How to Have a 'Good Home' The Practical Aesthetic and Normativity in Norway

This article presents an exploration of home decoration and domestic aesthetics in the Norwegian town of Skien. The analysis of everyday domestic aesthetics is derived from original ethnographic research in which a normative social reference point such as practicality is investigated in the organization of material culture and decorative order. I analyse domestic aesthetics in terms of Campbell's discussion of need or desire-based rhetoric as forming the basis of consumer choices. I discuss this position through an analysis of 'the practical' (praktiskj as it pertains to ideas of the 'good home' in Norway. I suggest that practicality can be described as an idiom through which an aaeptable image of individual priorities is projected. The articulation of socially legitimate objectives also allows a certain disjuncture between words and actions and underpins one expression of the normative home

DOMESTIC BOUNDARIES Privacy, Visibility and the Norwegian Window

The article presents an exploration of domestic borders in the Norwegian town of Skien. Differences between homes may be minimal, however the differentiation between homes, can occasionally, be marked (Wallman, 1978: 203). This observation has relevance for Norwegian and Somali house- holds whereby perceptions of domestic boundaries, visibility and definitions of privacy are analysed. The domestic window is shown to provide one material medium for the negotiation of ethnic identity and social classifi- cation. I argue notions of the private are dynamic and contextual and frequently have less to do with ‘being seen’ than with a perception of the social gaze. Consequently, looking at ethnic minorities, Norwegian locals and the private home in Skien does not just imply investigating the link between visibility and privacy but questioning the ideas on which this link is based, and rethinking notions of privacy itself

The Norwegian country cabin and functionalism: a tale of two modernities

The mountain or shore-side cabin (hytte) represents a common leisure form for a significant proportion of the Norwegian population. Its roots can be traced to the decline of farming society, growing urbanisation and an emphasis on the outdoor life as part of 20th-century state modernising projects. Throughout this modern history, and through periods of accelerated social change, the cabin has represented an ‘other’ form of domesticity. This paper makes the argument that far from representing an escape from post-industrial consumer society, the hytte prompts evaluation, comparison or negation of normative domesticity for its occupants. Many priorities such as getting back-to-nature and living the simple life are achieved best, paradoxically, through their material manifestation. Routine and rupture, and discourse surrounding farming culture artefacts are central in evoking contrast

Ageing with Smartphones in Ireland

There are not many books about how people get younger. It doesn’t happen very often. But Ageing with Smartphones in Ireland documents a radical change in the experience of ageing. Based on two ethnographies, one within Dublin and the other from the Dublin region, the book shows that people, rather than seeing themselves as old, focus on crafting a new life in retirement. Our research participants apply new ideals of sustainability both to themselves and to their environment. They go for long walks, play bridge, do yoga, and keep as healthy as possible. As part of Ireland’s mainstream middle class, they may have more time than the young to embrace green ideals and more money to move to energy-efficient homes, throw out household detritus and protect their environment. The smartphone has become integral to this new trajectory. For some it is an intimidating burden linked to being on the wrong side of a new digital divide. But for most, however, it has brought back the extended family and old friends, and helped resolve intergenerational conflicts though facilitating new forms of grandparenting. It has also become central to health issues, whether by Googling information or looking after frail parents. The smartphone enables this sense of getting younger as people download the music of their youth and develop new interests. This is a book about acknowledging late middle age in contemporary Ireland. How do older people in Ireland experience life today? Praise for Ageing with Smartphones in Ireland 'An innovative and thorough description and analysis of how one small piece of technology has changed the way Irish people live their lives.' Tom Inglis, Professor Emeritus of Sociology in University College Dublin ; 'An innovative and thorough description and analysis of how one small piece of technology has changed the way Irish people live their lives.' Tom Inglis, Professor Emeritus of Sociology in University College Dubli

