the perfected place where life was lived at the fullest. The many physical experiences from foraging in the surroundings, fishing and swimming, putting up tents and building huts, making new friends and meeting older generations made this to a place where one could gain personal autonomy within a safe social setting. The material collected demonstrates how the particular habitus (Bourdieu 1977) related to the summer house can make antagonists out of the previously amicable inheritors. Some end up in court, are forced into therapy or part in fury never to speak to one another again. While ordinary emotions like anger and offence mostly are possible to put into words and come to terms with, the attachment to the summerhouse is at the one time more physically profound and cognitively more evasive.