Home Possessions Material Culture Behind Closed Doors

Home Possessions This page intentionally left blank Home Possessions Material Culture behind Closed Doors Edited by Daniel Miller Oxford • New York First published in 2001 by Berg Editorial offices: 150 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JJ, UK 838 Broadway, Third Floor, New York, NY 10003-4812, USA © Daniel Miller 2001 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Berg. Berg is an imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 1 85973 580 0 (Cloth) ISBN 1 85973 585 1 (Paper) Typeset by JS Typesetting, Wellingborough, Northants Printed in the United Kingdom by Biddles Ltd, Guildford and King’s Lynn Chang-Kwo’s parents, Stephen Frosh, Helene, Jef and Mariette, Joseph Kushner, George and Katy, Orange, Skien Friends, Susannah This page intentionally left blank Contents List of Figures ix Acknowledgements xi 1 Behind Closed Doors Daniel Miller 1 Part I Mobile Homes 2 The Aesthetics of Social Aspiration Alison J. Clarke 23 3 Organized Disorder: Moving Furniture in Norwegian Homes Pauline Garvey 47 4 The Refurbishment of Memory Jean-Sébastien Marcoux 69 5 The Taste of Home Elia Petridou 87 Part II Estate Agency 6 Possessions Daniel Miller 107 7 Home Sweet Home: Tangible Memories of an Uprooted Childhood Anat Hecht 123 Part III Building Relationships 8 Building Conjugal Relations: The Devotion to Houses amongst the Paiwan of Taiwan Chang-Kwo Tan 149 – vii – Contents 9 A Man will get Furnished: Wood and Domesticity in Urban Romania Adam Drazin 173 10 The ‘Untidy’ Japanese House Inge Maria Daniels 201 Index 231 – viii – List of Figures 2.1. Suspension between the ‘ideal’ and the ‘actual’ demonstrated in a half-decorated children’s bedroom in Sharon’s home 42 4.1. Sandra’s unicorn case in the living room after the move 74 4.2. Another view of Sandra’s unicorn case in the living room after the move 75 4.3. Mme Lambert’s miniatures 76 4.4. A view of Mme Lambert’s bedroom before the move 77 4.5. Mme Lambert’s closet before the move 78 4.6. The Lambert’s living room before the move 79 7.1. Map of Abbeyhill – Nan’s Wee World (1930s) 132 7.2. Layout of the Begg’s Building – Nan’s childhood home (1930s) 133 7.3. Kitchen/living room in Nan’s childhood home (1930s) 134 7.4. Kitchen in Nan’s first home as an adult (1950s) 135 7.5. Living room in Nan’s first home as an adult (1950s) 135 7.6. Living room in Nan’s current home (2000) 142 7.7. Bedroom dresser in Nan’s current home (2000) 143 8.1. Traditional Paiwan commoners’ house 152 8.2. Traditional Paiwan paramount chief’s house (From Li 1994: A-21, 22, 29, 30) 153 8.3. Habitations in ‘Little Laliba’, Taichung 161 8.4. The house of Buka and Lanau 166 8.5. Plan of Buka and Lanau’s house 166 9.1. Wooden and painted ‘wood’ doors 177 9.2. Wood factories dominate Suceava’s industrial zone 181 9.3. New furniture in a private firm’s showroom 183 9.4. The main furniture shop 185 9.5. Wood gives the home its character 189 9.6. Shadow of a crochet leaf on a cupboard 193 10.1. Clutter in the Miyadas’ Japanese-style room 218 10.2. The Miyadas’ tokonoma 220 10.3. An inherited cupboard in the Moris’ home 222 10.4. The Moris’ tokonoma 224 –ix– This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgements This book is intended as a sequel to Material Cultures, edited by me and published in 1998. In this second volume we have the advantage of greater cohesion amongst the projects being undertaken, which quite easily transcend their individual case studies to become a sustained analysis of the material culture of the home. So whereas the previous volume was concerned with ethnographic studies of material culture in general, the present volume is more focused and narrower in its scope. Both books were constructed through the process described in the acknowledgements of the previous volume: a monthly round of drinking and gossiping (that counts for us as methodology training) followed by the discussion of a pre- circulated paper. All the contributors to this volume are currently my PhD students. There is only one overlap amongst the contributors to this and the previous volume, which I am glad to say attests to the speed with which each project has been completed. The exception represented by Alison Clarke is understandable given her achievements over the last few years including a highly successful book on Tupperware. Although I am the sole editor, all these papers were produced within a collective environment of mutual assistance and critique amongst all the contributors. Contributions from co-students present at the evening drinking sessions included Pat Berhau, Mark Mullen, Kaori O’Conner and Andrew Skuse, as well as an ex- member, Sophie Chevalier. In particular, two newcomers who are also conducting research on the topic of the home, Heather Horst on Jamaican returned migrants and Laurence Faure on establishing homes in London, have looked at many of the chapters and have made comments, as has my colleague Victor Buchli, the most recent recruit to the material culture team at UCL. Daniel Miller –xi– This page intentionally left blank Behind Closed Doors –1– 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 perspect- ives. 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 –1– Daniel Miller 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.

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