Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Alienation

Gifts

Felix Stein — Tue, 07 Jul 2020 12:47:55 +0000

University of California, Los Angeles

Initially published 7 Jul 2020

Abstract:

As one of the oldest forms of social actions that bind people together and as an arresting example of the universality and diversity of humanity, gift exchange has long been a focus of anthropological inquiry. This entry starts with the distinction between individual gifts and collective gifts which explains some cross-cultural misunderstandings, and moves on to review the two basic theoretical models on the engine of gifting—the spirit of the gift and the principle of reciprocity. While revealing that the highly diversified patterns of gift exchange derive from different perceptions of the relationship between culturally-constructed notions of personhood and material objects in the larger social setting, the anthropology of the gift also unpacks the nuances of social life by examining patterns of gift-giving behaviour all over the world.

Introduction

When Europeans first arrived in North America and received presents from the Native Americans they encountered, they could not understand why an equivalent return was expected by their hosts. Many Europeans believed they owed nothing in return, because a gift should be free and with no strings attached. They also assumed the Native Americans were merely pretending to be generous; hence the expression of ‘Indian gift’ or ‘Indian giver’ for objects and people given merely in hopes of future returns (Wilton 2009: 166-7). The famous American explorers Lewis and Clark, for example, often suspected such motivations to be guiding their Native hosts when being presented with gifts. They even rudely refused to accept them, referring to the Native Americans as impertinent and thievish in their journals (see Slaughter 2004). Yet the Native Americans considered gifts to be initiating cycles of social exchange. They felt insulted by the Europeans who either refused to accept gifts in the first place, or who did accept them but did not want to reciprocate. In their eyes, both stances proved their unfriendliness and untrustworthiness.

Thanks to the anthropological study of gifts and gift-giving, we can now see clearly that beneath the racist expression ‘Indian gift’ or ‘Indian giver’ lies the European settlers’ imposition of a culturally specific understanding of gifts onto Native Americans, who saw their function and meaning in a quite different light. To somewhat simplify the matter for the sake of clarity, I hereafter refer to the former as the individual gift that is imagined as a token of a person’s affection with no strings attached, and to the latter as the collective gift that is part and parcel of a series of collective actions with wider and profound social implications. At surface level, they represent two different prototypes of gifts and two different systems of social exchange, which are often diametrically opposed to each other. The individual gift emerged in the modern West along with the rise of individualism and the expansion of the capitalist market economy, while the collective gift has been a major system of social exchange all over the world that creates sociality through a sense of indebtedness (see Graeber 2011) and can be found in various forms in different cultures. At a deeper level, their differences are actually more rhetorical than behavioural, and more in degree than in kind. Behind the discourse of the individualised pure gift in modern times, there are still rules of gifting, expectations of returning gifts, and the social function of strengthening social ties through gift-giving, all of which are similar to their counterparts in systems of traditional collective gifts. Yet, without knowing the cross-cultural differences and similarities between the two basic types, we may be biased to place one against the other, or to misunderstand both of them.

In the following pages, this entry briefly introduces two well-known examples of the traditional and collective gift—the Kula ring and yam exchange, which both occur in the Trobriand Islands—highlighting their features in contrast to the widely-held assumption of modern individual gifts. It then introduces two major theoretical models—the spirit of the gift and the reciprocity principle—that emerged out of scholarly efforts to better understand the origin and driving force of gift exchange. The scholarship shows the main commonalities between the two basic types of gifts, as well as some important differences which in turn lead our inquiry to a deeper level: the cultural understanding between persons and things. In the last section, the entry demonstrates the richness and complexity of the world of gifts that has been explored by scholars from different academic disciplines in recent decades.

Obligatory gifts

A striking feature of collective gifts is their obligatory circulation among the same group of givers and recipients, as illustrated in the Kula ring and yam exchange in Melanesian society. Kula is a ritualised form of intertribal exchange of red shells necklaces (soulava) and white shells armbands (mwali) carried out among men of influence in the Trobriand Islands, a region now part of Papua New Guinea. Predefined partners exchange these gifts in a closed circle across several islands, and they always circulate the gifts of necklaces clockwise and exchange armbands in the opposite direction. These gifts are made for exchange only and have their own names, identities, and histories. The exchange relationship is a lifelong one, but the gifts of necklaces and armbands always flow among fixed partners. Kula exchange voyages from one island to another customarily take place twice a year, and it will take one or two years for a given Kula object to return to its original owner. More importantly, each Kula voyage is highlighted by the interisland trade of many other objects, and in this sense the Kula ring also reflects the economic system in this region (Malinowski 1984 [1922]; Leach & Leach 1983).

An equally important form of collective gift exchange in the Trobriand Islands involves yams. Trobriand men spend a great deal of time and energy cultivating yams, but local people normally eat other fresh produce, including sweet potatoes, greens beans, squash, fruits, and taro. The yams are mainly used by men as gifts to their married-out daughters and sisters who will display them publically in a special yam house. The obligation to participate in gift-giving is in this instance dictated by the local kinship system. People in the Trobriands traditionally adhere to matrilineal descent and patrilocal post-marital residence. This means that when a woman gets married to a man, she moves to his village but her husband continues to belong to his mother’s lineage. The woman who married him will in turn belong to her own mother’s lineage. The gift of yams from a man to his sister or daughter brings the woman prestige and status because it shows how many strong supporters she has from her matrilineal kin. The gift of yams thereby recognises the woman as the actual owner of the matrilineal group. In return, her husband, who will receive some of the yams that she is given, will similarly be obligated to produce and send yams to the house of his married-out sister or daughter who, again, will be living in her husband’s matrilineal community.

These interlocking exchange relationships between men and their married-out sisters or daughters do not stop at the exchange of yams. By giving yams to one’s sister and thereby to her husband, one obligates one’s brother-in-law to give a return gift. This must come in a particular form—bundles of banana leaves given by women. When a man dies in a matrilineal village, all female descendants of this matrilineal lineage who are already married must come back to participate in the funeral as the kinswomen of the deceased. More importantly, they return as the true owners of the matrilineal group. During the funerary ritual, these women give away their special wealth—bundled banana leaves or banana-leaf skirts—to funeral guests. They also mourn the deceased and contribute to the ritual with labour. The woman who gives away the largest number of bundles and skirts is recognised as a ‘wealthy woman’ (Weiner 1992).

Here the links among a woman, her husband, and her brother are made visible and embodied in the flow of yams and banana leaves. The production of yams and banana leaves is in fact so important that it occupies a central place in the local economy, keeping both men and women busy all year around. Importantly, they are not busy for their own consumption needs; rather, they work hard in order to have more gifts for others and expect to receive return gifts as well.

On the surface, gift-giving in both the Kula ring and the exchanges of yam and banana leaves is an obligatory act with specific expectations about the time of return and the volume of the returning gift that takes place between persons as representatives of their own familial/kin groups. These gifts serve socio-political functions while forming an important part of the local economy, motivating economic behaviour and ‘making the world go around’. This contrasts sharply with contemporary understandings of individual gifts, which should be non-obligatory and have no strings attached, especially not specific expectations of return gifting.

Yet this difference become less striking in some customary gift exchanges in the modern West, for example the exchange of holiday greeting cards. More importantly, the expectation to offer gifts but also to receive them and then to make counter-gifts is clearly present in the family tradition of Christmas gift exchanges. This is similar to the yam exchange among Trobriand Islanders, although the value and content of Christmas gifts should be individualised. Truly free gifts seem only to exist in discourse. As Marcel Mauss notes (1967 [1925]), the three obligations of giving, receiving, and returning gifts constitute the foundation of gift-exchange systems all over the world, notwithstanding special cultural and temporal differences.

The engine of gifting: the spirit of the gift or the principle of reciprocity?

Anthropologists have been debating for many years about what motivates gift-giving around the world. Although not the first to explore the subject, Mauss offered the first theory on various gift-exchange systems in non-Western cultures that continues to provide inspirations for the study of the gift. He highlighted the paradoxical and ambiguous nature of gifts being simultaneously obligatory and free, material and spiritual, with interest and disinterested. He started this intellectual journey by asking the fundamental question, ‘What force is there in the thing given which compels the recipient to make a return?’ (Mauss 1967 [1925]: 1). Mauss finds his answer in the Maori concept of hau—a mystic power that lies in the forest and in the valuables (taonga) given by one person to another. According to studies of the Maori that Mauss had access to, the hau always wishes to return to its place of origin, but can only do so through the medium of an object given in exchange for an original gift. Failure to return a gift can result in serious trouble, since not returning the hau can cause the death of gift recipients. It is the hau in the gift, Mauss asserts, that forces the recipient to make a return, and he calls this ‘the spirit of the gift’ (1967 [1925]: 8-9). According to the Maori, to receive a gift is also to receive a part of the gift-giver’s own spiritual essence. Thus, one must make a return gift to keep the original giver intact.

The Maussian notion of the spirit of the gift, however, did not convince Bronislaw Malinowski, one of the founding figures of modern anthropology. Prior to the appearance of Mauss’ classic 1925 work, The gift, Malinowski had already published the famous ethnographic account of Kula exchange in Melanesian society (summarised above) and had described in detail the local system of transactions, ranging from ‘pure gifts’ to ‘real barter’ (1984 [1922]). Rejecting Mauss’ interpretation of the spirit of the gift, Malinowski retracted his category of the ‘pure gift’ in a later book (1962 [1926]) and articulated the principle of reciprocity to explain the Trobriand system of economic transactions. Malinowski argued that the binding force of economic obligations lies in the sanction, which either side may invoke to sever the bonds of reciprocity. One gives because of the expectation of return, and one returns because of the threat that one’s partner may stop giving. He thus concluded that the principle of reciprocity serves as the foundation of the Melanesian social order (Malinowski 1962 [1926]: chapters 3, 4, 8, and 9).

Inspired by Malinowski's work, Raymond Firth argues that among the Maori in New Zealand, exchange is driven by reciprocity (locally called utu). The Maori attach great importance to the idea of ‘compensation’ or ‘equivalent return’ (Firth 1959: 412ff). According to Firth, Mauss misinterprets the hau by imputing active qualities to its social construction, which Maori people do not recognise; Mauss also allegedly confuses the hau of the gift with the hau of the gift-giver (Firth 1959: 419-20). In a similar vein, Claude Levi-Strauss went so far as to call the spirit of the gift a mystification:

Mauss strives to construct a whole out of parts; and as that is manifestly not possible, he has to add to the mixture an additional quantity which gives him the illusion of squaring his account. This quantity is hau. Are we not dealing with a mystification, an effect quite often produced in the minds of ethnographers by indigenous people? (1987: 47).

The most effective advocate for the accountability of the principle of reciprocity, however, is Marshall Sahlins, who introduces a tripartite division of exchange phenomena—generalised reciprocity, balanced reciprocity, and negative reciprocity. He identifies three variables as critical to determining the general nature of gift-giving and exchange: kinship distance, sociability, and generosity (1972:191-210).

The principle of reciprocity was so frequently employed to explain various patterns of gift exchange that it quickly became something of a cliché, as Geoffrey MacCormack warns: ‘the description of all types of exchanges as reciprocal easily leads to an obscuring of the significant differences between them’ (1976: 101). Ultimately, the principle of reciprocity is nothing more than saying that no one will do anything for nothing. As Annette Weiner commented, such a rational and overly general notion of reciprocity is deeply rooted in Western thought and has been used to justify theories of a free market economy since Thomas Hobbes (1992: 28-30).

To truly understand what motivates various systems of gift exchange in non-Western cultures, therefore, one must go beyond Western assumptions of economic rationality and the notion of Homo economicus, which is exactly what Mauss did in 1925 (see also Graeber 2001). The Maussian notion of the spirit of the gift was therefore revitalised from two directions. First, in South Asia studies, anthropologists have explored the Hindu idea of giving without expectation of material return. As early as the 1970s, Ved Prakash Vatuk and Sylvia Vatuk (1971) noted some asymmetric gift-giving relationships in the context of caste hierarchy. Here, people of low castes were generally not expected to return the dan gifts they receive from their superiors. Further investigations reveal that the dan gifts, which are offered by the dominant caste to lower castes during various secular and religious rituals, serve to transfer dangerous and inauspicious elements, such as illness, death, and misfortune, from the donor to the recipient. The acceptance of these gifts is intended as a vessel of evil and inauspiciousness, like swallowing poison. The recipients of lower castes are required by caste ideology to receive this type of poisonous gift without returning it. As a result, the institutionalised flow of poisonous gifts from the dominant caste to subordinate castes creates a mode of cultural domination (Raheja 1988). These findings seriously challenge generalised models of reciprocity. They led Jonathan Parry (1986) to interpret the absence of reciprocity in the Indian dan in terms of an ‘evil spirit’ of the gift. This denies Mauss’ original argument that the spirit of the gift elicits a return gift. Realising this difficulty, Parry writes: ‘Where we have the “spirit,” reciprocity is denied; where there is reciprocity there is not much evidence of “spirit.” The two aspects of the model do not hang together’ (1986: 463). James Laidlaw argues that the notion of the non-obligatory pure gift exists in all world religions, albeit often in obscured forms, such as the case of the dan gift to Shvetambar Jain renouncers in India, and it carries as many important social meanings as the obligatory gifts (2000).

A solution to the tension between motivating spirits and merely secular reciprocity is found in studies of Pacific island societies. One can see both the ‘spirit’ and the social obligation to return. Rather than accepting Mauss’ interpretation of the Maori hau, many anthropologists have employed the notion of inalienability to explain the existence of spiritual, non-utilitarian ties between giver and recipient. Frederick Damon discovered that not all Kula objects are in the endless circle of exchange; the Muyuw islanders, for example, separate particular types of conus shell valuables known as kitoum from other Kula gifts. They may take the kitoum gifts in or out of the circle at their individual choice. This is because they represent the ‘congealed labor’ of their individual owners and because ‘no matter where a kitoum is . . . it can be claimed by its owner’ (Damon 1980:282). All Kula valuables are brought into exchange by the labour of specific individuals whereby they constitute one’s inalienable kitoum (Damon 1980: 284). Similar views are developed by Christopher Gregory in his analysis of the difference between gift-debt relations and commodity-debt relations, positing that gift-debts involve a transfer of inalienable objects between mutually dependent persons, whereas commodity debts result from the exchange of alienable objects between independent transactors (Gregory 2015). Interestingly, the inalienability of certain valuables may explain not only the motivation to return but also the original motivation for participating in competitive exchange such as the Kula (Feil 1982).

The inalienability of gifts is at the core of an innovative theory of exchange by Weiner (1992), arguably the sharpest critic of standard anthropological studies of the gift which routinely rely on the principle of reciprocity. She maintains:

[w]hat motivates reciprocity is its reverse—the desire to keep something back from the pressures of give-and-take. This something is a possession that speaks to and for an individual’s or a group’s social identity and, in so doing, affirms the difference between one person or group and another (1992:43).

It is this principle of keeping-while-giving, rather than the norm of reciprocity, that can explain the obligation to return a gift (Weiner 1992: 46). Weiner also believes that Mauss is right about the Maori hau: ‘[t]he hau as a life force embedded in the person is transmitted to the person’s possessions and thus adds inalienable value to the objects’ (Weiner 1992: 63; see also Godelier 1999; Graeber 2001; Thompson 1987).

Weiner’s theory of the inalienable gift may be hard to apply to gift-giving practices in some complex societies, where most gifts are purchased commodities and where gifts are often individualised. For example, in China, money plays an important role in ceremonial gift-giving, and most material gifts are consumer goods, such as wine, cigarettes, or canned food. Altogether the monetary expenditure on gifts among Chinese villagers costs about twenty percent of household income, making it literally a gift economy (Yan 1996). Moreover, in contrast to the Melanesian and Polynesian cases, which involve the endless circulation of valuable shells, fine mats, or cloaks, the commodities-turned-gifts exchanged among the Chinese are rarely recycled as return gifts; instead, it is expected that gifts will be consumed by their recipients soon after their acceptance. In this sense, not only is a gift alienable, it must be alienated; to return the same gift would be considered a gesture of insult and rejection (Yan 1996).

While posing a challenge to the notion of inalienability, the Chinese case suggests that the spirit of the gift can be understood at two levels. Inalienability as elaborated by Weiner, among others, can be seen in the Melanesian case, where gifts are believed to contain hau or some similar spiritual essence and thus cannot be disposed of freely by the recipient. This is the empirical evidence upon which Mauss bases his argument; but, as an empirical observation, it may not be true in other societies. Therefore, the key issue in any society is to determine what people think about the message conveyed by the gift—love, friendship, caring, obligation, competition, or a supernatural spirit—and the essential implication is that a bond between individuals or groups can be created through the association between persons and things.

The person in the gift

Indeed, the underlying theme in almost all anthropological discussions of the gift and the gift economy is the relationship between persons and material objects. The bonds created by gifts (inalienable objects) are often considered to be the same as the mutually dependent ties between persons. Here we can see that the fundamental issue in Mauss’ analysis of the gift is to determine how people relate to things, and, through things, how people relate to each other. As John Liep notes, both Karl Marx and Mauss are concerned with the alienation of people from the products of their labour, which correlates to the development of a world capitalist market economy (1990: 165). But unlike Marx, who focuses on the system of commodity exchange in modern societies and discovers the secret of surplus value, Mauss concentrates on gift exchange in pre-capitalist societies and seeks answers from indigenous belief systems. To compare the archaic, personalised gift economy with the modern, impersonalised system of commodity exchange, Mauss draws a three-stage, evolutionary scheme: social exchange begins with ‘total prestations’, in which the materials transferred between groups are only part of a larger range of noneconomic transfers. The second stage is gift exchange between moral persons who represent groups, leading finally to commodity exchange between independent individuals in market societies (see Mauss 1967: 68-9).

Jonathan Parry (1986) pushes Mauss’ thesis further by first showing that the Maori and Hindu ideologies of gift exchange represent fundamentally opposite types: the former requires the reciprocity of every gift given, while the latter denies reciprocity. However, the Maori gift and the Indian gift share one thing in common: namely, the absence of an absolute disjunction between persons and things. The separation between persons and things is, according to Parry, a product of Christian cosmology: ‘Christianity—with its notion that all men are fashioned equally in the image of God—has developed a universalistic conception of purely disinterested giving’ (Parry 1986: 468, italics in the original). Furthermore, the strong faith in freedom and rational choice also leads to the belief that ‘those who make free and unconstrained contracts in the market also make free and unconstrained gifts outside it’ (Parry 1986: 469).

In line with Parry’s view, James Carrier argues that the ideology of the perfect gift in the West is shaped by the rise of industrial capitalism:

Free and disinterested givers and recipients who transact unobligating expressions of affection come into cultural existence with the shift of production out of the affective and substantial relations that exist in the household to the impersonal relations of wage labor and capital (Carrier 1990: 31).

This ideology, however, does not always guide everyday practice. Instead, modern American gifts are often predictable and socially regulated (see Caplow 1984; Cheal 1988). The obligatory gift relations characterised by Mauss for traditional societies also exist in capitalist societies (for a further discussion of these themes, see Sanchez et al. 2017).

One important implication of Parry’s and Carrier’s works is that, although gift exchange exists in all human societies, the form it takes varies greatly depending on the particular culture within which it is rooted. Hence we may find multiple ‘forms’ of the gift—the Melanesian gift, the Indian gift, the Japanese gift, the American gift, and so on. At a deeper level, different forms of gifts tend to reflect different customs in the cultural construction of personhood. In Melanesian societies, for example, the person is relationally constructed and in turn represents a set of social relations in his or her social acts, including gift-giving. A primary feature of relational personhood is that ‘persons simply do not have alienable items, that is, property at their disposal; they can only dispose of items by enchaining themselves in relations with others’ (Strathern 1988: 161). By contrast, the free, autonomous individual defined in neoclassical economics has nothing intrinsic to his or her personhood but the ‘bare undifferentiated free will’; everything else is alienable (Radin 1996: 62). In other words, the differences in personhood provide us with a key to better understanding why the Melanesian pure gift is inalienable and thus obligatory, while the Western perfect gift is free and thus must be unconstraining. Moreover, personhood also explains the idiosyncratic differences between the two prototypes of gifts and gift-exchange systems: the modern individual gift and traditional collective gifts.

Particularly noteworthy is that a Western-centric understanding of personhood may easily contribute to the misunderstanding of the gift in non-Western societies. At the core of the debate about the nature of the gift is its essential ambiguity; that is, gifts are at once free and constraining, self-interested and disinterested, and are motivated by both generosity and calculation or expectation of return. Although Mauss initiated the anthropological discourse on the gift by taking a both/and approach in examining its ambiguous nature, most subsequent studies focus on one side or another. As a result, the principle of reciprocity, the inalienability of the gift, and the dichotomy of gifts vs. commodities have taken turns dominating the study of the topic. Underneath all these theories, there is a Western notion of a pure gift based on the belief of the autonomous and free individual that has been used as the ultimate measurement to examine gift-giving activities all over the world. As Mark Ostern points out:

We have met the enemy and he is us: the perfect altruist is nothing more than the obverse face of Homo economicus…[w]e will achieve no deeper understanding of gift exchange and their relationships to economic and social behavior until we discard or at least modify the notion of persons as free, unconstrained transactors (2002: 240, italics in the original).

The inability to think beyond Western economic rationality is precisely what caused cultural misunderstandings between the early European settlers and Native Americans, discussed at the outset of this essay.

The multifaceted gift in the real world

Anthropologists have explored a great number of social functions of gifts as well as the explicit and implicit rules governing gift exchange, which in turn help us to better understand a wide range of social phenomena. The enigma of the gift continues to draw more scholars to such an intellectual endeavour, and the study of gifts has gone far beyond anthropology to become an interdisciplinary enterprise in its own right. This section can only make a few brief observations thereof, barely scratching the surface.

Gifts are commonly exchanged in ritualised contexts and can even constitute a rite in and of themselves, such as the presentation of a wedding ring. Thus we can make a distinction between ceremonial and non-ceremonial gifts. The most common examples of the former include gift-giving activities in rites of passage and holidays, such as weddings, funerals, and the Christmas holiday. An occasional gift offered to a helper to express gratitude or some regular exchange of presents among family members or friends may be considered as the latter.

Yet, one possible classification is to see the social identity symbolised by the gifts. Do two persons exchange gifts on behalf of the respective group that they belong to, such as family, lineage, or village community? Or is the gift exchanged between two autonomous individuals? The custom of bridewealth and dowry constitutes a good example of collectivist gift-giving; by contrast, most gift-giving activities in contemporary Western societies occur between two autonomous individuals.

In general, most collective gift-giving activities are institutionalised and ceremonial because collective identities and group interests are at stake, while most individualistic gifts occur in non-ceremonial occasions. But there are exceptions. The exchange of Kula valuables is an institutionalised ceremonial activity but remains a highly competitive enterprise whereby individuals act as free agents. On the other hand, the offer of an engagement ring in contemporary Western societies is a highly ritualised and institutionalised act of individual gift-giving.

Once we place gift exchange in the larger social context, we can see the difference between horizontal and vertical gift exchanges. Horizontal gift exchange occurs among social equals, while vertical exchange cuts across the boundaries of social status. Both types of gift-giving activities may coexist on some occasions. Taking Christmas gift-giving as an example, the horizontal exchange of gifts among friends, classmates, or coworkers goes side by side with vertical exchange of gifts between employers and employees, patrons and clients, hosts and service providers, and to a lesser degree, between senior and junior generations in a family or kin group. Because the obligation to return a gift places its recipient in the inferior position of being indebted, gift-giving is often used as a way to create political authority and dominance, such as in cases of the Melanesian big-man and the Polynesian chieftainship (Sahlins 1972). It may even become a weapon to fight against one’s political opponents, such as in the cases of potlatch among Native Americans on the Northwest Pacific coast.

This superiority of the gift-giver, however, may not work in complex societies with a clearly defined class hierarchy and/or a centralised state authority. For example, in her study of the repayment of Japanese on gifts (benevolent favours from superiors), Takie Sugiyama Lebra (1969) demonstrates that, given the hierarchical context of Japanese society, the gift-donor who is in a subordinate position can never balance what has previously been received from a superior. In Chinese society, a particular type of gift known as xiaojing, which is rooted in the cultural promise of filial piety, unilaterally flows up the ladder of social status and no equivalent return is expected. Recipients remain socially superior because their acceptance is already regarded as a favour to the gift-giver, showing that the principle of hierarchy overshadows the principle of reciprocity in this context (Yan 2002).