Grandparenting as the resolution of kinship as experience

This article argues that a population of relatively affluent retired people in a small Irish town have employed the possibilities of grandparenting to resolve many of the tensions of contemporary kinship. This includes the tension between the obligations of prescriptive relationships as against the voluntarism of friendship. This is considered against a background shift in kinship studies towards a distinction between kinship as a category and kinship as experience. Kinship as experience often now comprises a series of deep fluctuations during the life course. Experience is also extended by the growth in life expectancy. This makes it still more important that the legacy of an individual's prior experiences of kinship may be partially resolved through the experience of grandparenting. The profound consequences of grandparenting lie not in the relationship to the grandchildren but in the possibilities that grandparenting offers to recalibrate all other kinship relations. These include the relationship with one's own children, the relationship with partners, the legacy of one's prior experience of being a parent, and even the memory of the way one was parented when a child

'lkea sofas are like H&M trousers': the potential of sensuous signs

What makes Ikea sofas similar to H&M trousers? Clothing and furniture retail are increasingly aligned, as both follow fashion trends and seasonal change. Because of the transience that shifting trends imply, clothing is often read as a signifier of superficial or frivolous expression, masking more important realities that lie elsewhere. In this article, I follow Webb Keane in asserting that when treating clothing as a sign of surface adornment, as a mere communicator of meaning, one not only dematerialises the sign but foregrounds meaning over action. In focusing on the sensuous qualities of signs (qualisigns), I view Ikea goods as sites of potential and compare how adorned surfaces are more than semiotic vehicles, but also material things that have effects

Ikea as folk museum

Abstract included in text

La memoire en attente. Le musee ethnographique dans l'lrlande post-coloniale

Le parcours historique des collections ethnographiques irlandaises, historiquement les plus importantes, lie au passe colonialiste et post-colonialiste ae l'lrlande. L'ile occupe a cet egard une position tout a certaine epoque, elle abrita en effet la seconde ville de l'Empire britannique, tout en figurant parmi le plus des eftets catastrophiques de l'administration coloniale. L'histoire recente dans le domaine des est elle aussi inhabituelle : de superbes collections ethnographiques et folkloriques sont restees enfermees decennies. Or, ces objets temoignent de l'idee que l'lrlande se fait d'elle-meme et de sa position dans presente ce patrimoine ethnographique dont la signification anthropologique est examinee en appliquant en attente

Design Dispersed: Design History, Design Practice and Anthropology

This special issue is part of a rising tide of literature dedicated to design in the disci-pline of anthropology. In this publication, we respond supportively to Lucy Suchman’s call that ‘[. . .] we need less a reinvented anthropology as (or for) design than a critical anthropology of design’.1 Arriving at this academic moment entails at least two schol-arly trajectories that have been hitherto distinct, concerning how anthropology has engaged with design history on the one hand, and with design practice on the other

Introduction: Ireland's new ethnographic horizons

An appropriate entry point to our discussion of ethnographic collections in Ireland is the remarkable history of an assemblage of non-European ethnographic artefacts housed in the National Museum of Ireland (NMI), Dublin. The 12,500 artefacts from the Pacific, the Americas and Mrica are described as 'one of the finest collections of that kind in the world' (Hart 1995, 36). In contrast to a parallel collection in the Ulster Museum, Belfast, which for some time has been drawn on for exhibitions, this collection has been out of view for a considerable period. Indeed, William Hart writes that '[t]he Mrican collections of the National Museum of Ireland are one of its bestkept secrets' (ibid., 36). One of its constituent units-the O'Beirne Collection-'has never been on view to the public' and has been 'totally forgotten' (ibid.). While these collections have been largely kept in crated storage from 1979 to 2002, a permanent exhibition space is now being planned. This unveiling of an extensive collection in the National Museum comes at a time of extensive rethinking of ethnography and its artefacts-both nationally and internationally, academically and in practice. And though ethnographic exhibitions are not an uncommon presence in many European capitals, in Ireland the disclosure of this 'absent presence' (Buchli and Lucas 2001) suggests a potentially fruitful medium to refract shifting identities within the island of Ireland