This article examines the white, woven linen tablecloth as a disciplined surface within modern domestic interiors, tracing how its whiteness, maintenance, and display have functioned as markers of moral order, social status, and gendered competence from medieval bourgeois domesticity to the contemporary household. Drawing on Mary Douglas's analysis of dirt and order, Thorstein Veblen's theory of conspicuous display, and Jean Baudrillard's framework of sign value, the article reads the tablecloth as a disciplined surface where bodily labor, aesthetic expectation, and social recognition converge. Through engagement with material culture scholarship on household textiles, the article argues that existing literature has treated the materiality, ownership, and labor of linen separately, and proposes that reading the white tablecloth as a single disciplinary surface makes this convergence visible. The moral coding of whiteness, historically articulated within bourgeois domesticity, acquires renewed force within urban domestic formations shaped by modern housing, hygiene discourse, and gendered ideals of domestic competence.
This article explores how municipal waste is socialized and rendered visible through shifting practices of recovery, sorting, and disposal, 35 years after the demise of the socialist regime in Romania. The research draws on fieldwork conducted in Bucharest between 2020 and 2025 and involves residents, cleaning personnel, block administrators, handling workers, truck drivers, and two managers of sanitation companies. It examines the reorganization of consumption and urban life in Romania, as well as classification practices beyond the recently introduced System for Guarantee-Return (SGR), which enables residents to recycle specific beverage containers through supermarkets. The article highlights a significant transformation in urban sanitation from the socialist period to the present, focusing on changes in collective and communal life and on the increasing tendency to place responsibility on individual residents rather than on the development of shared waste-management strategies and coherent legislation across all six districts of the capital. In the absence of clearly defined roles for block administrators, cleaning personnel, and sanitation services, the article shows how responsibility for recycled waste remains centered on individual consumption rather than on production, and how this responsibility has shifted discursively from the apartment block to the supermarket.
This paper explores the role of material culture in shaping a sense of home for migrants in a new place. Specifically, it focuses on display cabinets as material components within the homemaking practices of Syrian migrants. By doing so, it investigates how display cabinets contribute to the production of home among Syrians in displacement. Considering that the Syrian migration is a form of forced displacement, it has not always been possible for migrants to bring the belongings they wished to take with them. Consequently, they have made use of familiar objects available in their new environments or attempted to recreate a similar decorative setting. As decorative elements, display cabinets establish a sense of familiarity, and through the composition they form, they also reproduce the past and contribute to the temporal character of the home. Accordingly, display cabinets play a significant role in shaping emotional attachment to the home and fostering a sense of belonging.
The trope of the "captive woman" in domestic spaces has been a recurring motif in American and British horror films, evolving alongside women's changing social status and economic independence. This essay examines how this trope has transformed over time, from the emotionally captive woman confined by societal norms that restrict her autonomy to the physically trapped woman whose emotional confinement manifests as literal imprisonment, even as she gains apparent independence from male figures. By analyzing films across decades, such as Rebecca (1940), Silent House (2011), and Men (2022), this article explores how women's confinement reflects broader societal dynamics and their relationships with men. Early depictions often tied women's entrapment to economic reliance and societal expectations, portraying domestic spaces as both refuge and prison. Contemporary narratives, however, frequently depict independent women trapped by trauma or residual patriarchal control, illustrating how progress does not equate to full liberation. The article concludes with an analysis of Never Let Go (2024), which represents a shift where conservative ideologies and societal pressures push women back into traditional domestic roles. This new form of captivity reflects the complex interplay of autonomy, societal expectations, and resurgent patriarchal structures, underscoring the evolving dynamics of gender in horror cinema.