Gender constitutes another important dimension in the world of gifts. Many earlier studies of gift-giving in non-Western societies seemed to be gender-blind because they tended to focus on institutions of ceremonial exchanges in public life where women were thought to play only a trivial role. Annette Weiner’s 1976 book, Women of value, men of renown: new perspectives in Trobriand exchange, represents one of the first significant breakthroughs in this regard. Weiner argues that women in the Trobriand Islands are by no means the object of gift exchange by men; on the contrary, women play an autonomous and crucial role in certain ceremonial gift exchanges in public, such as the mortuary exchange described above. In it women reclaim their unique role in the matrilineage and restate matrilineal solidarity (Weiner 1976, 1992). Marilyn Strathern pushes the theme further by pointing out that, in Melanesian culture, women and men not only have their own domain in gift exchange but also separate realms of power and domination which are gendered by the gendering of gift exchange (Strathern 1988, see chapters 2, 4, 5 and 11). In contemporary Western societies, women not only give more but also receive more gifts than their male counterparts, and gift-giving is regarded as an essential part of a feminised ideology of love (Cheal 1988; Caplow 1984). How to assess women’s dominant role in gift-giving, however, remains to date a debatable issue (Komter 1996).

If we look at the purpose of gift-giving, we can see that a gift may serve an expressive or an instrumental function, or both. In expressive gifts, the existing status relationship between the giver and the receiver determines the conditions of gift exchange (the kind and value of gifts to be given), and gift-giving supports the status relationship. By contrast, if the conditions of exchange (the nature and value of the gift) determine or alter the respective statuses of a giver and recipient, we are likely dealing with instrumental gifts. In other words, expressive gifts are ends in themselves and thus often reflect a long-term relationship between a giver and a recipient; instrumental gifts are a means to some utilitarian end and ordinarily indicate a short-term relationship. Nevertheless, in practice, the pure types of expressive and instrumental gifts never exist; rather, elements of expressivity and instrumentality coexist in almost all gift-giving activities, but in different ratios and combinations. In post-socialist Ukraine, for instance, a small payment of cash presented to a doctor is regarded as a gift instead of bribery, as long as the recipient did not explicitly demand it (Polese 2008).

In a broader sense, the exchanges of greetings, assistance, and moral support are often regarded as gifts from one party to another. Their nonmaterial nature often makes the giving a more disinterested act and thus closer to the idealism of the pure gift. In this connection, donations, charities, and especially online gifting to strangers are particularly noteworthy gifts that build impersonalised ties between the givers and the often-unknown recipients. The best example is the donation of human blood, tissues, organs and bodies, which are more often than not transacted from anonymous donors to unknown recipients. These altruistic yet unconventional gifts also raise new ethical issues in both Western and non-Western societies (Bolt 2012; Simpson 2004).

The economic implications of gift-giving are enormously far-reaching in post-modern and developed countries, as well as in small-scale and pre-industrial societies. Malinowski had long argued that the work incentives of the Trobriand Islanders could not be explained in terms of materialistic self-interest. Instead, they produce extra yams so that the harvest may be given to exchange partners and chiefs and eventually rot in storehouses for the sake of earning prestige. Similarly, they actively participate in the inter-island Kula exchange primarily to obtain the armbands and necklaces that have no practical value except to become renowned (Malinowski 1984 [1922]; Weiner 1992; Graeber 2001). The exchange of Kula valuables therefore constitutes the very foundation of this prestige economy in Trobriand society. The cattle complex in Africa is another example in which the production and exchange of cattle mostly serve social, political, and ritual purposes, and people have an exaggerated and emotional personal attachment to their animals (Evens-Pritchard 1940). Gift exchange may be seen as a different type of economy even in the narrowest sense of the term: Christmas gifts alone amount to a multi-billion-dollar business in contemporary American society (Waits 1993). The global expansion of the capitalist market economy and consumerist ideology has pushed the gift economy to a higher level, leading to new ceremonial occasions like Mother’s Day and more convenient ways of gift-giving like gift cards (Otnes & Beltramini 1996). The most intriguing and perhaps excessively individualistic invention is the gift given to oneself, known as self-gifts (Mick 1996).

Riding the tidal wave of global consumerism, self-gifts can be found all over the world and are more popular among millennials. In the village community where I conducted a systematic study of gift exchange (Yan 1996), I found that the emergence of self-gifts is part of the much larger and important trend among young villagers to embrace the modern individual gift in their practice of gift exchange. Most of these individual gifts are not offered through ritualised family ceremonies; neither do many of them lead to long-lasting cycles of giving-receiving-returning between the donor and recipient. The occasions of individual gift-giving are not only personal but often ad hoc or situational, such as celebrating a friend’s promotion in the workplace or bringing something nice or exotic to family members from a trip back home. More intriguingly, the motivation of offering such a personal gift is also highly personal—as villagers put it, they did it because they had good feelings toward the recipient and they felt good after offering the gift as a token of their fondness toward the recipient. The influence of consumer individualism is obvious here, as all kinds of commercials and products of pop culture promote the importance of affection and emotional ties in the context of commodification. An emphasis on feeling good may have replaced past requirements of being or doing good; hence, personal gifts for feeling good replace obligatory gifts for being good. The implication here is that the two prototypes of gifts that we examined at the outset of this essay not only coexist in our time, but also influence and transform each other, creating new possibilities in the world of gifts.

The give-and-take of gifts in everyday life creates, maintains, and strengthens social bonds—be they cooperative, competitive, or antagonistic—which in turn define the identities of persons. Scrutinising gifts and gift economies may therefore provide us with an effective and unique means of understanding the formation of personhood and the structure of social relations in a given society. Lastly, although gifts are given and received among peoples all over the world and throughout human history, the specific rules of gift exchange vary from one culture to another. Gift exchange thereby crystallises the universality and diversity of human cultures.

Conclusion

To conclude, the anthropology of the gift is particularly important for understanding social life for several reasons. Gift-giving has long been one of the major forms of social exchange, along with redistribution and market exchange. Yet, unlike the other two, it encompasses multiple domains of social life and carries rich meanings above and beyond the economy. Moreover, the study of gift-giving reveals the social origins of economic institutions and provides insights about the value of human labour that have long been obscured by modern economic theories. They include the relationship between persons and things, or what drives people to work beyond their basic consumption needs. Gift-giving basically debunks the cornerstone assumption in neoliberal economics that human beings only aim to maximise individual utility, and thus has greatly enriched social theories. Additionally, the give-and-take of gifts in everyday life creates, maintains, and strengthens various social bonds—cooperative, competitive, or antagonistic—which in turn define personal identities. An examination of the gift and the gift economy, therefore, will provide us with an effective and unique means of understanding the formation of personhood and the structure of social relations. Furthermore, although gifts are universal and are given and have been received throughout human history, the specific rules of gift exchange vary from one culture to another. Therefore, gifts represent a crystallization of the universality and diversity of human cultures.

Finally, it is noteworthy that the gift is no longer the preserved subject of anthropology. Scholars of humanities and social sciences alike have joined forces to explore the dynamic, complicated world of gifts from different disciplinary perspectives and approaches, such as antiquity study, history, literary critics, philosophy, sociology, law, economics, and marketing research (see Cheal 1988; Davis 2000; Davies 2010; Hyland 2009; Kolm & Ythier 2006; Marion 2011; Osteen 2002; Otnes & Peltramini 1996; Satlow 2013). The growing literature also shows that, as the human interest in and capacity of doing gift exchange are consistently changing in response to a rapidly shifting environment of social life at large, the enigmatic gift will likely remain to be an attractive subject in anthropology and beyond.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to three anonymous reviewers and Felix Stein for their insightful comments on early drafts and advice for improvement.

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Note on contributor

Yunxiang Yan is professor of anthropology at University of California, Los Angeles and adjunct professor of anthropology at Fudan University, China. His research interests include family and kinship, social change, and the anthropology of moralities. He is the author of The Flow of Gifts: Reciprocity and Social Networks in a Chinese Village.

