Vernacular Architecture and Domestic Habit in the Ohio River Valley A
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Building Home: Vernacular Architecture and Domestic Habit in the Ohio River Valley A dissertation presented to the faculty of the Scripps College of Communication of Ohio University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy Sean P. Gleason August 2017 © 2017 Sean P. Gleason. All Rights Reserved. This dissertation titled Building Home: Vernacular Architecture and Domestic Habit in the Ohio River Valley by SEAN P. GLEASON has been approved for the School of Communication Studies and the Scripps College of Communication by Devika Chawla Professor of Communication Studies Scott Titsworth Dean, Scripps College of Communication ii Abstract GLEASON, SEAN P., Ph.D., August 2017, Communication Studies Building Home: Vernacular Architecture and Domestic Habit in the Ohio River Valley Director of Dissertation: Devika Chawla Dwelling entails the consumption of resources. Every day others die so that we may live. I realize this simple premise after fieldwork. For six months, during the spring and summer of 2016, I visited 13 southern Ohio homesteads interviewing an intergenerational population, ranging in age from 23-65, about their decision live off-grid in the Ohio River Valley as a form of environmental activism. During fieldwork, I helped participants mix sand, straw, and clay to create cob—one of the earliest-recorded building materials. I attended workshops on permaculture and tiny homes. My participants told me why they chose to build with rammed earth, citing examples from the 11th and 12th centuries. I learned about off-grid living and how to recycle rainwater. I built windows with salvaged wine bottles and framed walls from scrap tires. I now think of home as a material ecology of more-than-human forces that shape identity through habitual action. When we build, eat, or write about home we enter this material ecology. By going off-grid, my participants learn to recognize this material ecology through daily habits of consumption. Here, everyday materials—whether they be a barn, composting toilet, or dragline excavator—cultivate domestic sensibilities as we taste, touch, and feel home. As a sensory ethnography of home, this project examines how some individuals build home so that others may live. iii Dedication For Amanda, with love. iv Acknowledgments This project is about domestic habit. So, I would like to begin by acknowledging my parents. Thank you for reading to me at an early age and forgoing TV for books and bike rides. You have always made learning fun. Writing is also habit. In service to the craft, I owe an incomparable debt to my advisor Dr. Devika Chawla. Thank you for teaching me the habits of a writer. I now think of “data points,” write every day, and carry a notebook because of you. I am lucky to call you a mentor. A central motif of this project is the idea of home as a “more-than-human.” It is an idea that I have been fascinated with since my master’s program, and I owe a hearty thanks to Dr. Judith Grant for her mentorship and teaching. Many of the off-grid homesteaders I interviewed for this project described their home as a more-than-human space of environmental stewardship. Without your animal/human course I would not have recognized this sensibility. Many thanks. I’d also like to thank Dr. Roger Aden for teaching me to consider architecture, place, and rhetoric as coterminous phenomena. You are the first rhetorician I ever met, and your Public Memory seminar convinced me to apply to the doctoral program at Ohio. My interests in space, place, and memory found a home in your seminar. Graduate school can sometimes feel like a labyrinth. Thankfully, over the past four years though I’ve learned that Dr. Benjamin Bates is always in his office. Dr. Bates, thank you for answering the many questions I have posed at the threshold of Schoonover 418. But more importantly, thank you for teaching me that rhetoric, as an “art,” may take v a myriad of forms. Both your Research Methods and Rhetorical Criticism seminars taught me to think of communication as a “more-than” process of meaning making. vi Table of Contents Page Abstract .............................................................................................................................. iii Dedication .......................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................... v List of Figures .................................................................................................................... ix Preface ................................................................................................................................. 1 Introduction: Vernacular Architecture and a Tale of Two Barns ....................................... 5 A Short History of Home and Dwelling ........................................................................... 21 The Birth of Home: Domination and the Oikos .......................................................... 24 Domesticity and Dwelling .......................................................................................... 28 Habits, Home, and Modernity ..................................................................................... 32 Eco-Architecture and Vernacular Home Building ...................................................... 34 At Home in the Ohio River Valley ............................................................................. 40 Domestic Material Ecologies and Affective Response ..................................................... 48 Agency, Cause-and-Effect and Habit Within a Material Ecology .............................. 55 The Body at Home ...................................................................................................... 59 Home in the Anthropocene ......................................................................................... 62 An Affective Material Ecology? ................................................................................. 66 A Rainy Day in Meigs, Co. ......................................................................................... 75 Research Practices: Fieldwork in a Material Ecology ...................................................... 78 Appalachia as Location and Method ........................................................................... 80 The People and Their Places: Finding Participants .................................................... 84 Embodiment and Muddy Boots Ethnography ............................................................. 86 Liminal Places, Timber Ecologies, and Eco-Homebuilding ........................................... 101 Elbows and Assholes ................................................................................................ 101 Dreams, Concrete, Powder Posts, Bore Bees ........................................................... 109 Liminal Spaces and Domestic Architecture .............................................................. 117 Logging, Material Ecologies, and a Poplar Beam .................................................... 119 Tile Saws, Earthships, and Rhythms of Dwelling in a Deep Ecology ............................ 131 Tile Saws and Laundry Soap .................................................................................... 131 Deep Ecologies, Shit Buckets, and Domestic Rhythms ........................................... 134 vii Deep Ecologies in an Earthship ................................................................................ 142 The Early Years ........................................................................................................ 144 Tinkerin’ with Trash ................................................................................................. 151 Final Thoughts on Deep Ecology and Trans-Generational Activism ....................... 164 Water, Dirt, and Emergent Rhythms of Affect ............................................................... 168 Emergent Rhythms .................................................................................................... 168 A River of Earth and Petrified Affects ..................................................................... 170 Monkeywrenching along the Ohio ............................................................................ 194 Five Patrols and One Community Library ................................................................ 200 Dirt, Rhythms, and Research .................................................................................... 216 Conclusion: Big Muskie, King Coal, and Domestic Stories of Resistance .................... 219 A Field Note on Route 13. ........................................................................................ 219 References ....................................................................................................................... 232 Appendix A: Participant Profiles .................................................................................... 246 Appendix B: IRB Submission and Exemption Notice .................................................... 253 Appendix C: Interview Protocol ..................................................................................... 263 Notes ……………………………………………………………………………….......266 viii List of Figures Page Figure 1: Mortise and tenon joinery at the family farm. ..................................................... 6 Figure 2: