Anthropologist Sarah Pink, in her ethnography of the home, concentrates on how we engage with domestic practices of maintenance, with a particular focus on how these can be understood as gendered activities. This is clearly an issue of some interest for architecture, whether addressing privately owned residences or public social housing; detached structures or terraces;
houses or apartments. As with other chapters in this volume, the material is intended for discussion both by the designers of homes and with researchers in architecture.
Pink conducts fieldwork in a collection of residences in England and Spain.
There is a potential for a comparative study in this selection, but Pink resists attempting to describe a typical or normative home in each of these countries, noting the impossibility of this pursuit (2004:16). An important starting point for Pink is found in the language used by her respondents to describe their homes. Establishing that there is a great deal of sensory description in these accounts, Pink interprets the material to suggest that there is a visual bias in conventional design discourse. This is to the detriment of multisensory discussions, where the scents, sounds, textures and temperatures are either included in a reductive manner or not considered at all. Interviewees would describe their homes using rich sensory metaphors as well as through the activities or practices they engage in there. There is a richness in the simplest of tasks such as cleaning communal stairs, undertaking repairs or washing and drying clothes. These activities engage the body of the householder, engage their senses, and often instigate social interactions. As such, it is important to understand the home not as a site or fixed point in space: rather, it is constituted of a continually unfurling, knotting and tangling set of social relations.
Small changes in the conditions under which we dwell can make a more fundamental shift in how we understand the home. Pink notes that the Spanish practices of engaging with the communidad of an apartment block involve not only a financial contribution, but also responsibilities towards the cleaning and maintenance of communal areas and facilities (2004:17). This is not seen as a full social interaction, as such activities are often conducted by individuals in isolation, but the common effort is recognized and offers an opportunity for more direct social engagement to take place, in the case of either a smooth- running apartment block or one where the attendant neighbour to neighbour relationships are fraught with tensions or dysfunctional in some way. The provision of exterior spaces in housing is a feature of the Spanish context and includes elements appropriate to the climate such as communal pools. The shared responsibility can help to engender a community spirit and even result in close friendships between residents who, in another culture, might rarely come into contact with one another at all. Small changes in the conditions of our living can make a disproportionately large impact socially.
Most importantly, Pink suggests that the home is an important site for the production of the self. In this, there is a great deal to understand. Firstly, that selfhood is a construction, a process and an activity rather than something predetermined, fixed and final. Secondly, that our material possessions, the arrangements of these and our practices of home-making either reinforce or assist us in defining these aspects of selfhood, rather than merely being secondary representations or reflections of who we are.
Much knowledge is produced and used through embodied experience that involves sensory engagements with the environment. Such knowledge is experienced by sexed bodies and is gendered itself as it is associated with different identity types. To understand how the multiple femininities and masculinities that make up the contemporary gender pattern are lived, I suggest it is instructive to account for how sensory experiences, knowledge, metaphors, meanings and actions are bound up in this. (Pink, 2004:147) This notion of the production of self is, for Pink, a gendered process. Gender can be understood as distinct from sex in a number of ways, but primarily as an expression of the difference between the biological aspects of one’s sexuality as opposed to the social and cultural factors which determine our roles within society. This offers a great deal of variety in human experience, with gender understood differently from one family or household to the next never mind between one culture and another.
Pink discusses the possibilities in both multiple femininities and multiple masculinities: different ways of being considered masculine or feminine.
These overlapping categories are bound up in a knot of self-definition and social constraints. Given these differences, it becomes possible to map out the social relations represented by the various activities and spaces of the home (Pink, 2004:147). These multiplicities allow for alternative experiences of the same physical space, as those experiences are given shape by what each person practices there. If people adhere to a given society’s traditional roles for men and women, then they experience spaces differently according to what they are expected to do, how they behave and what is not permitted.
This extends beyond gender categories and into other areas such as social class.
The implication of constructing our idea of home around practices, the things that we do there, is that we can begin to understand that different people have radically different experiences of a space based on the activities they take part in there. Even within a single household, the experiences of the members of that unit each have their own idea of home; their own understanding of space; their own set of practices by which they live their lives. Taking the example of a notional nuclear family, children’s practices will be different from their parents: their associations with selfhood constructed differently from the adults, their responsibilities towards the space expressed in quite different ways. Home is complicated by social relations, resulting in a much more nuanced concept with the potential to be a site for radical rethinking of identity and selfhood.
This is not intended to paralyse architects into inaction with all of the possible permutations, particularly as each understanding of the home can coexist without physical adaptations. Home is more than a physical structure,
but those material aspects can have an impact on how we dwell there. The accounts given by Pink are very ordinary, with simple answers to simple questions revealing a great deal about how differently our neighbours might live. As such, it heightens our awareness that we might make assumptions or accept stereotypes without asking how people actually live.
Conceptualizing the construction of selfhood as an ongoing process is mirrored by one of the other ideas explored by Pink: that the home is incomplete and in transition through continuous home improvement and maintenance strategies, whether decorative, complete remodelling of the space, or simply storing or rearranging items and accumulated possessions. This is framed as an everyday creativity expressed through our dwelling in a place, finding pleasing or functional arrangements for our possessions (2004:56).
The manner in which we make alterations to this incomplete home is made with reference to a framework of social constraints and personal creativity. Even where a given constraint or trend has been rejected, that decision might be made with reference to a normative projection. This is where the generalizable opinions of home occupation and living are useful and interesting, as people use patterns projected by television programmes or magazines as reference points from which to hang their personal opinions and responses.
Adaptations are a key way in which people make a place their own, making their mark on the place. Despite this, a significant amount of design resists adaptation in any substantial way: change is rarely accommodated by the design, and improvements or alterations have to be made in spite of the original, against the express wishes of the architect, or in a manner deemed unsympathetic to the original. Enshrining some architecture as worthy of preservation is the furthest expression of this idea: where the agency of the ‘original’ design overpowers the needs of contemporary inhabitants and historical preservation seeks to freeze a building to a certain moment in time.
This is of course a complex argument, and the wealth of literature on building re-use and conversion attests to a fruitful and valid form of architectural expression and intervention: it is notable, however, that this field is continually undervalued in the discussion of architecture as an art form with an established canon of individual geniuses each producing singular designs.
Pink’s account of homeowners’ adaptations and modifications to their homes helps to rewrite this narrative, describing the interior design cues for ‘country house’ aspirations and how these influence decisions about the home (Pink, 2004:55). The home is defined by these suburban respondents with reference to a normative idea of country living, one which is expressed through the loosely defined term ‘countrified’. The home is associated with a coherent aesthetic which is a key driver behind the purchase of one property over another. This stylistic preference is further reinforced through subsequent
changes. This is in part expressed by the householders as an expression of the agency of the house, restoring it to an ideal or original state. This idea of agency gives the house, despite being an inanimate assemblage of material objects, the power to influence the actions of the human inhabitants either directly or indirectly.
Pink expresses each of her analyses in terms of the sensory experiences of that place. Multiplicity of experience emerges as a theme, setting this anthropology of home in opposition to earlier readings of domestic space, which lay important groundwork in politicizing the domestic sphere, but which fail to fully grasp the practised nature of such spaces. Early gendered readings of the home see the practices of different householders as fixed and unchanging, where Pink explores a number of the ways in which activities fluctuate. Homes are defined by the practices or activities which take place there. Gender remains an important category in this particularly when the identity of ‘housewife’ is interrogated in a number of differing cultural contexts.