Prof. Yunxiang Yan, Department of Anthropology, 366 Haines, Los Angeles, CA 90095, United States. yan@anthro.ucla.edu

House and home

Felix Stein — Mon, 09 Dec 2019 10:11:58 +0000

Farhan Samanani Johannes Lenhard

Initially published 9 Dec 2019

http://doi.org/10.29164/19home

Abstract:

If asked to imagine home, most of us will come to think of a particular house or building. And, for many of us, the quintessential image of home remains the place we grew up in. This close association between house and home has long marked anthropological literature. And yet, when we imagine home, it is often not the structures themselves but the feelings, practices, and relationships within familiar spaces which give home a powerful sense of belonging. Home may be the scent of a grandmother’s cooking, the familiar fuzz of a worn cushion, the seemingly defiant thrill of hanging posters on the wall as a teenager, or the knot of tension in the stomach of a child listening to an argument in the adjoining room. Recent anthropological studies have hence looked beyond physical structures to understand home in terms of a diverse array of practices, meaningful and imaginative forms, and feelings which surround a sense of groundedness within the world. Understood in such terms, home becomes something much less solid than a structure of stone or wood. It tends to be contestable and fragile, a domain not only of belonging but also of potential alienation when attempts to make home fail or are subverted. This flourishing literature increasingly suggests that while physical shelter may be a basic existential need, it is houses and homes, wrapped up in the desire and struggle for belonging, which underpin human sociality.

Introduction

The study of home within anthropology, and within the social sciences more broadly, occupies a curious position. On the one hand, houses, homes, and practices of homemaking have been an inescapable background within anthropological writing throughout the discipline’s history. Houses and homes have been recognised as an essential ground upon which many of the most prominent theoretical questions of social science unfold, from the nature of kinship, to the reproduction of class and gender differences, to the shaping of sensory knowledge. On the other hand, however, houses and homes often remain out of focus, with their ability to ground and shape social life simply taken for granted and lacking analytical elaboration. They tend to be the mere background to the ‘real’ objects of analysis. The intimacy and idiosyncrasy of home spaces can threaten to confound efforts to consider broader questions of social reproduction or social transformation. And yet it may well be that no one lives without a home, and that home plays an inescapable role in defining who we are.

This entry traces anthropological attempts to think through the significance of houses and homes in shaping our lives. Given the persistent gap between the centrality of home to most of human life, and its peripheral position within most social science, these attempts represent fertile analytic starting points for the study of social life more broadly. For heuristic purposes, this entry presents ‘house’ and ‘home’ as distinct but related entities. It takes the ‘house’ to be the material and often-generic form of the home in a given society. Thus, the house points here to familiar physical structures in streets and neighbourhoods, which mainly take shape through the practices of planners, architects, craftspeople, and builders. The house, however, also refers to the idea of houses or households as typical social institutions, defined by dominant norms. In contrast, the notion of ‘home’ emphasises the subjective sense of being rooted within the world. Both ‘house’ and ‘home’ exist simultaneously as physical entities, subjective feelings, and as objects of various discourses which seek to shape, reinforce, or contest the forms they take. Both entities do not always map neatly onto one another. ‘Home’ may refer more to imaginary spaces, or to bodily practices rather than physical structures, while houses, as sites of labour, conflict, and tension, may be at times fundamentally unhomely.

The house: from symbolism to social reproduction

The conceptual distinction between house and home is a relatively recent one, and for many years anthropologists did not give much importance to either concept. Early scholars such as Lewis Henry Morgan (1981[1881]), writing on American aboriginal houses, or Bronislaw Malinowski, who defined the family as a group of kin tied to ‘a definite physical space, a hearth and home’ (see Collier, Rosaldo & Yanagisako 1987), saw the physicality and particularity of the home as secondary. When homes appeared within anthropological accounts, they ‘tend[ed] to be thought of as a “case” of symbolism or cosmology rather than a subject in their own right’ (Humphrey 1988: 16). In addition to being seen as a symbol indicating particular cultural beliefs, earlier generations of anthropologists also saw the house mostly as a container or setting for those social relations, such as kinship, which were taken to be of primary interest (Carsten & Jones 1995). While the home environment certainly mattered in earlier anthropological work, it did so because it was seen as an important element within broader meaningful orders, or as symbolically-laden stages, upon which important social dramas such as marriage or initiation rites played out.

Two seminal works by Pierre Bourdieu and Claude Lévi-Strauss both reflect this approach, but also mark the beginning of a shift in focus towards unpacking the role of houses in fundamental social processes: Lévi-Strauss (1983) wrote on ‘house societies’, defined as societies where elite power was organised via the institution of often noble ‘houses’, which bundled together familial descent, land, power and wealth. In such societies, including the Native American Yurok and Kwakiutl as well as medieval European societies, Lévi-Strauss argued that noble houses played a critical role in sustaining society by encompassing forms of power that might otherwise be in tension (1983). For instance, marriages within noble houses turned allies into kin, reconciling the tension that might have existed between maintaining distinct family groups and interests, and the desire to build cross-cutting alliances (Lévi-Strauss 1983: 187). This approach continued to see houses as ‘containers’. However, in contrast to earlier works, the act of containment itself was now highlighted as playing a critical role in sustaining the social processes it encompassed.

Meanwhile, Bourdieu’s famous essay on the Kabyle house traced how corresponding distinctions of light/dark, public/private, and male/female sat at the heart how the Kabyle people, a Berber group living in the Atlas mountains, viewed the world (1992 [1970]). These distinctions not only shaped public conduct and religious belief, but were also manifest in the very layout, furnishings, and domestic routines which made up the Kabyle house, as well as in everyday domestic routines. In Bourdieu’s account, the physical organization of the Kabyle house not only reflected this structured worldview, but was also responsible for reproducing it. This argument would find full expression in his later theory of ‘habitus’, which he came to characterise as ‘a system of predispositions inculcated by the material circumstances of life and by family upbringing’ (Bourdieu 1976: 118). Although Bourdieu’s later work does not deal with the house at the same level of empirical or conceptual detail (Atkinson 2016), it is clear within his theory that houses are important sites for learning embodied habits and internalising specific values. Thus, as anthropologists began to focus on the home itself, it was largely through physical houses. For Lévi-Strauss, houses literally and conceptually encompassed and mediated relations, while for Bourdieu the structured, material form of the house became the primary ground for social reproduction.

In many ways, the first surge of attention flowing from the study of houses into the realm of homes has followed from the meeting of these two approaches, revealing that houses and homes are spaces where relations were not only reproduced, but actively mediated: a point made in an important volume by Stephen Hugh-Jones and Janet Carsten (1995). This new understanding of house and home has been illustrated in different ways. In her study of Malay domestic life, Carsten (1997) puts the hearth at the centre of the house: it is the place where the family meets, where food is prepared, and where kinship is made through the transformation and sharing of substances. She argues that ‘[h]earths are obvious sources of physical sustenance, but they are also often the symbolic focus of the house, loaded with the imagery of the commensal unity of close kin. Houses are material shelters as well as ritual centres’ (Carsten 2003:55). By sharing food, kinship is made and reproduced (many Malay express the two concepts as being like siblings). Here, the physical and symbolic dimensions of domestic life are not easily separated. Rather, as other authors have also argued, it is the physical enactment of kin relations, and their direct involvement in sustaining life through forms of care and nourishment, which give these relations weight and reality, investing them with memory and feeling (see Martens & Scott 2006; de Pina-Cabral 1986). Such attention to care, unity, and togetherness also brought questions of homeliness into focus, alongside matters of material wellbeing, collective ritual, and social reproduction.

Likewise, the making of a house and the making of a marriage can often be closely linked, as was the case among the Zafimaniry in Madagascar when studied by Maurice Bloch (1995). As a married couple’s house becomes stronger – ‘grows bones’, as several Zafimaniry put it – and transforms into a hardwood construction over time, the relationship of the married couple becomes more stable. No longer separating out broader social processes from the house itself, Bloch instead argued that house and marriage were interdependent. For married couples, in fact, key moments and challenges in a solidifying marriage, such as the birth of the first child, were intertwined with on-going processes of renovating and decorating the house. As the family unit matured, and took on wider roles and responsibilities, the physical structure of the Zafimaniry house grew increasingly solid and ornate, both reflecting this maturity and significance and contributing to it.

