Home Possessions

Material Culture Behind Closed Doors

Daniel Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000180930
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Although so much of the life we care about takes place at home, this private space often remains behind closed doors and is notoriously difficult for researchers to infiltrate. We may think it is just up to us to decorate, transform and construct our homes, but in this book we discover a new form of 'estate agency', the active participation of the home and its material culture in the construction of our lives. What do the possessions people choose to take with them when moving say about who they are, and should we emphasize the mobility of a move or the stability of what movers take with them? How is the home an active partner in developing relationships? Why are our homes sometimes haunted by 'ghosts'?. This intriguing book is a rare behind-the-scenes exposé of the domestic sphere across a range of cultures. Examples come from working class housewives in Norway, a tribal society in Taiwan, a museum in London, tenants in Canada and students from Greece, to produce a genuinely comparative perspective based in every case on sustained fieldwork. So Japan, long thought to be a nation that idealizes uncluttered simplicity, is shown behind closed doors to harbour illicit pockets of disorganization, while the warmth inside Romanian apartments is used to expel the presence of the state. Representing a vital development in the study of material culture, this book clearly shows that we may think we possess our homes, but our homes are more likely to possess us.

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Behind Closed Doors

Daniel Miller

In industrialized societies, most of what matters to people is happening behind the closed doors of the private sphere. The home itself has become the site of their relationships and their loneliness: the site of their broadest encounters with the world through television and the Internet, but also the place where they reflect upon and face up to themselves away from others. For this reason it is likely that people are paying increasing attention to their relationship to their own home, to its structure, its decoration, its furnishing and the arrays of objects that fill its spaces, and that they reflect back on it their agency and sometimes their impotence. It is the material culture within our home that appears as both our appropriation of the larger world and often as the representation of that world within our private domain. Yet precisely because it is a private sphere, an investigation that studies such an intimate relationship, a sharing that can only take place if we are ourselves are present inside these private homes, seems intrusive. Every chapter in this book is written on the basis of just such an experience: they are ethnographic encounters that took place behind the closed doors of domestic homes. We justified these, even where they were clearly experienced as intrusive, on the grounds that we need to understand, through empathy, the diverse ways in which this intimate relationship is being developed as the foundation to so many people’s lives.

As such this is not merely ‘another book about the home’. It is a volume that attempts to change our understanding of the significance of the home as a route to social and cultural analysis and to question some assumptions about what might have been thought to be the ‘obvious’ nature and implications of the home. It does so through developing and extending certain key insights and new perspectives. Given the multitude of books that have already been published on the topic of houses and homes, the primary purpose of this introduction is to highlight the several ways in which this particular book is an original and distinctive contribution to the topic. The book does not aim to be comprehensive; it is complemented by many other recent works on the home, some of which also emphasize material culture. It does not, for example, provide the same attention to the development of domesticity found in some of the contributions to Cieraad (ed.) (1999), or examine the house as instrumental in the localization and appropriation of global forms as found in some contributions within Birdwell-Pheasant and Lawrence-Zúñiga (eds) (1999), or consider the relationship to state and private institutions found in Chapman and Hockey (1999), or emulate the social–psychological approaches that range from Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton (1981) to Steedman (1992). Instead it concentrates on directly observing the processes by which a home and its inhabitants transform each other.

The study of home life is hardly new to anthropology. Indeed it is probably its core. Typically, in the ‘classic’ period of ethnographic enquiry, supervisors would instruct their graduate students that it was essential that they live in the homes of their informants, at the heart of a community. Not surprisingly the families that hosted them often became primary informants. Indeed the problem was often that they became the gatekeepers in determining the ethnographer’s relationship to other households. So observing the intricate details of such homes was central to fieldwork. But in most of the societies deemed appropriate to ethnographic study, homes were, relatively speaking, public places. In some cases male anthropologists may have had more difficulty gaining access to female ‘quarters’ that lay at the back of the house, but there was considerable fluidity between the world of work and the home. Artisan and agrarian activities often happened within the home and family life often took place in the public domain. So the study of the home could remain integral to the holistic ambition behind the classic ethnographic study.

Today, however, anthropologists find themselves increasingly exposed to quite different situations. One reason has been the rise of anthropology ‘at home’, which has required a meeting point with both the tradition of ethnology in continental Europe, but also of indigenous anthropology in countries such as Japan. Another was the increasing reciprocal exchange of anthropologists between all countries, and a third a growth of suburban-style private housing within regions of more traditional anthropological enquiry, and the spread of the ‘modern’ professionally constructed home (see Birdwell-Pheasant and Lawrence-Zúñiga 1999: 19–25). This volume and that which preceded it (Miller [ed.] 1998) contain several examples of anthropology ‘at home’. These include a Greek anthropologist studying Greeks, a Taiwanese anthropologist in Taiwan, and a French-Canadian working in Montreal. On the other hand they also include a French anthropologist carrying out fieldwork in England, an Irish anthropologist studying in Norway, and a Belgian anthropologist studying in Japan. But even anthropologists who were once situated in societies where residence for some might be in long houses complemented by menstrual huts, such as in New Guinea, now find they have to contend with the local rotary club and a suburbia marked by fences and guard dogs (for example, the recent work of Gerwertz and Errington 1999).

