Home, materiality, memory and belonging : keeping culture / Rachel Hurdley, Cardiff University, UK.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hurdley, Rachel, 1971-

Series:

Palgrave Macmillan studies in family and intimate life

Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Group identity.

Identity (Psychology).

Fireplaces.

Manners and customs.

Culture.

Physical Description:

xvii, 270 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Summary:

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 online films participants' 'photo-calendars', it combines meticulous empirical work 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. Book jacket.

Contents:

List of illustrations

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Introduction: dismantling mantelpieces

Pasts : history, archive and memory

Histories of domestic fire

Mass observation mantelpiece

Materialising memory

Telling identities

Relating the gift

Focal points

Presents : identities, things and home

Others : here, there and everywhere

Defamiliarising home

Genealogies of difference

Conclusion

Epilogue : encounter

Appendix: participants' biographies

Bibliography.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780230230286

0230230288

OCLC:

825047262