Home, Materiality, Memory and Belonging

Keeping Culture

Rachel Hurdley

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230230286
• eBook ISBN: 9781137312952
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Assembling Mass Observation Archive material with historiographies of family, house and nation from ancient-Greece to present-day Europe, China and America, this book contributes to current debates on identity, belonging, memory and material culture by exploring how power works in the small spaces of home.

Part I

Pasts: History, Archive and Memory

1

Histories of Domestic Fire

It is part of our condition that the purity for which we strive and sacrifice so much turns out to be hard and dead as a stone when we get it ... Purity is the enemy of change, of ambiguity and compromise. Most of us would indeed feel safer if our experience could be hard-set and fixed in form.

(Mary Douglas 2002 [1966]: 162–163)

Introduction: writing history

This chapter examines scholarly and expert writing about four developmental phases of domestic fire in Europe: the hearth, fireplace, mantelpiece and, finally, objects displayed on mantels. The first problem is material ‘evidence’: what has survived and, just as importantly, what has not. Stone and wood, rich and poor, male and female: what now can be seen of them? Second, I will stress how points of view re-emerge and transform, to demonstrate how ‘coherent’, taken-for-granted explanations fall apart under sustained scrutiny. This is not a ‘timeline’ of the mantelpiece, but a messy assemblage of diverse traces (Law 2004; Savage 2007). This ‘throwing together’ re-orders seemingly coherent historic narratives to highlight the gaps between them, where different interpretations become visible.

The ‘hearth’ has certainly been a focus for anthropological attention. For example, Janet Carsten’s absorbing ethnography of a Malayan fishing village, The Heat of the Hearth (1997), analyses eating/cooking practices, kinship/familial and gender relations in connection with the division of work and space, among other topics. Although I discuss the social history of the hearth, there are two significant differences from work such as Carsten’s. First, the end point of this historiographical survey is the ‘cold of the mantelpiece’ in the houses where there is no longer, or never has been, a cooking hearth. That distinction elicits the second: despite connections between such ethnographic studies of long-established kinship/family societies, centred geographically around the village, house and hearth, and social histories of traditional European/American life around the cooking fire, there has been no critical examination of the similarities and differences between there/then and the ‘social life’ of the contemporary mantelshelf above the fireless fireplace. If the house is a primary ‘structuring structure’ (Bourdieu 1977), it is so completely implicated in ongoing processes of meaning-making (and thus, power) that every aspect of its historiography and current, specific manifestations invites analysis. Nostalgic discourses of ‘family, hearth, shrine, tradition’ and the peculiar ways in which these interplay with counter-rhetorics such as individualism, taste and modernity deserve close attention. The cold mantelpiece, both detached from and attached to the ‘hearth’, is an ideal location for producing critical understandings of how these discourses make history, home and identity.

The historiography of architecture is complex and approached from many different perspectives, such as the global (Fletcher 1989), continental (Pevsner 1963 [1943]) or period-specific (Long 1993; Fernie 2002). Architecture can be included in a more general historical survey of a ‘civil-isation’ (Boardman et al. 1988); a country (Foster 2004); the everyday life of an historical period (Quennell and Quennell 1937); an artistic movement (Greensted 2010); or colonialisation (Herman 2005). Public or larger domestic buildings and large-scale architectural trends have often been the focus of architectural publications, although cultural, regional specificity and vernacular or smaller domestic structures have had more attention recently. Buildings of a particular region, such as northern New England (Garvin 2002), houses of a region (Johnson 1993) or a type or period in that region might be the focus (Gowans 1986). Perhaps the writer or editor will draw together global vernacular domestic forms (Oliver 2003), the ‘ordinary’ British house (Barfoot 1963) or the history of a single Chinese family home (Berliner 2003). Studies of building and design technologies can focus on a single person (Fazion and Snadon 2006), a specific technique (Peterson 2000), the use of a material (Reinberger 2003) or a particular form, such as the grid, manifested in the brick (Higgins 2009).

