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.
Stuff (Miller, 2010). In this text, Miller establishes the idea of material culture as fundamental to our understanding of contemporary society, to the extent that our lives are lived closely enmeshed with materials of things and of stuff.
His use of this potentially flippant turn of phrase, of stuff is intended as a way of moving the debate away from reified categories of items with strong symbolism, the status of art objects or religious artefacts and towards all the everyday things we tend to take for granted. This reiterates anthropology’s general focus on the aspects of life that are quotidian, that we take for granted, the supposedly banal details of life where some of its most important aspects are revealed.
Miller begins his work on material culture with a discussion of clothing as a demonstration of how such goods define aspects of our life, informed by, or formative of, our character. Miller notes that there is an interesting comparison with the home as another aspect of material culture, distinctive in terms of scale and costliness, but in the end developing our sense of selfhood through materials in a similar way (2010:80).
Discussing the home, Miller describes the possibility of Londoners having a common set of issues regarding their housing; that despite the variety of social and cultural groups within the city, a set of external forces are applied to their living conditions, including the economic and political situations as well as the physical morphology and density of the city. Miller’s argument is that these external forces run counter to theories of mutual co-constitution between people and their environment: Miller’s description is of housing shaped by the socio-economic forces of late capitalism and of individuals whose lives are in turn shaped by that architecture. The condition of the city, broadly understood to be made up of all those factors we must accept as a given, the urban condition, all have an influence on how we live there. Close quarters living often makes sound abatement an issue, for example, or the maintenance of common grounds: stairwells, doorways and gardens. In terms of agency, Miller takes much of the control of the environment out of individuals’ hands, preferring to see larger global forces at work, with people largely at the mercy of these.
Whilst I would argue that this is overstated, Miller’s distinction between clothing and the home is helpfully articulated in terms of relative investment.
The relative ease with which we can wear alternative clothing, but not escape the mortgage or rental markets in London is determined by the relative levels of investment required: compared to property, clothing is affordable. Even where homeowners have a desire to remodel their house to suit their needs, the local authority can deny permission for substantial structural changes, and even modest decisions about decor can have an impact on resale potential.
Relative investment is not an absolute measure, but an important one which includes the mechanisms by which:
property attracts a great many more interested parties: the state, landholders, local councils, building societies and the like. Against these forces, any desire by us, the mere people who dwell in houses, to engage in a certain relationship to them can find us way down any pecking order of power. (Miller, 2010:81)
In engaging with the home, we immediately insert ourselves in some relation to wider economic and political forces which are incredibly difficult to extricate ourselves from. Indeed, as with cultural norms noted above, the attempt to reject such forces is in itself a reaction to their power and presence. As such, there is a normative model for housing, residing and ownership in London and the UK as a whole. These forces mean that the home can be said to have a strong degree of agency over residents. Taking the concept of home to include all of these forces can seem at first to be a bit of a stretch, perhaps even a paranoid expression of theory, but it is consistent with exploring the Lévi-Straussian social structures6 which are the result of observed wider social relations.
For Miller, the theory of agency is a way of combatting a reductionist approach to the power relations represented by the home. We do not, on a day-to-day basis, make explicit reference to these power structures, however much they might govern elements of our lives. They form a background against which we constitute our lives in a variety of different ways, foregrounded at particular points in the process of dwelling such as during the purchasing process. In order to increase the fidelity of our studies of the home, we must look to different theories as lenses or filters through which we understand the world. One such lens is agency.
Reductionism is dangerous, as it represents an essentialist impulse which resists the complexity of life as we live it. This messy complexity of the lifeworld is the unit of analysis for anthropology: firmly of the world, it is impossible to extract social theories entirely from the context where they are formed. Were we merely to seek to understand one element of our domestic, home lives, we leave a great deal unconsidered and omit many of the ways in which we manage and mediate these large external forces creatively.
Whatever our circumstances, we are able to make our mark on where we live through the choices that we make.
Miller hangs his idea of agency on the concept of accommodating.
Accommodation refers here to both the amount of space afforded by a house and the adaptability of that space for inhabitation. Establishing the importance of accommodating as a term encompassing not only a place to live, but also the process of adapting that spaces to suit our needs and including the social agreements and compromises for living, the term decouples from some of
its more market-led connotations. Whilst anthropologists might see the home as a site of analysis, householders are rarely in the business of producing a deliberately constructed image which represents their life for the consumption of outsiders.7
The aim of studies of the home is twofold: to study the way we dwell as a fundamental human activity and to examine the intersections of these quotidian routines with grander narratives. Miller notes that ‘the little details and the grand ideologies are usually linked’ (2010:99). Living is experienced over time. This might seem like a self-evident observation, but many attempts to understand and theorize our lives abstract this fundamental foundation of experience in place and time. Living, simply stated, is a process which unfurls over a period of time. It also takes place somewhere. Our relationship to objects changes over time. Every event we undertake in the home, from cleaning to cooking, moving home or settling in, even failing or refusing to maintain a place – each of these acts is illustrative of our approach to life as an individual, member of a social group and in culture more broadly.
This approach to material culture suggests that the power relationship we have with external influences and the agency of the home itself are both important to our understanding of how we live today. It would be my contention, then, that as architects we need to understand our clients in order to be able to accommodate their needs better. This ‘knowing’ needs to have the same dispassionate and non-judgemental eye as the anthropologist and can be acquired through various forms of consultation, interview and observation informing the decision-making process of a design or through a sensitive response to the variety of inhabitations which might be both desirable and possible within a space.8 Architecture also has the intention of proposing something new, a provocation to which people respond. This can also be informed by a greater understanding of the lifeworld.
Miller is, in the end, an anthropologist and sees the actions of the architect as simply one more level of agency or power relation between home and inhabitant. By beginning to approach an architecture more embedded in social anthropology, there is the potential for an architecture which is more attuned to the needs of a client. By understanding the day-to-day intersections between people and broad socio-economic forces, we can allow for greater flexibility, accommodate the specificity of a plural and multicultural life, offering both the possibility for change and the meeting of specified needs: handing some agency back to the householders.
Our task, then, is to take material culture studies and further analyse the outcomes: to operationalize the social relations revealed, the processes of living preferred, offering viable and useful alternatives, and embedding such understanding firmly into the design process.