The third  2017 seminar of HOMInG will be with Irene Cieraad, an anthropologist at TU Delft, The Netherlands.

Irene, a well-known anthropologist of domestic space and material culture, will give a seminar on Anthropological perspectives of home next May 9, Tuesday, at 2.30pm (Dpt. of Sociology).

Her main discussant will be Ester Gallo.

As usual, all welcome!

See the abstract below.

Home is one of the core concepts of Western culture. The concept of home defies easy definitions as it also holds a strong personal meaning which changes through the course of a lifetime. In general it refers to an personal  bonding  with a place  and an emotional attachment to living beings on that location. Western culture and society thrive on the emotional, social and spatial opposition between the domains of home and work. The opposition is the outcome of a historic development of the progressive separation of the two domains  that accelerated in the nineteenth century in response to industrialization and subsequent urbanisation, but was only completed in twentieth century.

In the latter half of the twentieth century the home as a location became a research area of a small group of European and American anthropologists, who were more or less forced by shrinking research funds to shift their attention to areas closer to home.  The home-coming of anthropology and the study of the contemporary home in consumer societies also resulted in a revival of material culture studies.  In my presentation the different research approaches in the anthropological study of the home will be addressed.