Based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan, this article examines the role of the butsudan, a household Buddhist shrine commonly found in Japanese homes, in conveying a sense of normality within domestic life. Building on existing theories of home that emphasize spatial and structural dimensions, I propose shifting attention to the temporal rhythms of domestic life. To do this, I conceptualize the butsudan as a site of rhythmic normotopia: a space where karmic ties to ancestors and imagined futures are cultivated through important moments of homemaking across the household's life course. Drawing on ethnographic examples, this article explores how acts such as acquiring, inheriting, upgrading, and retiring a butsudan reflect individuals' changing life stages and their evolving orientations toward the household and familial responsibility. In doing so, it questions prevailing narratives of decline associated with butsudan abandonment. Rather than focus on decline, it proposes reframing butsudan rituals as temporal practices that generate lasting effects on domesticity amidst Japan's ongoing demographic transformations.
This article examines and contextualizes the Swedish architect Gustaf Linden's domestic architecture of the 1920s through the lens of contemporary planning and housing discourse. In addition to developing the first general city plan for Link & ouml;ping in 1923, Linden sought to create affordable, good housing for the working class, who was affected by overcrowding and inferior dwellings. The two residential areas Linden designed in Link & ouml;ping were influenced by international planning ideals, the urban garden movement and the stylistic principles of Nordic Classicism. Although Gustaf Linden is mentioned in several surveys of urban planning and architectural history, his specific contributions to domestic architecture have received limited attention. His thorough planning of residential architecture surrounded by green spaces, shows a social-esthetic ideal that was partially lost when the pace of development increased. Furthermore, Linden's view on architecture may offer valuable insights for contemporary discussions on urban planning and sustainable housing.
This paper examines how urban stray cats challenge normative constructions of home, care, and legal belonging. Focusing on the Chat Libre designation in France, it explores how certain cats are granted a form of "companion-denizenship"-a legal and cultural status that offers protection without full domestication. Drawing on multisited ethnographic research and a multispecies anthropological framework, the chapter situates cats as agents in the shaping of urban space and questions the anthropocentric ideals underpinning conventional notions of home. It critically engages with concepts of bare life, and biopolitical control to show how inclusion often comes at the cost of sterilization and surveillance. Through vignettes of cats and voices of animal welfare volunteers, the chapter argues for more fluid, relational understandings of home and care that better reflect the realities of urban animal life-and suggest pathways toward more zooinclusive futures.
Kitchens are more than functional spaces; they reflect and shape cultural values, technologies, and ideals of modern life. Framing the kitchen as an orchestrating concept that brings together images, materials, and competencies, this article examines how idealized settings and tools have produced shifting narratives of modernity and redefined meanings, functions, and everyday practices in T & uuml;rkiye from the 1930s to the present. It highlights the transformation of the kitchen from a moralizing space to one of entertainment and creativity across three eras: the ordered workshop of the 1930s, the cozy living room of the 1970s, and the technological hub of the 2000s. Drawing on archival research from a larger project on the social history of domestic technologies in T & uuml;rkiye, the article analyzes newspapers, magazines, TV commercials, social media, and films to reveal how domestic ideals have been negotiated through kitchen spaces.
Providing a feeling of home and an authentic experience are considered important aspects of home-sharing services that have grown in popularity in recent years. The article is based on a qualitative study exploring how renters perceive and experience "home" and "feeling at home" within the context of short-term accommodation. Contrary to the literature pointing to the importance of an "authentic," "homely" feel, the findings show that Airbnb guests' homemaking practices are aimed at establishing a sense of distance. Guests "volitionally" dismiss a sense of home by avoiding typical everyday routines associated with their everyday life at home, thus contributing to Airbnb's distinctive "home-like" setting, where a feeling of welcome is combined with a sense of detachment and estrangement. The article advances research that emphasizes complex modes of dwelling where the homely and unhomely elements are simultaneously present.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century in Ottoman Istanbul, the house, as a space where modern experiences gained visibility, underwent significant transformations and began to be seen as a new cultural field. Many topics related to the house, such as its maintenance, organization, hygiene conditions, physical and spatial conditions, the use of its spaces, child care and education, and the rules of etiquette to be followed at the house, were scientifically studied during this period. Numerous books were published that introduced scientific standards to these topics in the field of household management, which was offered to the general public and, from the mid-century onwards, was included in the curriculum of girls' schools as a subject. These books were important sources for the period, containing discourses on innovation in housing culture and ideological imaginations about the production of the ideal house, and possessing significant potential in the context of the social production of space. Because these publications textualized knowledge and defined the ideal, they played a significant role in the transformation and reproduction of domestic space organization. This article aims to reveal the importance of these books and the roles they played during the period in question, as well as how modern experiences related to housing culture and the organization of domestic spaces were expressed in these books.
