House Life: Space, Place and Family in Europe [Reprint 2020 ed.] 1859732305, 9781859732304

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Preface
1 Introduction: Houses and Families in Europe
Part I: House, Family and the Construction of History
2 The Casa of José dos Santos Caldas: Family and Household in a Northwestern Portuguese Village, 1850-1993
3 Fleeting Villages, Moving Households: Greek Housing Strategies in Historical Perspective
4 The Home "Place": Center and Periphery in Irish House and Family Systems
Part II: Houses and the Construction of Family Life
5 Reconstructing Sexual Geography: Gender and Space in Changing Sicilian Settlements
6 Suburbanizing Rural Lifestyles Through House Form in Southern Portugal
7 Living Spaces in Transition: From Rural to Urban Family Life in Serbia
8 Use of House and Space: Public and Private Family Interaction on Chios, Greece
Part III: House and Symbol - The Power of Constructions
9 Re-entering the West Room: On the Power of Domestic Spaces
10 The Memory House: Time and Place in Jewish Immigrant Culture in France
Author Index
Subject Index

Citation preview

House Life

House Life Space, Place and Family in Europe

Edited by Donna Birdwell-Pheasant and Denise Lawrence-Zuniga

First published 1999 by Berg Publishers Published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © Donna Birdwell-Pheasant and Denise Lawrence-Zuniga 1999 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Typeset by JS Typesetting, Wellingborough, Northants. ISBN 13: 978-1-8597-3230-4 (hbk)

"Like the house builder, old breaker of stones and splitter of trees, we must destroy, but not to leave the world in disarray, shattered into millions of little cards, sealed in hermetic typologies. In the spirit of the builder, we break reality apart to rebuild it ... He makes houses out of smashed scraps of nature. We make meaning out of ruined houses, moving from pattern to change, logic to will, culture to history ..." -Henry Glassie Passing the Time in Ballymenone

Contents Notes on Contributors

IX

Preface 1

Xlll

Introduction: Houses and Families in Europe Donna Birdwell-Pheasant and Denise Lawrence-Zuniga

1

Part I: House, Family and the Construction of History

2

3

4

The Casa of Jose dos Santos Caldas: Family and Household in a Northwestern Portuguese Village, 1850-1993 Caroline B. Brettel/

39

Fleeting Villages, Moving Households: Greek Housing Strategies in Historical Perspective Susan Buck Sutton

73

The Home "Place": Center and Periphery in Irish House and Family Systems Donna Birdwell-Pheasant

105

Part II: Houses and the Construction of Family Life 5

6

7

Reconstructing Sexual Geography: Gender and Space in Changing Sicilian Settlements Sally S. Booth

133

Suburbanizing Rural Lifestyles Through House Form in Southern Portugal Denise Lawrence-Zuniga

157

Living Spaces in Transition: From Rural to Urban Family Life in Serbia Judith A. Rasson, Mirjana Stevanovic and Vladimir Ilic

177

-vii-

Contents 8

Use of House and Space: Public and Private Family Interaction on Chios, Greece Alice V. James and Loukas Kalisperis

205

Part III: House and Symbol - The Power of Constructions 9

Re-entering the West Room: On the Power of Domestic Spaces Lawrence J. Taylor

223

10

The Memory House: Time and Place in Jewish Immigrant Culture in France Joelle Bah/ou/

239

Author Index

251

Subject Index

257

-viii-

Notes on Contributors Joelle Bahloul is associate professor of anthropology and Jewish studies at Indiana University (Bloomington). She received the doctoral degree in social and cultural anthropology from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (University of Paris) in 1981. She has conducted research on Jewish minorities in France and in Italy. She is the author of The Architecture ofMemory (Cambridge University Press, 1996). Donna Birdwell-Pheasant is professor of anthropology at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, and holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from Southern Methodist University. Her research in Central America and Ireland has focused on family systems and the historical development of inequality. She has published two book chapters and several articles in journals (including Journal ofFamily History and American Ethnologist). She most recently authored "Family Systems and the Foundations of Class in Ireland and England" for History of the Family: An International Quarterly (I 998). Sally S. Booth teaches at the Friends World College of Long Island University in Southampton, New York. In her research in Sicily and the United States, she addresses the culture and political economy ofland use and architecture, especially in the context of reconstruction and resettlement. Her current work involves the changing culture and politics of land use and open space preservation efforts in eastern Long Island. Caroline B. Brettell is professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Southern Methodist University. Her major areas of research interest are the anthropology of Europe, the anthropology of gender and family, the anthropology of religion, ethnicity and immigration, and the intersections of anthropology and history. In addition to numerous book chapters and articles, she has written several books, including Men Who Migrate, Women Who Wait: Population and History in a Portuguese Parish (Princeton, 1986) and We Have Already Cried Many Tears: The Stories of Three Portuguese Migrant Women (Waveland, 1995). She is editor of When They Read What We Write: The Politics of Ethnography (Bergin and Garvey, 1993).

-IX-

Notes on Contributors Vladimir Ilic is a Project Architect at the architectural firm HOK, Inc., San Francisco, specializing in hotels, resorts, and housing. He has conducted research on industrialized housing in Delft, Holland. Alice V. James is associate professor of anthropology at Shippensburg University, a senior research associate at the Population Research Institute at Pennsylvania State University, and recently a visiting scholar at the National Center for Social Science Research in Athens, Greece. Her research interests include household formation and process. Among her recent publications are "Fertility Patterns in a Bastardy Prone Sub-Society" (with W. T. Morrill) in Journal of Quantitative Anthropology ( 1991) and "Household Formation on St. Bart, F. W.I.: Continuity and Change," (with W. T. Morrill) in Human Ecology ( 1990). Loukas Kalisperis is associate professor of architecture and Director of the Stuckeman CAD Laboratory at Pennsylvania State University. He received the Ph.D. in the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in the Humanities in 1989. He is a registered architect in Greece and a member ofthe Technical Chamber ofGreece. Denise Lawrence-Zuniga is professor of environmental studies in the College of Environmental Design at the California State Polytechnic University - Pomona: Her doctoral degree in cultural anthropology is from the University of California Riverside. Her research focuses on anthropological approaches to the built environment. She is co-author with Setha Low of "The Built Environment and Spatial Form," Annual Review ofAnthropology (1990) and author of"Transcendence of Place: The Role of La Placeta in Valencia's Las Fa/las" in Place Attachment (1992). Judith A. Rasson is research associate at the University of California - Los Angeles, Institute of Archaeology, where she edits the Archaeological Research Tools series. She worked as an archaeologist in Yugoslavia between 1968 and 1982 and served as an interpreter for Project Joint Endeavor in Bosnia in 1996-7. She is currently excavating with a Hungarian team at the Bronze Age tell Szazhalombatta-Foldvar. Rasson published an article entitled "Ex Balcanis Lux" with Robert K. Evans in American Antiquity and an article in Ruth Tringham and Dusan Krstic 's volume entitled Selevac: A Neolithic Village in Yugoslavia ( 1990). Mirjana Stevanovic is a research associate in the Department of Anthropology, University ofCalifornia at Berkeley, currently excavating at the site of