Synopses & Reviews
Why do mantelpieces matter? As everyday 'focal points', they offer a unique way into understanding how what matters relates to who matters.
Wide-ranging, original, innovative research assembles Mass Observation Archive material with historiographies of family, house and nation from ancient Greece to present-day Europe, China and America. Entwined with insightful ethnography of British domestic and heritage practices, these studies elicit how power works in the small spaces of home. Accompanied by films made with asylum seekers and participants' 'photo-calendars', it is an engaging, effective fusion of different modes of analysis, with imaginative theorising and auto-biographical reflection.
This cutting-edge contribution to current debates on identity unfolds how dominant cultural values not only exclude the dispossessed, but also limit possibilities for future networks of shared hope, loss and vulnerability.
Review
Rachel Hurdley on Woman's Hour
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00yz54q#p00fgmhg
Synopsis
Assembling Mass Observation Archive material with historiographies of family, house and nation from ancient-Greece to present-day Europe, China and America, this book contributes to current debates on identity, belonging, memory and material culture by exploring how power works in the small spaces of home.
Synopsis
Why do mantelpieces matter? As everyday 'focal points', they offer a unique way into understanding how what matters relates to who matters.
Wide-ranging, original, innovative research assembles Mass Observation Archive material with historiographies of family, house and nation from ancient Greece to present-day Europe, China and America. Entwined with insightful ethnography of British domestic and heritage practices, these studies elicit how power works in the small spaces of home. Accompanied by films made with asylum seekers and participants' 'photo-calendars', it is an engaging, effective fusion of different modes of analysis, with imaginative theorising and auto-biographical reflection.
This cutting-edge contribution to current debates on identity unfolds how dominant cultural values not only exclude the dispossessed, but also limit possibilities for future networks of shared hope, loss and vulnerability.
About the Author
Rachel Hurdley is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Cardiff University School of Social Sciences, UK. Her research focuses on everyday relations between people, things, space and time, examining how identity, power and culture happen as small processes.
Table of Contents
PART I: PASTS: HISTORY, ARCHIVE AND MEMORY
1. Histories of Domestic Fire
2. Mass Observation Mantelpiece
3. Materialising Memory
PART II: PRESENTS - ORDERING IDENTITIES , THINGS AND HOME
4. Telling Identities
5. Relating the Gift
6. Focal Points
PART III: CULTURES OF 'HOME' - OTHER WAYS OF LOOKING
7. Defamiliarising Home
8. Genealogies of Difference