Anthropologists have also highlighted the role played by houses in producing a distinctive mode of economic organisation, known as the ‘house economy’ (Gudeman & Rivera 1990) or the ‘domestic mode of production’ (Sahlins 1972). Following a theory developed by Alexander Chayanov in relation to peasant economies, Sahlins describes household production as defined by the needs of the domestic unit – and as such as relatively low. In a parallel way, Stephen Gudeman and Alberto Rivera observed how their informants sustained their agricultural livelihoods in an increasingly market-driven world, drawing on fieldwork with farming communities, first in Panama in the late 1960s, and then in Columbia from the 1970s onwards. Here, material practices were organised through the house (Gudeman & Rivera 1990: 2). While ‘both the house and the corporation are means for accomplishing material tasks’, the house economy is distinct in that it is ‘smaller, […] locally based and wholly or partly produces its own means of maintenance’ (Gudeman & Rivera 1990: 10). This organization enabled the household to pursue goals and modalities of mutuality, as well as individual well-being, distinct from but connected with the imperatives of the market. As such, Gudeman and his collaborators describe the house as the basic unit of economic life connected to others through bonds of exchange – while striving to be self-sufficient – and embedded in communities (Gudeman & Hann 2015). Again, the role of the house in mediating these relations and in the re-production of the family and the household is key.

Gudeman’s work ties in with approaches that emphasise the house as a sort of technology, which brings people together and mediates their relations with others, far beyond the confines of their economic existence. This argument is set out by Donna Birdwell-Pheasant and Denise Lawrence-Zuñiga in the introduction to their volume, Home life:

Both households and families use houses more than as settings for activities of production and distribution or as consumer goods. They are also mechanisms of communication, which channel and regulate social interaction among family members and between separate households. […] The house defines a place that belongs to a particular set of people and also defines, through co-residence and shared usage, the set of people that belong to a particular place. (1999: 3)

In each of these cases, although houses and homes are understood as playing an essential role in reproducing social relations, this reproduction cannot be taken for granted. Houses, homes, and those people within do not simply take up a pre-given place within an ordered cosmos. Rather, social reproduction is revealed as an often idiosyncratic process, where different individuals and families work to take up, challenge, or reinterpret given and familiar social roles. Houses and homes play a key role in such processes, mediating between individuals and society. Their construction and arrangement, as well as the kin relations which come together to create a ‘household’, often follow and reproduce existing social patterns. At the same time, the material and social resources of households are taken up in creative ways. As such, houses and homes situate individuals and families within society: not identically, but always in particular locations.

Assembling home: materialist approaches

If one strand of anthropological attention focused on the role of houses and homes in social reproduction, another strand has asked on how homes, and acts of homemaking, shape subjects themselves. Instead of examining the role of homes in sustaining or remaking key social institutions, the family, or labour, these approaches have looked more closely at the variety of lives and relationships that unfold within the home. They have focused more closely on questions of what it means to eke out a sense of belonging, security, and worth within and through the home, but also on the tensions that can emerge between different members of a household when feelings of belonging, security, or value do not align. In highlighting the subjective stakes of homes and homemaking, such work also begins to suggest a contrast between the house and household on one hand – which might be understood as a social institution, reflecting dominant norms – and the home, which might be understood as including feelings of rootedness, safety, and value.

The contrast between a physical ‘house’ and a subjective sense of ‘home’, however, is not hard and fast. Instead, as work on the materiality of the home has shown, houses are often made into homes through the reworking of their material forms. Renovation, decoration, and furnishing, for example, help transform houses from generic expressions of familiar forms into places which tell the story of distinct, personal lives and relationships. This has been shown in a study of residents on a North London council estate (Miller 1988). Danny Miller documented how residents decorated and renovated their council flats in ways which both reflected their class position but also inflected this position with a personal sense of identity and belonging. Focusing not on homes themselves, but on the possessions and consumption practices that concentrate within their walls, Miller has continued to examine the importance of material objects for developing a sense of home. These objects include fitted kitchens, furniture, and knickknacks, but also the materials of the flats themselves such as concrete, wood, or brick which channel noise, light, and warmth. They allow homes to express not only given social meanings but the particularity of individual biographies and interpersonal relations (2009; 2001; 1998). As a result, the objects in one’s home are simultaneously involved in placing oneself in broader society, creating relationships of care, and developing a personal sense of biography, whereas the home both facilitates and reflects these interwoven processes. Together, home, the possessions which fill it, and the memories attached to both, shore up our sense of identity and belonging against the tribulations we might face in the outside world (Miller 2001). The physical permanence of material objects, and their peculiar mode of assembly within the home, serve as durable sources of security (Petridou 2001). The subject, the inhabitant of the home, as Elia Petridou argues in her study of Greek students’ homes in Britain, is advanced through the ‘interaction with objects’. These objects could be furniture but also food, which is less place-bound; their totality and the security that accompanies them is in part based on an understanding of home as a ‘sensory totality’ (Petridou: 88). As such, for Miller (2009; 2001; 1998) and others (see also Gregson 2007; Dittmar 1992; Daniels & Andrews 2010; Cieraad 2006), creating a sense of home is directly linked to activities like shopping for material goods, arranging furniture in the rooms or narrating stories and memories of different objects. Shifting the focus onto materiality helps clarify a distinction between the physical house, whose forms often follow dominant norms, and a felt sense of home, which plays with and reinvents these forms, without necessarily subverting them.

On a more macro-level, anthropologists studying architecture and urban planning have highlighted that the material qualities of our surroundings work to shape bodies, habits, and mobility in line with broader social patterns (see Buchli 2013 for an overview). Following Bourdieu, they ask how houses impart particular social understandings and roles, often focusing less on individual houses or homes, and more on housing as a form of infrastructure (see Larkin 2013 for a review of infrastructural approaches). Thus, specific forms of architecture can give colonial aspirations physical form (e.g. Rabinow 1995 on France and its former colonies). In addition, specific features of houses, such as gates, tend to structure social relations. They may create class and race-based enclaves, as in American upper class suburbs, where segregated communities are established around singular houses or groups of them (Low 2003). On an intra-house level, Christine Helliwell (1996) studying the Dayak in Borneo, or the contributors to Beyond kinship (Joyce & Gillespie 2000) on various other house societies, go into detail of how houses and their architectural design restrict bodies, channel sensory awareness, produce sociality, or provoke interventions (e.g. in response to a quarrelling couple). While partitions – often flimsy and transparent – can create a division between private and public, they can also lead to forms of sociality. Likewise, changing housing conditions can be used to structure and sustain political outcomes. For example, moving Chicago ‘project’ residents into newer, mixed-income buildings led them to lose access to the free and effective heating systems of their former homes. Thereby, the residents were subject to a ‘sensory push’ towards becoming better workers and consumers, who bore the risks of their own survival individually (Fennell 2011). Many approaches which look at houses as infrastructure are grounded in actor-network theory, which in its most radical iterations refuses to see houses as stable objects at all, but instead approaches them as collections (or ‘assemblages’) of objects, materials, and processes, all of which exert agency and make demands on people in particular ways (e.g. Vokes 2013).

On the other hand, a range of works on the home has focused on emotion and affect, where affect denotes forms of bodily perception that slip below conscious detection and are frequently hard to put into words. Affects often have a strong material basis, which is why the material arrangement of homes can serve to suffuse them with specific atmospheres of feeling (Daniels 2015; Olesen 2010). For example, in Jordanian Bedouin homes, the profusion of green-tinted windows fills them with a radiant green hue which evokes a sense of divine presence (Bille 2017). Specific forms of light are not simply a religious symbol. Rather, for instance, green light’s physical brilliance, immaterial nature and its ability to seep into spaces help construct deeply evocative feelings of piety and virtue. This helps householders make their claims to virtue visible to and felt by others, and it shapes domestic moods and interactions. As such, while the use of green light clearly reproduces dominant notions of piety and a public-private distinction, these values come to life in affective ways within individual households. They come about at the intersection of materiality, emotion, social relations, and the practices of dwelling, and they shape personal notions of home.

Re-making home: feminist and critical approaches

If homes have come to be seen as sites where people can negotiate and even contest their place in the world, then this is in no small part thanks to feminist writings on domestic labour and women’s lives. While the universalism of the specific, often Marxist concepts used to theorise women’s domestic efforts has often drawn criticism from anthropologists (Edholm, Harris & Young 1975; Strathern 1992), Marxist approaches, and the anthropological responses to them, have nonetheless productively focused attention on the domestic sphere as a domain of labour and creativity, as well as one holding the potential for alienation or exploitation.

