Abstract
This article deals with houses and objects. Based on anthropological fieldwork on materiality in two well-off neighbourhoods in Denmark, the starting point are localisations of global flows in the privacy of houses. Filters and control showed out to be a major theme concerning the passages of things in and out of houses; these passages follow two rules: “something in means something else out” and “what comes in must be activated”. Openness and transparency showed out to be important themes concerning the house; there is a tendency towards large windows, few inner walls and large rooms, which are both poly-functional and poly-social. Furthermore, the filtering mechanisms for objects and the openness of the house are related to virtual flows from computers, telephones and televisions. Classical anthropological theories are used to understand this subject matter: the concept of haul (the spirit of the thing), exchange and social relations at large.
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Notes
In the following, the term house is used for several categories of dwellings, namely one-family houses, apartments and terraced houses. This is consistent with other anthropological literature, since the anthropological use of the term house includes a huge variety of housing forms, e.g. large round houses for extended families or whole villages in South America. The term household, the socio-cultural entity inside the physical house does not include the physical house, and the terms apartment and terraced house are part of an architectonic, rather than an anthropological, taxonomy. I therefore use house along with anthropological taxonomies, whereby I try to combine physical and socio-cultural aspects.
A more correct term might be para-private space, since the space is not half-way private, but entirely private simultaneously with being entirely public: It is public as a part of the city (everybody have access to the area), and it is private as a building containing private homes (situated apart from the rest of the city), architectonically (you can easily perceive this, when you enter the territory), and socially (only those living there actually use it). In this way, along with its being public, the territory becomes para-private (see also Raahauge 2006b).
The Danish philosopher Hans Fink argues that you can distinguish between to types of boundaries: boundaries that have effect and boundaries that are given effect, in other words: boundaries that define what is actually possible and boundaries that define what should be the case (Fink 1992). “Reality decides where the first set of boundaries are placed, whilst it is people who decide where the second set of boundaries are to be placed” (ibid.: 27) [my translation, kmr]. The filters surrounding the houses are constituted after both principles.
About the brackets: Explanatory comments (e.g. about words and places) are represented in brackets as ordinary text. My questions during the interview are represented in brackets as text in italics.
Matter out of place, the notion introduced by the anthropologist Mary Douglas in (1969), has become an ordinary tool in the anthropological toolbox. Douglas used it in connection with her analysis of the category “dirt”. She argues that dirt must be understood as matter out of place: “Dirt is a by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements. Where there is dirt there is system” (Douglas 1969: 35). In a way, the heirloom is matter out of place in a consumer society, a by-product of a system.
The Swedish ethnologist Orvar Löfgren (2003) has argued that bourgeois homes of the Oscarian period (the Swedish counterpart to the Victorian period) are defined by their separating spatial organisation, whilst working-class homes are defined by their mixing everything in the same room, to the regret of the bourgeois class. Programmes were started by bourgeois women to make working-class women proper housewives, not mixing, but instead separating the functions of the house. When mono-functional, the rooms become mono-social as well, and that was also the point of the bourgeoisie: every space has its use, and this also separates the people inside the house, makes a distinction of status between them, and makes them keep some aspects of life hidden from the other residents – and from guests. For example the parents’ master bedroom was an enigma to the children, and the children’s world was in many ways separated from that of their parents, clearly to be seen from the nursery and other rooms which only children and nannies used. Similarly, the house had rooms for receiving guests, separated from the rest of the house; the guest of course only saw the living room, not the private rooms (ibid.). At the court of the Sun King in France, such a separating socio-spatial organisation was also at work; the palais of the noblesse was built so that it was possible to separate the people inside in formalised manners. This case is analysed by Norbert Elias (1983). It is the bourgeois socio-spatial organisation of separation working in the Oscarian/Victorian period though, which seems to be the model that is abandoned in our material. The houses of well-off people figuring in our case are not only different from, but also in opposition to the old bourgeois ideal; a transformation is going on from many separating, secretive rooms to a few mixing and open ones.
Anthropological theory and empirical cases have constantly emphasised the important role of materiality, especially in the form of gifts. Just to give a few examples, Arjun Appadurai edited an anthology with the significant name “The Social Life of Things” (1986), dealing with exactly these connections; Daniel Miller edited the anthology “Materiality” about the importance of materiality in social life (2005) and recently, “Thinking through Things” (Henare et al. 2006), another anthology, has dealt with this issue from a cultural rather than social angle.
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Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Realdania for financing the project, and Kirsten Møllegaard, a scholar of both anthropology and English literature, and the editor Ilpo Koskinen for their constructive comments on this article.
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Raahauge, K.M. In and Out of the House. Housing Hau in Sønderborg and Frederikssund. Know Techn Pol 20, 281–289 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12130-007-9034-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12130-007-9034-4