House Life

Space, Place and Family in Europe

Donna Birdwell-Pheasant, Denise Lawrence-Züniga

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000213508
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy & Ethics in Science

This book, which fills a gap on the materiality of lived relations, examines households within the context of their immediate physical surroundings of home and shows how human interactions are reflected in built forms. Houses are dynamic participants in family life in many ways. They often pre-date the origins and outlast the life spans of their inhabitants, but they can exert a powerful influence on the organization of behaviors and the values of family members, as well as on the forms and flows of family life across the generations. Constituting wealth, investment, security and inheritance, they are an objective in and of themselves in many domestic strategies. Drawing on developments within anthropology, archaeology, architecture and social history, the authors demonstrate, through detailed case studies, how household or family relations can usefully be mined to re-situate social theory in both space and time. Space, boundaries, family cycles, historic changes, migration patterns, ethnicity, memory and gender are all interrogated for the light they shed on how people interact with the physical world around them and what this means culturally and symbolically. Europe is an especially rich focus for this kind of analysis because it is distinguished by its long, well-documented history and a recent period of intense change.

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Introduction: Houses and Families in Europe

Donna Birdwell-Pheasant and Denise Lawrence-Zúñiga

Humans require shelter, and for hundreds of millennia we have built such shelters for ourselves and our families when and where we have needed them. The shelters we build have become one of the several symbols of our very humanity, in which our vulnerability, sociality, ingenuity, and creativity contend and coalesce and find expression in material form. Our lives and our houses intertwine in a thousand ways.

Exactly when humans began to construct shelters and conceive of them as “home” is impossible to tell. The tendency for the same group of individuals to return repeatedly to a favored spot for activities such as food sharing dates back probably to the earliest ancestral species of our genus, Homo habilis (Potts 1984, 1988). It was habilis’ descendant Homo erectus who likely mastered the use of fire more than a million years ago, thereby transforming the habituation of a space into a place of habitation. With fire there was security and warmth and light (Fisher 1983: 198–9; Clark and Harris 1985), and a fuller range of human activities could be safely conducted in and around one central place. Some of the earliest built shelters known to archaeologists are found in Europe, at Terra Amata, France (de Lumley 1969; Binford 1981; Stringer and Gamble 1993).

Houses and Anthropology

Anthropologists have generally tended to treat houses as a backdrop, a setting with props where presumably more interesting and important aspects of the drama of human cultural and social life are played out. The implicit definition of “house” – alternatively known as “dwelling” (e.g. Oliver 1987) or subsumed under “domestic architecture” (e.g. Kent 1990b) – that emerges from the anthropological and archaeological literature refers to a built form where people sleep, eat, socialize, and engage in a variety of economic, symbolic, and other activities that sustain the people who use it. The house shelters from the elements both people and their resources, including equipment, furnishings, food stores, and animals, as well as sacred paraphernalia and symbolic goods.

Clark Wissler (1923) included houses under the rubric of “shelter” as a critical component of the universal cultural inventory of human beings, and Murdock listed “housing” in his 1945 “partial list” of human universals. The latest treatment of human universals (Brown 1991), contains exactly one sentence about houses: “The UP [Universal People] always have some form of shelter from the elements” (1991: 136). Brown does not even mention that this shelter is built, much less refer to the rich range of meanings with which these “Universal People” are wont to endow even the simplest “shelter from the elements,” nor the deep emotions that emerge as they make it their home.

Lewis Henry Morgan’s Houses and House-life of the American Aborigines (1981 [1881]) was one of the first anthropological works to address the role of the house in domestic social organization. Malinowski’s 1913 definition of family specified a group of kin occupying “a definite physical space, a hearth and home” (Collier, Rosaldo and Yanagisako 1987). Subsequent definitions of other kinship groups have also emphasized the salience of co-residence (see Parkin 1997: 146), implying thereby some sort of residence or house.