Contemporary material culture studies have placed themselves in the vanguard of anthropological acceptance of these changes. What they strive for is the maturity of true comparative studies, which does not separate out the study of Toyotas in Australian Aboriginal society as somehow more exotic than the study of Volvos in Sweden (see Miller 2001), and where any easy dualism of simple and complex but also colonial and colonized are transcended. The problem indeed is not that privatized households are new. Abundant historical and ethnographic research in Britain (for instance McKibben 1998) has shown that for some considerable time the working-class house has been rigorously privatized, and apart from kin, entry into the private home has been highly restricted. This separation of the private is, however, exacerbated when so much of the encounter with the larger world is through television and now the Internet: encounters that take place mainly within the home (see Morley 1992).

Ethnographers working in such environments often respond by carrying out their researches in a very different situation from traditional ethnography. Usually they do not live with a family, but visit. They find there is no particular community and there is no reason to expect that knowing one family will lead to an acquaintance with its neighbours. Indeed the relationship between neighbours may be cursory or antagonistic. In the absence of community there are fewer cross-references in the gossip and exchanges that take place. The home may have developed historically to become systematically opposed to other arenas such as work (Davidoff and Hall 1987, but see Nippert-Eng 1996). But if this is where and how life is lived, it is very hard to see a future for an anthropology that excludes itself from the place where most of what matters in people’s lives takes place. Furthermore there seems no likelihood that any other discipline will take up this challenge. For example, there has been a vast increase in media studies, which acknowledge the role of the home as the site of consumption (for example, Morley 1992), but these still largely rely on the focus group and questionnaires (methods that often produce quite the opposite results from ethnography; see Miller, Jackson, Thrift, Holbrook and Rowlands 1998: 79–89), and so the sense of both the experience and consequences of media consumption may be limited (with exceptions such as Hirsch 1992; Lull 1988). Early studies of the Internet that call themselves ethnographic actually just mean the experience of being on-line, rather than the relationship between that and off-line life (compare Markham 1998 with Miller and Slater 2000). The topic of consumption ought to raise the same issue, but while, for example, Clammer (1997) provides a highly informative book on consumption in Japan, what is missing is a sense of the private life of households.

Much of the motivation behind the contents of this volume and Miller (ed.) 1998 was the feeling that this is the single most important site for material culture studies. Tacchi (1998) for example, did not just accept the challenge of media studies within the home; she took the most private example of that encounter: the very personal relationship between individuals and their radios. In this volume it is not just that most of the papers include material from behind these closed doors but they include case studies from Norway and Japan, which present two of the most extreme national stereotypes of the intensely private domain. Nor was it regarded as sufficient just to have occasional access. Chapters such as those by Garvey and by Daniels depend on coming to know the strains and contradictions of household relations behind the apparent tight normative order of home life. In these as in other chapters this knowledge was obtained vicariously but effectively through a study that focused on the precise implications of the material culture within the home.

As will be evident in the chapters in this book, working behind closed doors does not constitute a simple dichotomy between the private and the public, which itself has been subject to a complex history (for example Sennett 1976, and Attfield 2000:177–201 who consider the implications for material culture). Clarke’s chapter demonstrates that the relationship between these two is found to be far more complex, with each having a place inside the other, and this theme of projection and interiorization is continued throughout. Furthermore, within the home there are equally complex relationships, because we cannot equate the private with the personal. There are many conflicts between the agency expressed by individuals, by the family, the household, and not least as we shall see the house itself, that make the private more a turbulent sea of constant negotiation rather than simply some haven for the self. This becomes clear precisely because all the chapters use ethnography to immerse themselves in the particularity of individual houses.

The study of the home from the perspective of material culture is not new to anthropology. There were many influential examples during the heyday of structural analysis and many since then. But the emphasis was on the home as a representation of normative order through symbolic contrast. The architectural structure of the home was found to have a shadow in its symbolic structure. Other approaches at that time emphasized the home as a stable foundation or anchor to kinship and domestic life. The first part of this book overturns the concomitant assumptions behind such approaches. By contrast these chapters emphasize the home as both the source and the setting of mobility and change. The second part of this book in turn acts as a critique of the dominant thrust of the literature that followed the decline of structuralist perspectives in the 1980s. That literature turned to the active agency of the occupants of the home: the home as a site of consumption and the ‘do-it-yourself’ process of people transforming their homes. Instead of looking at what we do with homes, the second part of this book examines what the home does with us. The concern is with the agency of the home itself. How this is conceptualized and made manifest.