For example, in her ethnography of a high-rise apartment building in Karachi, Laura Ring (2006) traces how inter-ethnic peace is the product of the relentless work of women’s domestic labour. Peace prevails despite on-going tensions between different nationalist factions who share the building, including Sindhis, Punjabs, and Muhajirs. As they went about their lives together, the female residents would exchange gossip, share fashion and grooming tips and preferences, reflect on questions of religious practice and belief, or help one another navigate family tensions. These seemingly-mundane interactions worked to build bonds between households, offering both men and women a localised counternarrative to stories of irreparable political and ethnic divides. Ironically, the success of these small, everyday efforts could make the state of friendship, care, and peace in the apartment building appear to some (including the ethnographer, initially) as if this were simply a natural state, rather than a product of sustained work.

In documenting the everyday labours involved in making a home, feminist scholars have also called for more careful attention to tensions between exploitation and belonging, and between social change and social reproduction. For example, Lila Abu-Lughod, studying Awlad 'Ali Bedouin women in Egypt (1990; 1986) traces how ostensibly oppressive norms of public male honour and private female modesty are creatively taken up by women to claim power for themselves. By echoing men’s insistence over strict separations between men and women within the home, women eke out space to smoke, scheme, and share household secrets. They invert their formal deference to men, while retaining their claim to modesty and virtue. These practices can often become forms of resistance, challenging power dynamics within households and potentially driving broader social change. Thus, traditional Bedouin marriage tends to involve elder relatives selecting a woman’s betrothed, with little input from the bride herself, and with financial support for the couple expected to come from kin. However, women may resist such practices by asserting their own desirability, chafing at the obligations this practice produces, and remaining enchanted with the idea of a spouse with an independent income. Through buying lingerie or makeup, they assert a role for desire – both theirs and that of their husbands – in determining marriages. Such assertions reshape power dynamics within and between households, granting women more power over prospective and actual husbands, as orchestrators of desire. They also reposition the home as a more private space between husbands and wives, one shaped by consumer goods, and less dependent on kin.

Lives within the home can be constrained by multiple, intersecting forms of power, from gendered hierarchies to the power of the state. Yet, even under what may seem like desperate or desolate circumstances, home can serve as a site of creative response and as a repository for hopes and dreams. This is illustrated in Clara Han’s (2012) striking ethnography of slum households in Santiago, Chile, where she traces home as a site of ‘active awaiting’. Living in a present where the possibilities for life are tightly constrained by debt, gang violence, and the punitive force of the state, Han nonetheless traces how small interventions in the home – the pawning of a beloved music player, or the sheltering of a relative away from an abusive partner – create small spaces in which new, perhaps unknown possibilities can take root and grow.

This emphasis on interpersonal relationships, on belonging, security, and worth, and on power and contestation, remain rooted in the house, as a physical space, but move beyond it in emphasising the subjective dimensions of home. For instance, classic analyses of hospitality may focus on how, for hosts, acts of hospitality may serve to enact the authority and moral standing of householders, and how such domestic sovereignty relates to broader forms of cultural and state authority (e.g. Herzfeld 1987). In contrast, recent studies of homes on the margins (e.g. Han 2012) have come to ask how homes mediate and constrain the very possibilities of caring for others, as hosts or otherwise, as a fragile and often fraught enterprise. Even in studies focused on physical houses and other structures, home often comes to life not as a symbolic or material form, but as an experiential and relational category.

Supporting this shift in focus away from physical structures to lived forms have been critiques of western understandings of home, as a product of capitalist modernity. Over the course of the twentieth century, western understandings of home have centred around the idea of a privately-owned dwelling, occupied by a nuclear family (Dupuis & Thorns 1996; Madigan, Munro & Smith 1990). These have been coupled with philosophically inspired works drawing on phenomenological (Ingold 2011) or existential traditions (Jackson 2005) to ask what it means for people to have a place within the world. From these impetuses, a growing body of work has approached the concept of ‘home’ not as a typical or identifiable institution, operating to reproduce given forms of authority, but instead as a name for the on-going efforts and dreams of people to secure a place or sense of belonging in the world, something felt, lived, imagined, or struggled for.

Home as a process and ideal

If the understandings of home explored above remain grounded in the notion of a physical house, occupying a fixed geographical location, a further set of perspectives engage with representations and practices of home more widely. Home and the processes linked to it are not necessarily material, and even when they are, they do not need to be linked to a house. Home may evoke the notion of a homeland, whose material basis lies in the smells of street foods, the cadence of a dialect, or the grand architecture of symbolic monuments. Yet, homelands may also be predominantly imaginative entities. This is the case, for example, with the Sikh ‘homeland’ of Khalistan, which exists as a yet-to-be realised nationalist vision, amongst local and émigré activists, who frequently discuss such visions online (Axel 2004). Linked to the imagination are the practical habits which produce and reproduce a sense of home, and which may persist in doing so, even in the absence of a fixed material basis. Particularly in situations where a material home is not immediately available, as in states of homelessness, refuge, or migration, the imagination, memory, and practices of homemaking become crucial to sustain a sense of stability and security. Homeless people, for example, may establish a sense of home in terms of their daily routines, moving through city streets, collecting new materials for temporary shelters, begging, and meeting with friends and familiar faces. In this way, they do not just structure their day, but also their surroundings (see Veness 1993; Lenhard, forthcoming).

Home may thus be seen as always in-between the real and the ideal and imaginative (Mallett 2004). It can relate to ‘the activity performed by, with or in a person's things and places. Home is lived in the tension between the given and the chosen, then and now’ (Mallett 2004: 80). As Shelley Mallett argues, ‘people spend their lives in search of home, at the gap between the natural home and the particular ideal home where they would be fully fulfilled’ (2004: 80). This analysis links ideas about home as a future (ideal) homeland inspired by past experience to notions of home in the present. It foregrounds that homes are made and have a procedural quality to them.

Catherine Brun and Anita Fabos (2015) position the idea of home-as-process at the centre of their work inspired by different contexts of migration. They describe home as a set of everyday practices, while ‘such practices involve both material and imaginative notions of home and may be improvements or even investments to temporary dwellings; they include the daily routines that people undertake [...] and the social connections people make’ (Brun and Fabos 2015:12). This view of home builds on Mary Douglas’ (1991) classic minimal definition of the home, as the act of bringing a particular space under control. For Douglas, a home is first and foremost a localised activity of ordering and control in the present, produced through accumulating meaningful objects and through enacting familiar routines in a certain space (see also Easthope 2004; O’Mahony 2013). Douglas continues her analysis in the following way:

home is always a localizable idea. Home is located in space but it is not necessarily a fixed space. It does not need bricks and mortar, it can be a wagon, a caravan, a board, or a tent. It need not be a large space, but space there must be, for home starts by bringing some space under control (1991: 289).

From this perspective, making a home is about finding a daily structure, regular rhythms, and constructing routines (Easthope 2004: 135; O’Mahony 2013). April Veness (1993), who worked with homeless people in Delaware in the late 1980s, stresses the importance of habits, rhythms, and routines for making home — often as mundane as routinely visiting certain neighbourhoods, shelters, and food kitchens. Veness found that installing a temporal order to the day as well as the environment was a key part of peoples’ daily home-making.

Julie Botticello (2007) takes the notion of home further away from a fixed dwelling towards a ‘site of practices where comfort, familiarity, and intimate sociality occur’ (2007: 19; see also Capo 2015). In her study of Nigerians living in London, Botticello not only looks at a newly constructed home of immigrants but also at how a sense of home does not have to be limited to domestic, private space. Instead, home extends into the public realm of the street, of outdoor markets. The home-as-process, built on practices and routines, does not have to involve a fixed structure. It denotes a ‘highly complex system of ordered relations with place, an order that orientates us in space, in time, and in society’ (Dovey 1985: 39). All this takes us not just into the everyday rhythm of routine and practice, but to the ways in which such practices unfold over vaster spaces and longer periods of time.