In recent years, archaeologists, historians, and ethnographers alike have gravitated toward the household rather than the family or other kin group as their preferred unit of analysis, accentuating the need for a deeper understanding of the house in anthropological analysis. Archaeologists’ partiality to the concept of household is easily explained by the materiality of the house as a recoverable feature in excavations and the identity of households with activities that have clear material products and correlates (Rathje 1981, cited in Netting, Wilk and Amould 1984; Collier, Rosaldo and Yanagisako 1987). Historians have found census records conveniently organized into households, while ties of kinship and family more often must be inferred from disparate records of births, marriages, deaths, and legal transactions. Many ethnographers, too, have come to favor the concept of household. At its best, “household” describes an economically and socially important unit that – to the extent that its members are associated with (if not consistently co-resident within) a specific dwelling – can be successfully and usefully bounded in space and (somewhat less successfully) in time as well. The difficulty in defining temporal boundaries for households was alleviated somewhat through the development of the notion of developmental cycles in domestic groups (Fortes 1971 [1958]; Goody 1971 [1958]). Anthropologists have also sought to generate typologies of households in terms of morphology and function (Netting, Wilk and Amould 1984).

Some anthropologists have seen a conceptual opposition of “household versus family.” Netting, Wilk and Amould state: “While both households and families are culturally defined, the former are task-oriented residence units and the latter are conceived of as kinship groupings that need not be localized” (1984: xix-xx). Wilk then argues for the priority of task-orientation over co-residence by observing that the Kekchi households he studied in Belize cannot be defined on the basis of co-residence, but rather “on the basis of the activities of production and distribution” (1984: 224). Wallerstein and Smith define the household as “the social unit that effectively over long periods of time enables individuals, of varying ages and of both sexes, to pool income coming from multiple sources in order to ensure their individual and collective reproduction and well-being” (1992: 13). Lasletťs operational definition of co-residence includes not only elements of economic cooperation, but also procreation and child-rearing (Laslett and Wall 1972).

Writing on the Balearic Island community of Formentera, Bestard-Camps found that it was “necessary to make an analytical distinction” between household and family, since this distinction “can be observed in the everyday discourse of Formentera, where a universe of kinship and a universe of locality are quite evident” (1991: 75). He goes on to insist that family and household must be treated as “two principles of social classification and organization that do not belong to the same universe of discourse” (Bestard-Camps 1991: 75).

But family and household are impossible to keep separate. Even studies that take the family as the ostensible unit of analysis include implicit consideration of the house and household. Families must be housed. Donald Pitkin, for example, found the question of house-building to be an integral element in the life of a Calabrian family, whose history he recounts in his monograph, The House that Giacomo Built (1985). Furthermore, our anthropological definitions of the family still sometimes include – either explicitly or implicitly – a criterion of co-residence, even though family life is not completely contained within residences, and households may even include key members who are not regularly co-resident (Brettell 1986, 1988; Wilk 1990). Laslett introduced the concept of “houseful” to separate mere co-residence from the functions of mutual support and domestic cooperation that are essential to households and/or families (1983: 514).

Our anthropological concepts of household and family are not in opposition; they do not define separate realms of discourse. Family (for which the primary reference is kinship) and household (where the primary reference is locality) not only belong to the same universe, they are mutually constituting, with the house itself often serving as the mediating element. It is most often the house that permits us to define households; it is the indispensable reproductive and social reproductive role of family that makes such definition worthwhile. The two concepts are neither congruent nor interchangeable, but they are, at every level beyond the merely anecdotal, absolutely inseparable. They are not alternative mechanisms for the classification of social life.