The third part of this book uses both these previous insights to examine the dynamics of processes in which the transformation of the home is integral to the transformation of social relations, and shows how these develop in tandem. But it also highlights the messy and often contradictory nature of such processes. After considering each part, this introduction will conclude by returning to this initial concern with the significance of ethnographic work carried out in the private sphere. What this book demonstrates is what can be achieved through the focus upon the material culture of homes. But the promise it holds for anthropology as a whole lies in the degree to which so many other topics, from the organization of budgets to the process of socialization might be built upon the ethnographic foundations that are being laid.

Part One: Mobile Homes

If there was a pivotal study that re-launched the material culture of the home as a core topic in the development of modern anthropology it was surely the study of the Kabyle house by Pierre Bourdieu (1970). Although Bourdieu stressed the degree to which he was transforming the legacy of Lévi-Strauss by emphasizing practice and thereby time, contingency and strategy as against what were already by then coming to be seen as the more formulaic and static aspects of Lévi-Straussian structuralism (for example Bourdieu 1977), the study of the Kabyle house harks back to the core of structuralist teaching. In a sense it almost outdoes Lévi-Strauss himself in demonstrating how a series of core symbolic oppositions constitute the unspoken foundation for how a people express their beliefs about the world in material culture. For Bourdieu this habitat appears central to what he termed habitus. In the Kabyle house culture as a normative structure reproduces itself through a social order that is present more in the externalized order of the house itself than through some cognitive order inside the minds of its inhabitants.

Bourdieu’s was not the only example. Other anthropologists influenced by structuralism looked for homologies between the order of the house and other domains (for example Tambiah 1969). Indeed, so pervasive has this style of analysis become, that even a text by Weiner (1991) that announces itself as the absolute enemy of structuralist analysis through a claimed affinity with Heidegger is actually a fine piece of micro-structuralism delving into the precise symbolic oppositions constituted by the material culture of the house that would sit well alongside the Kabyle study, since it takes the structural order of the house as the basis for homologies with other expressive systems such as that of poetry.

If there has been a more progressive element to later studies of material culture and the home it has tended to be through a more traditional route of deeper and more subtle ethnography. Vom Bruck (1997) would be a case in point in her analysis of the Yemenite house. Along with this has been some repudiation of the ‘neatness of fit’ that came with Bourdieu’s homologies (for instance Halle 1993) and an emphasis on contradiction and the way the house may not reflect other domains but may itself become an instrument in resolving moral and other dilemmas. So amongst the best studies are Gell (1986) showing the house being used to avoid what is expressed in other domains or Wilk (1984, 1989) revealing the dynamics whereby the house might at one point express individualism within a collective ethos but later on be used in an attempt to suppress rising individualism. There has also been a considerable rise in feminist approaches. These tended first to follow from structuralism (and associated anthropological Marxism) in that they showed how oppressive structures of patriarchy were naturalized as ideology in the taken-for-granted order of the home (for example Ardener 1981) while later stressing the possibility for alternative sites of resistance (Moore 1986).

A greater sense of the house as a dynamic rather than a synchronic figure in the landscape has developed in part through recent historical research. For example, work in the Netherlands (see Cieraad 1999; de Mare 1999; Schama 1987) renders the architecture and material culture of the house as critical to the development not only of current concepts of domesticity but also civil society more generally (see also Frykman and Löfgren 1987 for Sweden; Comeroff and Comaroff 1997: chapter six for colonial Africa). In addition there has developed a greater attention to the intricacies of material culture (for instance Brydon and Floyd 1999) and the details of both provisioning of furniture (for example Auslander 1996) and the influences of states and commercial bodies on home interiors (for example Buchli 1999: 77–98; Forty 1986; Löfgren 1994; Zukin 1982).

In all these respects historians are developing perspectives that were already accepted in archaeology where house foundations are central to what survives. Archaeologists therefore tend to assign the house considerable significance in understanding long-term change. In addition the relationship between the house and associated material culture (such as tombs) has been central to archaeological methodology (see, for instance, Bradley 1996; Hodder 1984). What the chapters in this first part add to this trajectory is an appreciation of this same sense of the dynamic nature of houses as excavated from the more synchronic snap shot of ethnography. By emphasizing the house and its contents as a source a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Behind Closed Doors
• Part I Mobile Homes
• Part II Estate Agency
• Part III Building Relationships
• Index