Houses Transformed

Anthropological Perspectives on Changing Practices of Dwelling and Building

Jonathan Alderman, Rosalie Stolz

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781805392316
• eBook ISBN: 9781805392323
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Residential Architecture
• Index: Social Sciences

Over the decades, there has been a world-wide transformation of so-called 'vernacular houses'. Based on ethnographic accounts from different regions, Houses Transformed investigates the changing practices of building houses in a transnational context. It explores the intersection of house biographies and social change, the politics of housing design, the social fabrication of aspirational houses, the domestication of concrete and the intersection of materiality and ontology as well as the rhetoric of the vernacular. The volume provides new anthropological pathways to understand the dynamics of dwelling in the 21st century.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction. Houses Transformed – Transforming Houses
• Chapter 1. Anthropology and the Study of Architecture at a Time of Rapid Change
• Chapter 2. Lives of the House: Tracing Kinship through the Biography of Houses in Norway
• Chapter 3. The ‘New London Vernacular’: Architecture and the Politics of Community-Building in London’s Olympic Park
• Chapter 4. The Changing Temporalities and Ecologies of House Production in an Age of Translocalisation: Instances in Kerala and West Bengal, India
• Chapter 5. In Pursuit of a Modern Home: Shared Vernacular Temporalities and Modern Aspirations of the Nationals and Transnationals in Qatar
• Chapter 6. ‘There Are No Winds’: Sensory Dimensions of the Shifting Materiality of Houses and the Community of Sounds in Northern Laos
• Chapter 7. ‘Pretty but Too Hot, It Smells Like Bat Urine’: Public Funded Housing for a Waorani Village in Ecuadorian Amazonia
• Chapter 8. The Social Creativity of Remittance Houses: Reconfiguring Space and Social Relations in Guatemala
• Chapter 9. Not Vernacular Enough: Dwellings of No Architectural Significance and the New Anthropology of Housing
• Chapter 10. Adobe Houses and State Social Housing in Rural Andean Bolivia
• Chapter 11. New Materials, Different Spatialities, Same Houses? Domestic Architectures and Techniques among Pastoralist Communities in the Andean Highlands (Jujuy, Argentina)
• Chapter 12. From Graves and Churches to Houses: Managing the Temporalities of Sociopolitical Presences in Vanuatu (Nineteenth–Twenty-First Centuries)
• Afterword
• Index