Both households and families use houses more than as settings for “activities of production and distribution” (Wilk 1984: 224) or as consumer goods (Wilk 1990). They are also mechanisms of communication (Blanton 1994), which channel and regulate social interaction among family members and between separate households (Segalen 1983). Houses are as much cultural constructions as they are built forms. The house defines a place that “belongs to” a particular set of people and also defines, through co-residence and shared usage, the set of people that “belong to” a particular place. The propensity of some Europeans to identify people by their house names rather than the other way around highlights this point (Bestard-Camps 1991; Pine 1996; Gafĭm 1996: 95–7).

Architectural scholar Amos Rapoport credits anthropological research with focusing attention on the power of built forms to carry meaning and evoke sentiment (Rapoport 1982). Wilson has described the house as “a technical and cognitive instrument, a tool for thought as well as a technology of shelter” (1988: 5). Through their capacity both to signify appropriate behaviors and to accommodate them, house forms and their resident social groups are mutually constituting. Furthermore, as the built environment accumulates more significations through its historical associations with human occupation over time, understanding their meaning must be approached via the total cultural context of which they are a part.

Among the most fundamental symbolic messages found in houses is the coded distinction between public and private space. Wilson notes that “domestic walls divide space between the public and private, a division that is most important for the development of both the avoidance and the enhancement of human attention” (1988: 5). This division, he notes further, entails “possibilities for concealment” as well as “opportunities for display” (1988: 5). All physically bounded domestic spaces are private to the extent that they allow household members to control access to themselves, perhaps to conceal or hide behavior from the view of others or manage the knowledge others have about them; public spaces, in contrast, are those located beyond the boundaries of home where residents have little or no control. Within the home itself, however, spaces are further differentiated by control of access, often relegating some spaces to group activities or hospitality while others accommodate individual and intimate activities. The “front stage” refers to spaces where the family presents or displays itself and entertains outsiders, while the “back stage” indicates areas of presumably greater individual control where household members prepare, rest and seek solitude. Archaeologist Richard Blanton classifies features of house form (including size, number of specialized rooms, hierarchical layout, spatial complexity, elaboration of symbolic content and external decoration) in terms of two general dimensions – canonical and indexical communication. While canonical elements refer to “back region” and interior elaborations of gender, generation and rank that communicate primarily to residents, indexical elements are “front region,” exterior elaborations that indicate status and wealth to those outside the household (Blanton 1994: 10).

While anthropologists may have cued scholars in other fields to the capacity of houses to convey meaning, we still have much to learn from them about the physicality of the house itself. Taylor (Chapter 9) explores the role of ideas about the built environment in the development of general anthropological theory, accessing works of philosophy and literature as well as social theory. He observes that in both England and America, social science developed “in disregard of things (and bodies)”.

Other anthropologists (e.g. Kent 1990a; D. Lawrence and Low 1990) have recently turned toward scholars in architecture and history, as well as other social and behavioral sciences such as environmental psychology, sociology, and geography, who have devised various approaches in an effort to place the immense physical diversity, social complexity, and cultural and emotional content of houses within a comparative and/or evolutionary context. Architectural approaches seek to identify the multiple factors responsible for the production of particular built forms distinguished by size, scale, volume, massing, proportion, solid-void relations, level changes, plan, materials, color, decoration, placement of permeable elements, and so on. These explanations typically concentrate on materials and methods of construction, adaptation to climate and environment, expertise of designers/builders, accommodation of organized social groups, and symbolic expression (see Oliver 1987, 1997).

Rapoporťs voluminous and encyclopedic writings include one of the earliest comparative discussions of domestic architecture, House Form and Culture (1969). Resisting the notion that house form could be explained exclusively or simplistically in terms of environment, availability of materials, or “tradition,” Rapoport articulates an explicit but unfortunately linear scheme linking house form and culture, one that emphasizes sociocultural factors modified by environmental and technological constraints. Rapoport argues: “What finally decides the form of a dwelling, and mo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: Houses and Families in Europe
• Part I: House, Family and the Construction of History
• Part II: Houses and the Construction of Family Life
• Part III: House and Symbol – The Power of Constructions
• Author Index
• Subject Index