Existing analyses of the housewife situate her in terms of a series of theoretically constructed binary oppositions. Although such analyses are useful for understanding some cultural representations of domestic gender, they fail to account for everyday sensory embodied experience and diversity and do not accommodate change. (Pink, 2004:81)
This possibility for change is suggested by the practice-based theory driving Pink’s critique of earlier anthropologies of the home. These remain influential foundational texts, but gender roles are practised and as such can be subject to change, say when one moves from one country to another, from one home to another, or even as the household makeup develops and changes. This idea is developed in later research by Pink, where the home is ‘ongoingly made’ (Pink et al., 2017:31), encouraging us to see the home not as a fixed structure or space, but as a constellation or knot of interrelated practices which continually produce home through the activities of dwelling there.
Pink begins with the existing literature on homes, analysing the theories presented there and beginning to understand these within the paradigm of her own work. This is then developed towards understanding the self- definition of her respondents, the interviewees and collaborators in the research. This is crucial to understand people’s perceptions of themselves before beginning to abstract and theorize into social structures as suggested by Lévi-Strauss (1963).
Self-identification is an interesting concept, as it reflects both the way people actually see themselves and the image they would like to project. On top of this are external influences such as social and economic constraints, larger cultural conditions and the home itself with its agency affecting the
individual. A large house requiring a great deal of upkeep, for example, can actually determine the life of its inhabitant to a large degree. The twentieth century sees advances in this, with the modernist focus on the kitchen as a site of efficiency and postwar introduction of domestic technologies such as washing machines and vacuum cleaners which served both as class signifiers and as ways of reducing the extent of manual labour required to maintain the home.5
Self-identification also reveals some of the methodological issues with interview-based research, as it relies on the power of an individual to fully articulate their situation. The self-awareness necessary and the skill to convey such observations require a degree of honesty on the part of the respondent as well as a lack of judgemental behaviour from the researcher when interviewing or architect meeting a client. Practices of cleanliness are useful indicators of how people understand their homes. Pink uses this to get to the heart of how her informants conceptualize their everyday lives from sensory experience through to the morality of making sure the home itself, the items within it and all of ones clothing is clean in a verifiable manner. Multinational corporations aid in constructing this conception of cleanliness, to the extent that the soap commercial has agency over the home in a worrying manner. There is, for example, an associated scent signifying this concept of cleanliness, which is often the result of market research rather than in the reality of how clean a thing is, or a culture of cleaning practices.
The underlying suggestion that a dirty home is one where there is a moral lapse is an idea that is losing its foothold, but still employed as a reference point. Other moralities emerge, with the division of labour in the home as a process of a gradual societal shift, drifting away from the traditional or conventional model and towards an equity as gender equality becomes the norm in both research sites investigated.
The idea of the clean and its flip side of the unclean has resonance with a key text in anthropological theory: Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger in which the cultural construction of the idea is interrogated, writing in the preface to the 2002 edition:
There is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder.
If we shun dirt, it is not because of craven fear, still less dread of holy terror.
Nor do our ideas about disease account for the range of our behaviour in cleaning or avoiding dirt. Dirt offends against order. Eliminating dirt is not a negative moment, but a positive effort to organise the environment.
(2002:2)
This relates to the definition of dirt as ‘matter out of place’ (2002:44) and redefines the discourse as one between order and disorder rather than a
real fear of disease, judgement or of failure. The practice of cleaning is one of bringing order to a place: most importantly, in eradicating chaos from our homes. This order and disorder is a strong thematic, extended in a number of ways by Douglas into a discussion of the danger of liminal zones: of thresholds. The threshold, such as the door, is a well-understood architectural figure and one in which a great deal of energy is spent in the design process.
Douglas indicates that it represents the passage between the ordered world of the interior and the exterior which, being out of our direct control, can be understood as chaotic. The point of transition between these states is fraught with potential danger (Figure 3.1).
As a unit of analysis, home offers the researcher a great many potential projects. Where Pink explores the gendered and sensory home, others have focused on the material culture of space, the power relations of a state imposing its will on the everyday life of citizens as an increased and enforceable agency of home, or even using a single aspect of the home such as storage, as a way of discussing the process of accumulating and organizing possessions.