Thus, imagined, in-process homes may be grounded in nostalgia – a feeling of reaching backwards in time that is already present in its Greek root (ὅμοιος [homoios]), which relates to homesickness. Memories and a yearning for a past home are often part of home imaginaries. Coming from the field of migration studies, Brun and Fabos (2015) define this idea of what they call HOME (in all capitals) as the ‘geopolitics of nation and homeland’ (13). It symbolizes an often idealised return to the cultural environment of one’s past. Georgia Doná (2015: 69) analyses this nostalgia as the ‘memories of, longing for, and imaginations of homes that are idealized’, anchoring this longing in a conglomerate of sanitised prior experiences. The idea of home as ‘homeland’ figures strongly in the social science literature on migration and refugees. In her study of refugees in Georgia, Brun (2015) finds that return and repatriation are greatly important for the people she worked with who were escaping from the Georgian war in the late 1990s. Here, home has to do first of all with an ‘absence’ of ‘social relations and practices possible to enact in the familiar home environment’ (Brun 2015: 7). It is related to a feeling of nostalgia for the home of the past. Brun’s informants think of home primarily as a (lost) homeland, both in the sense of a country and a cultural routine that includes taste, language, people, and, particularly, family. Home might therefore be understood firstly as an imagined entity that carries what Liz Kenyon (1999) calls a right to return and a place of origin (Birdwell-Pheasant & Lawrence-Zuniga 1999). It is a place we depart from and have a desire to return to (Hobsbawm 1991). In their review of the literature on homelessness and home, Peter Kellett and Jeanne Moore (2003) position the concept of home in between personal and collective-cultural memory and desire: ‘certain aspects of home seemingly shape and motivate homeless people’s experience and behaviour […] and the desire for [it] acts as a powerful personal and cultural objective’ (124, 128). Likewise, for people in situations of displacement, Brun and Fabos (2015) argue that ‘understandings of home are often based on the past: people long for the home they lost’ (7). In this sense, home is immediately connected to the yearning and desire for a better future.

Caroline Humphrey (2005), in her historical analysis of Soviet shared houses and apartment blocks, shows that the imagination of different futures is likewise part of making a home. In the Russian city of Magnitogorsk, near the border with Kazakhstan, where workers’ dwellings were often built around a central public living space, workers would frequently adapt such public space according to their personal routines and imagination rather than necessarily follow Soviet collectivist ideals. Here, the ‘comforts of everyday domestic practices (byt) gradually invaded the austere spaces of even the exemplary Soviet Nakomfin apartment house’ (Humphrey 2005: 40). The infrastructure and built environment interacted with the ‘imaginative and projective inner feelings of the people’; together they were ‘mutually constitutive of fantasy’, pointing to a different possibility for living, for instance in carving out private spaces where quiet conversations could take place (Humphrey 2005: 40, 43).

The idea of home as something located largely in an imagined future is even more striking in Sara Ahmed’s (1999) study of migrants’ writing, particularly Asian women living in Britain. She found that home is often a destination, a place to travel to:

The space which is most like home, which is most comfortable and familiar, is not the space of inhabitance — I am here — but the very space in which one finds the self as almost, but not quite, at home. In such a space, the subject has a destination, an itinerary, indeed a future, but in having such as destination, has not yet arrived (Ahmed 1999: 331).

According to Ahmed, home is quintessentially not about the present, but about one’s hopes, about a future place where one has not yet arrived (also Bloch 1995) and which might be related to an idealised past homeland. This is particularly true for refugees, for whom idealised, imagined, or remembered homes play a particularly strong role, not simply in maintaining a sense or hope of rootedness, but in impelling their movement in search of such homes (Jansen & Löfving 2011; Doná 2015)

Jeanne Moore brings together this focus on an imagined future with the importance of daily routines in discussing homeless migrants, arguing that ‘[h]ome is a powerful desire for many homeless people […] this desire is shaped by particular goals and lifestyles’ (2000: 212). Many homeless people continuously ‘struggle along’ in the present, longing for a better home in the future: a place to sleep and a way to have meaningful relationships, as well as objects (Hecht 1998; Desjarlais 1994).

For refugees, the homeless, and many others, remembered homes may lack a sense of homeliness and security all together. Cristiana Strava (2017), writing of life in the Hay Mohammadi neighbourhood in Casablanca, explores how histories of state violence create a sense of precarity, uncertainty, and insecurity that gave homes an air of unhomeliness. Here, violence is marked in the remains of an old secret prison, or in the rebuilding of the neighbourhood to facilitate military control, dispossession, and enduring poverty. Strava traces the ambivalent responses to such feelings of unhomeliness. Residents of Hay Mohammadi sometimes strive to contain or move beyond such feelings through daily acts of care, which push back on historic narratives of abandonment or unscrupulous landlords alike. Yet daily care can also become implicated in reproducing unhomeliness, such as when broken plumbing, or tiny spaces, both of which evoke continued abandonment or exclusion, nonetheless come to be accommodated within everyday routines. In such circumstances, lived experiences of dwelling may themselves not be the primary anchor for hopes, dreams, or ideals of home. Speaking to such circumstances, Stef Jansen (2009) claims that, rather than seeing home as a ‘remembered site of belonging’, it should be seen ‘prospectively as a socially constituted object of longing’ (2009: 57; see also Jansen & Löfving 2011). Thus, as imaginative spaces that stretch out across time and are brought about through practice, homes are never static.

A final tension worth mentioning is that between alienated and unalienated characterizations of home. On the one hand, when explored in terms of familiar routines, closely held ideals, or a site of comfort or intimacy, home emerges as a domain where subjects’ sense of who they are is bolstered and reproduced. Here, home is the space, the practice, or the imagined idyll where alienation might be undone. On the other hand, however, both imagined and physical homes may be sites of displacement: places where one is made to feel out-of-place or even threatened, places which evoke ideals that have not yet materialised, or something which is in need of continual, ungratifying labour. In these conceptions, home is characterised by a distancebetween subjects’ sense of selfhood, and their experience of home. It can thus be a domain that contributes to a sense of alienation, experienced as exclusion, dislocation, instability, or simply a desire for something other than what is given. In many cases, alienation and its escape may be present in the same account. For instance, the migrant women whose lives Ahmed traces try to make home in the everyday even as their experiences are often characterised by a sense of unhomeliness. In spite of present alienation, they see in the future the promise of an ideal, unalienated home. Alienation and its opposite continue to remain in tension, negotiated across space and time, through contending imaginaries, or through differently oriented practices.

Conclusion

The house and the home have had a varied life in anthropological thought and observation. Developing from an early focus on the house as a social institution, it was first understood as a way of ordering society, a site of practice, and a structure of social reproduction. Houses and homes have also been explored as sites of subject formation, of belonging and security – or the breakdown thereof. Shaped in part by their material underpinnings, domestic processes were constantly being rearranged, reworked, cared for, and reproduced through the efforts of various sorts of domestic labour. Anthropological approaches have recently begun to develop and elaborate a distinction between the house and the home, wherein houses involve normative, widely reproduced, and often material forms, while homes centre around the subjective feelings of belonging and dwelling. This distinction emerged in part through a growing understanding of how households could be sites of unhomeliness, whether for women faced with unvalued domestic labour, or for those living with displacement or the everyday realities of poverty or state violence. Temporal dimensions, from an idealised past to an imagined future, have featured heavily in recent studies. At the same time, a processual notion of home, often as a form of ordering without necessarily being confined to localised spaces of houses, has also become important. The spaces brought under control, in processes of home making, do not however have to be precisely localised. Home-making stretches across time as well as space, and even in the blatant absence of a physical home, the act of home-making often remains a focus point of daily practice.

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Note on contributors

Farhan Samanani explores questions of value, diversity, and community in contemporary London. His work looks at forms of value, understanding, and cooperation which emerge out of everyday life, and traces what happens to these everyday projects within broader political and economic systems. Farhan’s work spans across disciplines, from social anthropology to human geography and political science, and emphasises collaborations with community groups and local and national organizations to create meaningful change. He is currently based at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity.

Dr Farhan Samanani, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Hermann-Föge-Weg 11, 37073 Göttingen, Germany. farhan.samanani@gmail.com.

Johannes Lenhard is an ethnographer of inequality in the west, currently based at the Max Planck Cambridge Centre Cambridge for Ethics, Economy and Social Change. Having worked towards a better understanding of homeless people in London and Paris for his PhD, he has recently started a new research project on venture capital investors with fieldwork in Munich, Berlin, London, San Francisco and New York. His writing has appeared in academic peer-reviewed journals as well as journalistic outlets, such as Aeon, the Conversationand Crunchbase.

Dr Johannes Lenhard, Kings College, CB21ST Cambridge, United Kingdom. jfl37@cam.ac.uk