In this interdisciplinary study we explore the material and symbolic dimensions of Japanese and Norwegian domestic spaces, through the medium of windows. We tell the stories of Norwegian and Japanese windows as they entangle with gender, class, materialities, technologies, and cultural norms. The story starts with a hole over a smoky fireplace in a premodern Norwegian dwelling in a farming community with no clear spatial boundaries between men, women and animals. It moves through the shadowy light of Japanese paper screens to the invention of glass as producing new classed and spatial boundaries. The window then evolves into a veil between the gendered private and public spheres, cementing the symbolic link between woman and home. It becomes instrumental in the social isolation of the nuclear family encased by its spatial unit. Finally, we explore the notion of the meaningless contemporary window enmeshed in commercial relations and technological automatism.
Migration and displacement often arise from dissatisfaction with residents' circumstances, leading to increased cultural and ethnic diversity in destination countries. This study investigates how displaced individuals reconstruct a sense of belonging through the integration of personal artifacts, participation in community rituals, and engagement with meaningful spaces. It identifies key factors that strengthen their connection to new environments, emphasizing the role of objects, memories, and the spirit of place (genius loci) in fostering attachment. Employing a qualitative methodology and grounded theory approach, the study examines the experiences of immigrants to evaluate how cultural identity and place attachment are negotiated and sustained. Through in-depth interviews, the research offers insights into the types of places and belongings that foster enduring emotional and cultural ties. The findings provide a structured understanding of the complex processes through which individuals adapt culturally and cultivate emotional bonds within unfamiliar environments.
In today's metropolises, the relationships that individuals establish with their homes differ considerably compared to previous centuries, depending on their values and expectations. One particularly interesting case is the life that the middle-income group tries to create in small but luxurious houses. These houses appear to be an indicator of identity and social status. In this study, the one-room luxury houses in "Metropol," which is the largest commercial and residential complex in the Ata & scedil;ehir region of Istanbul, will be presented. The aim is to gain insight into the "materialized interiority" of the users, and their search for an "ideal home." The research was inspired by conversations with the author Ayla & Ouml;zaygen, who lives in a 27 square meters one-room house on the 20th floor of this complex. Although a specific region has been chosen, the aim is to provide an overview for the globalized environment.
This article introduces the concept of "Yade Mirat," a Sorani-Kurdish term employed to elucidate a distinctive manifestation of postmemory. Yade Mirat encapsulates the longing, experienced by second- and third-generation exile and diaspora communities, for a homeland or place that they themselves have not visited and will never visit. This concept is developed through a reading of "Half of them Dreams & mldr; Ruth Cohen Esther Cohen: Duo Exhibition," a research-based collaborative art installation by Israeli-Kurdistani-Yemenite visual artist Esther Cohen, exhibited at the Bialik House Museum in Tel Aviv. Throughout this reading, similarities and differences are explored between Yade Mirat, Hirsch's notion of "postmemory," and Boym's concept of "diasporic intimacy." This reading is developed with the help of an interview that the article's author conducted with Esther Cohen.