Frequently, the development of the fireplace is incorporated into these studies, mentioned only in passing, pictured as part of a room or used to illustrate a particular point about the principal subject. The exterior might be the writer’s main concern, particularly in works on historical architecture, accompanied by photographs, sketches and architectural drawings. Historical interior architecture is easily portrayed for extant buildings such as palaces, grand houses and public buildings, but drawings and descriptions of ruined or much-altered interiors must be reconstructed through the expertise of archaeologists and historians, and (this is the nub) through conjecture. The deployment of con-jecture (from the Latin verb conicere, to ‘throw together’) makes reading treacherous for the researcher. While the writer might take care to point out that, by their very nature, domestic interiors, particularly of the less wealthy, are poorly recorded, and materials such as wood, pottery and fabric are prone to perish, it is all too easy then to ‘throw something together’ that makes sense as a coherent narrative.

The next section will focus on modern texts about hearths in ancient Greece and Rome. This is not an assertion that the Roman/Greek hearth and associated cults or displays are the foundation stones for all current practices. As Goffman (1986) argued, myth and folklore are key referents in social performances. While there are many origins of the ‘hearth’ myth, I have selected this thread precisely because it is embedded in the cosmology for western European and American architecture.

Hearths, ancient and modern

When authors write about something as solid and unambiguous – it seems – as the domestic hearth, it is tempting to attribute the same substantive qualities to the text. By contrasting 19th-, 20th- and 21st-century writing about the hearth, we can see how Victorian certainty dissolves into present ambiguity. In tandem, parallel views of contemporaneous texts show how these are simply accounts – versions – of the hearth. Between the criss-crossing beams of light they throw upon the past, we may glimpse a shadow of something that might have been.

Authority and authorship

The canonical Latin dictionary by Lewis and Short (1879; see Perseus 2012) is still in common use. It is based on someone else’s translation of a Latin– German dictionary, which was first revised by its original German writer, then by an American scholar. Its genealogy is outlined in its full title (rarely used): A Latin Dictionary: Founded on Andrews’ Edition of Freund’s Latin Dictionary: Revised, Enlarged, and in Great Part Rewritten by Charlton T. Lewis, Ph.D. and Charles Short, LL.D. While Short, as befits his name, addressed only the letter A, Lewis had the rest of the alphabet to contend with. Such detail seems hardly worth bothering with; however, the cutting out of parts, even of dictionary titles, also deletes the multiple traces of this authoritative text. Similarly, traces of the ancient hearth have been variously outlined over the last two centuries, as we shall see.

According to Lewis and Short, focus has a number of subtly different meanings. It can signify the hearth or fireplace, but can also act as a metonym ‘to signify one’s dearest possessions’, home and family. This was due to the placing of Lares, the gods of the household, in niches on the hearths, ‘and for them a fire was kept up’. The term arae et foci (the altars and hearths) is common in Roman literature as a collective term for country, gods, home and family (for example, in the histories of Sallust and Livy). Virgil uses focus powerfully in his epic Roman poem, the Aeneid, to denote a funeral pile and the lyric poet Propertius signifies an altar by the same word. In addition, focus (or its diminutive foculus) could signify a moveable fire-pan or brazier, which might also be used for religious purposes – and was the same form as braziers used on public altars for fire and/or blood sacrifice.

Twenty years later, the American classical scholar Harry Thurston Peck edited an Encyclopaedia of Classical Antiquities (1898; see also Perseus 2012). This details the different types of Roman heating and cooking devices, their various uses and positions in the ancient house, and their association with domestic worship. Peck describes a gradual move from a single-roomed dwelling, where the Lares (household gods) were placed near a hearth used for cooking, heating and domestic worship, to a multi-roomed house which included kitchen, chapel, bedrooms and atrium (central courtyard). Many houses were centrally heated by hypocausts, underfloor water pipes heated with a furnace stoked by slaves. Although there is some doubt concerning the precise uses of different heating and cooking devices, the detailed descriptions, resting on source material from ancient writers, Pompeian houses and other archaeological remains, seem highly authoritative. Another, more modern authority on Roman architecture, Frank Sear, draws on the 1st-century Roman Seneca’s Epistle 44, where he ‘remarks that an atrium “crammed with smoke-blackened images” was a sign of the old nobility’ (Sear 1992: 33). Like Lewis and Short, Sear states that the hearth for the Lares was in the atrium. While the Victorian dictionary takes the Roman authors as its authoritative source, Sear uses both literary references and the ruins at Pompeii and Herculaneum. In contrast, other writers claim that the altar of the household gods was associated with the cooking hearth in the kitchen (Camesasca 1971: 419; Perring 2002: 192).

Although this comparison of brief statements raises some uncertainty about the place and uses of the ancient hearth, the texts gloss over the many variants, dependent upon region, wealth, house form, social organisation and cultural specifics. This might be due to lack of available evidence, necessities of space, an authorial focus that lies elsewhere, or a particular readership. It might be because the authors were working from other texts they assumed were authoritative and universally applicable, although this is conjecture. However, it is possible to look at other modern, expert scholarly texts in which uncertainty regarding the authority of ancient texts, modern assumptions and the lack (or poor recording) of material evidence is openly acknowledged. It is precisely the space in-between these ambiguities where these scholars work. A brief look at four authors’ texts will demonstrate first, how acknowledging uncertainty and fragility produces meticulous archaeologies, and second, how hearths (absent and present, fixed and mobile) can be used in arguments questioning taken-for-granted assumptions about everyday life.

Doubt and ambiguity

The sacred concept of the ancient hearth/home/family/homeland that can be ‘set in stone’ is engraved into modern conceptions of home. Yet, some classicists, archaeologists and ancient historians now emphasise that they do not have a clear view of the past, but must look at it through the ‘distorted lens’ of ancient drama, poems and legal prosecutions, or interpret material fragments, often displaced, disfigured or poorly recorded (Tsakirgis 2007). Assumptions about links between national and domestic religious practices, the law, social relations, everyday activities and even what it was to ‘be’ Greek are all cast out of place through careful examination of (among other things) fixed and moveable hearths. This is the task of research: to disfigure and displace nostalgic images of cosy fires in homely nooks, throw into question what it is to ‘record’ the past, treading a dirty stranger’s footprints across sacred ideas. As Douglas (2002) argued, dirt is only ‘matter out of place’, defined culturally, rather than naturally. And it now looks like modern madness to found an idea of ‘home’ on the past, since what these archaeologies make clear in their uncertainty is how much has been lost. Only ruins of what was set in stone remain, accompanied by a very few displaced, ambiguous and broken everyday artefacts, leaving so much still buried. Precisely how the idea of home is connected with the past, ‘... has very little to do with the past at all, and everything to do with the present’ (Douglas 1986:69).

As more ancient sites have been excavated over the past century or so, and techniques for recording material remains have developed, modern editions and translations of ancient texts have also become more widely available. For example, Janett Morgan’s work on Greek domestic religion (2005, 2007) argues that the fixed hearth is of material and symbolic importance in the home, in relations between public/private and human/divine spheres of governance. As an exemplar, she cites an ancient account of an adulterer getting divine protection by touching the hearth, thus avoiding the automatic death penalty (Lysias 1.27). Her argument, then, is that the Greek hestia (hearth) played an important ‘ideological role’ as well as being an architectural feature of the house (2005: 197).

This view is also taken by Barbara Tsakirgis (2007). Showing how domestic hestia and oikos (home) are synonymous in ancient writers’ conceptions, she illustrates how this literary hearth must be taken as fixed for it to fulfil its many ritual functions. However, she proposes that there were both fixed hearths and moveable braziers in Greek houses, in a detailed review of archaeological evidence. Having established the sacred character of the domestic hearth, she argues that moveable braziers must have had the same functions and symbolic resonance: these were also hestiai for cooking, heating and ritual. Her specific argument is that the increasing use of braziers in Athens and decline in fixed hearths coincided with a change in house form and a new flexibility in uses of domestic space. The movement of braziers and functions of rooms were ‘defined by the temporal activities of the inhabitants’ (2007: 229). Notably, she also comments that the idea of a constantly burning domestic flame (implying an immoveable hearth), kept up for purposes of worship, is a misunderstanding caused by a long-term confusion between the domestic hearth and public religious hearths, due to long-accepted parallels between state and domestic rituals. What is clear in her description of ancient sites is that there was no fixed place for the hearth in the house, or, in many cases, a fixed hearth. She argues that central fixed hearths made sense only in simple archaic houses, where they could heat the whole space. In palaces and, later on, more complex ordinary houses, there could be numerous fixed and/or moveable hearths; wall hearths were particularly suited for cooking, often in a separate room.

Tsakirgis also acknowledges the contested notion that early hearth forms influenced the shapes of Greek temples – so often seen the other way round in the popular view of domestic fireplaces as shrines or altars – but points out that this is ‘assumed’ and without documentary support. Before presenting her own argument, she clarifies for the reader that the only evidence really is literary: ‘... their sacred character is considered, this last matter seen largely through the lens, albeit somewhat and sometimes distorted, of literary testimonia’ (2007: 225). In fact, only one buried ritual deposit has been found beside a fixed hearth, and there are (so far) no assembled remains of ritual material with braziers. Braziers are often humble-looking (and breakable) things, warranting little attention from earlier archaeologists, and ritual remains – such as bones – would no doubt be disposed of elsewhere.

While Tsakirgis focused on the co-emergence of flexible domestic space and everyday domestic practice in Athens with the moveable hestia, Eva Parisinou (2007) examines an earlier period to argue that studying the illumination of house interiors can inform new approaches to social interaction in domestic space. She emphasises the paucity of the material record and the danger of mistaking where an artefact is found for where it originally belonged in a structure. Combining material evidence with references to the Odyssey and a later book on household management (Xenophon, 4th century BC), she proposes, tentatively, that lighting was an increasingly important consideration in Greek housing, in the facilitation of social interaction and use of dark rooms. ‘The absence of fixed hearths from a substantial number of surviving dwellings of the period may possibly suggest their replacement by artificial devices like portable braziers which provided warmth and light, thus becoming the focus of social activity particularly during the darker hours of the day’ (2008: 220). With only a few fragile lighting devices excavated, and unable to designate wall openings as ‘windows’ in such early structures, or even distinguish houses from other types of building, Parisinou uses the absence of fixed hearths to build an argument about the illumination of ‘living culture’. Her intent is to push the debate on ‘ancient domestic’ space beyond accepted spheres of chronology and gender relations (2007: 215).

Similarly, in her study of excavated houses in Crete, Ruth Westgate argues for the re-orienting of archaeological/ancient history away from an ‘idealizing, Atheno-centric perspective of literary sources’ towards a more regionalised, close-up reconstruction of ancient Greek life (2007: 424). Nevertheless, with the same proviso as Tsakirgis (2007) regarding literary evidence, she uses extant written sources to introduce her argument. Since ancient writers comment on the peculiarity of Cretan communal social institutions (in contrast to the private, family-oriented social organisation of Athens), she deduces that their domestic architecture and organisation must have differed too. Further, while ‘the sources present Cretan social and political structures as uniform across the island (and through time) ... it’s clear from the epigraphic evidence that there was a fair amount of variation in reality. The variability of the houses adds another dimension to this impression of diversity’ (Westgate 2012). Since older excavations were not adequately recorded and few extensive sites in Crete have been excavated, the material evidence is problematic. Referring to other recent writers, she comments on how ‘... the Pompeii premise – the assumption that the objects found in a room are a direct reflection of the activi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• Introduction: Dismantling Mantelpieces
• Part I: Pasts: History, Archive and Memory
• Part II: Presents: Ordering Identities, Things and Home
• Part III: Cultures of ‘Home’: Other Ways of Looking
• Conclusion: Culture, Clutter, Contemplation
• Epilogue: Encounter
• Appendix: Participants’ Biographies
• Bibliography
• Index