Home as a site and object of consumption
SAN266, 11th week, 2nd May 2019


Group work:
•Question: How can house/home be linked with consumption?
•Provide three examples

House as a metaphor: folk model of economic behaviour
•Gudeman and Rivera. 1990. Conversations in Columbia.
•Gudeman. 2001. The anthropology of Economy: community, market and culture
•People everywhere create models directing their economic behavior; these models have a form of a
metaphor/cultural idiom.
•House model:
•rural Columbia, medieval and early modern Europe
•inward directedness;  purpose to reproduce intself as a selfcontained entity
•‘Base’ – wealth, the basic element  of the house; the purpose of the house is to maintain the
base, preferable enlarging it; the base can be increased or decreased by the connections with the
outside world.
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House as a metaphor: folk model of economic behaviour
•Miller, Daniel. 1998. Theory of Shopping
•Shopping as a ritual involves:
•transformation of spending to saving (transcendental transformation) : the inward directedness as
in the Gudeman’s model
•prax negating discourse – the aim is transcendence – shopping is saving, household is centre
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Home as a space of consumption
•capitalist industrialization simultaneously created revolutions in both production and consumption
as well as both the factory and the home
•Factory and office as a place of work, home as a place of non-work, domesticity and consumption
•Specificity of housework and its relation to consumption: from 1980’s housework is not compatible
with lifestyle and leisure of middle classes in Western world
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Home as a space of consumption
•20th century
•The great shift from the role of the house as a source of moral welfare to the role of the house
as a source of physical welfare. This corresponded to a change from the home as a place of beauty
to the home as a place of efficiency.
•shift from the inculcation of collective sentiments of good behaviour, honesty and respect for
property through drawing room beauty to the efficient production of individual human bodies
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If the nineteenth century was the century of the drawing room, the twentieth century was the
century of the kitchen


Home as a space of consumption
•If the nineteenth century was the century of the drawing room, the twentieth century was the
century of the kitchen
•kitchen as the central room for the production of the healthy individual body; multifunctional
kitchen appliances; kitchen as a place of modernity
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Home and hygiene: Home as a space where order is established
•Late 19th century: rapid social change; boundaries became uncertain when working-class movement
tincreased in power; bourgeois preoccupation with cleanliness as a way of preordering life
•In 20th century hygiene relate to socialist modernisation>:
•Buchli. 1999. Archaeology of socialism
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Home as an object of consumption: ownership and appropriation
•Miller. 1988. Appropriating the state on the Council Estate. Man 23: 354-372; Daniel Miller. (ed.)
2001. Home possessions.
•Relation between state, dwelling and person; the role gender
•The role of objects in aesthetic schemes and relations (haunted house)
•Alison Clarke – Aesthetics of social aspiration
•Taste preferences– in relation to social aspirations and ideas of idealized future
•Relations and meanings change also because of aesthetic schemes
•Sarah Pink. Home Truth
•Zmyslové vnímanie domova. Domov definovaný cez zmyslovú skúsenosť – nielen vizualita, ale všetky
zmysly
•Pranie, pračky, vôňa jedla
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