HOUSE, HOME, PROJECT

In the past two decades, anthropologists have heeded calls for a "spatial" turn in the social sciences by asking how spatiality relates to social, cultural and political life. This turn is a remarkable given how much the field had treated space as a secondary effect of temporally-based processes of social and cultural change. Yet even if anthropology had neglected an adequate theorization of space, the increasing tractions of disciplinary conversations concerning place, ecology, and infrastructure suggest that human spatiality has long been a significant component of anthropologists’ concerns. In this seminar we explore how various scholars, including anthropological thinkers, have approached human spatiality through discussions of houses, homes and housing-related projects. Our exploration will shed light on several classic and contemporary concerns. For instance: What do built forms reveal about the shape and mechanics of social orders? How do they mediate and/or configure relatedness and what does that relatedness consist of? How can discussions centered on inhabiting place contribute to investigations of quotidian experience? How have interventions into domestic architecture supported political governance? How does one “write” the house? By following accounts of houses, homes and housing-related projects, we will consider varied interrogations of practice and embodiment, memory, materiality and collective well-being.