The conceptual separation of home and work, central to the cultural history of housing in most modern westernized countries, has been blurred by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has introduced working from home to many households. Using Lefebvre's concept of spatiality, this paper contributes to the ethnographic investigation of how households negotiate the ambiguity of time and space at home in post-lockdown working-from-home practices. The paper shows that (1) the stronger the spatial ambiguity, the more important temporal demarcation becomes, especially by the end of the workday; (2) household work is often included in work practices, and as such it bridges home and work while also keeping the homeworker "in place"; and yet (3) the domination of home also influences the way work is done, materialized, and understood. This suggests that working from home is not only a matter of flexibility and freedom, but an activity embedded in powerful spatial and temporal practices of home.
Cyprus had a peculiar trajectory toward modernity due to its civil war (1960-1974) with a society that united in the hope of a better future. This journey was spearheaded by visionary architects and socio-political figures of the bourgeoisie, who came to prominence through increased material affordances and education levels. These main actors of modernity had the notion of dedication and a sense of duty to reach better living standards for their island and its' people. In order to capture the essence of this modernity, the study examines a house, the narrator of life, designed by architect Ahmet Vural Behaeddin for Osman & Ouml;rek's family, a prominent political figure. The analysis of the house's spatial configuration with period photographs, site visits, and architectural drawings is supported by oral history. As evidenced by the findings, the architects persevered in their dedication to modern architecture despite the hardship of civil war and scarcity. This exceptional endemic perspective blended modern architectural features with local realities, harmonizing everyday living and modernity's social living with the era's most remarkable minds, thus transcending the private space of the modern house into a space of innovation and advancement. Everyday living described a sense of solidarity and aspiration for progress despite the limitations of the civil war, expanding our knowledge of modernity, in which houses were vital as architectural expressions.
Borders between the domestic domains of work, family and restoration, are essential to adult well-being. This article interrogates the blurring of these borders by post-pandemic, reshaped relations between adults and children in domestic space. Adult spaces can alleviate the negative well-being effects of blurred borders, but inadequate consideration of intrafamilial separation in contemporary housing forces parents to negotiate adult-child copresence, or 'presence to one another'. Drawing on time-geography, this article explores adult spaces of avoidance in the family home to negotiate negative copresence and maintain domestic borders. Qualitative analysis of 45 in-depth interviews shows adults in England and Scotland (UK) enacting spatio-temporal tactics -appropriation, exclusion, exile and containment- to negotiate negatively perceived copresence and alleviate its detrimental well-being impacts. Understood as a key component of togetherness, the article demonstrates the relationship between copresence and the physical space of the house, highlighting implications of negatively perceived copresence for housing design.
This article explores stuff donation on an online marketplace interpreting the reorganization of the household materials as citizens' creative waste management. The data consist of donation announcements collected in spring 2022 from a Finnish consumer-to-consumer (C2C) product resale platform. The study identifies three narratives for donations within the contemporary online market economy: 'Someone's trash is another one's treasure', 'Getting rid of abundance', and '(Almost) too good to be donated'. Results illustrate how the donation announcements were used to add meaning and value to surplus materials through descriptions of past use and imagined ways to maintain, repair, or recycle, as well as to propose potential functions for stuff no longer necessary for the donors. As conceptual and theoretical contributions, the article further develops the term material sense applying it in the analysis of novel empirical data, deepening its' connections to new materialism, and dissecting it with material donations. Overall, we aspire to enrich discussions of alternative forms of consumption and understanding of sustainable human-material interactions as future citizenship skills.
This visual essay explores the stand-alone home through an autoethnographic account comprising a constellation of theoretical analysis, paintings and personal narrative. By attending to Sara Ahmed's writing on affect, the theoretical analysis examines the boundary of the home as a source of both "with-ness" and "against-ness," revealing the complexity of the ideal home. Paintings are used as an investigative tool to consider the material, symbolic and affective relations which underwrite the figure of the stand-alone home and the process of making a home. Adopting the seemingly contradictory notions of "with-ness"-belonging, connection, security-and "against-ness"-anxiety-enables a critical gaze to be cast on the stand-alone home as a pervasive and often invisible type of social spatial organisation, of "the good life."
