House life. Space, place and family in Europe

House life. Space, place and family in Europe

This publication began as a panel for the 1992 meeting of the American Anthropological Association. It examines households within the context of the immediate physical surroundings of their home and shows how human interactions are reflected in built forms. Houses often pre-date the origins and outlast the life spans of their inhabitants, but they can exert a powerful influence on the organisation of behaviours and the values of family members, as well as on the forms and flows of family life across the generations.

Drawing on developments within anthropology, archaeology, architecture and social history, the authors demonstrate, through detailed case studies, how household or family relations can usefully be mined to re-situate social theory in both space and time. After a general introduction by the editors on houses and families in Europe, the book is divided into three parts, with case studies from different parts of Europe in each. The first part, 'House, family and the construction of history' has case studies covering family and household in a Northern Portuguese village; Greek housing strategies in historical perspective, and centre and periphery in Irish house and family systems. The second, 'Houses and the construction of family life', looks at gender and space in changing Sicilian settlements; house form in rural Southern Portugal; rural to urban family life in Serbia and public and private family interaction on Chios in Greece. The third, 'House and symbol - the power of construction', looks at the power of domestic spaces in rural Ireland and Jewish immigrant culture in France.