Dit is een verhaal in spullen. Een verhaal over de dingen die zijn behoed, bewaard en behouden. Over hoe een zorgvuldig opgerold ceintuur in een lade onderdeel wordt van een liefdesverhaal, hoe de schikking van planten in een raamkozijn een taal tussen huisvrouwen vormde. Een verhaal over de sporen van een schilderij, het verval van een knuffelbeer, een zeldzaam stuk vloerzeil, maar ook over een asbak, pedaalemmer en een verpakkingsdoos.

‘Een stilleven in dialoog’: Huis Sloëtjes door de ogen van een collectiebeheerder, een kunstenaar, een schrijver, een architectuurhistoricus en een antropoloog.

In deze tour neemt antropoloog Irene Cieraad je mee door huis Sloëtjes. Irene heeft onder andere gepubliceerd over de geschiedenis van Nederlandse interieurs, ontwikkelingen in huishoudelijke technologie, materiële cultuur en consumptie. Ze kan dit huis ‘lezen’ vanuit het tijdsbeeld en geeft een inkijkje in het huisvrouwenbestaan van Nel Sloëtjes. Kun je het typerende geur-universum van brandende petroleum en boenwas al ruiken? ... Read more

Throughout most of the seventeenth century plague epidemics raged through Dutch cities and took their toll in an enormous loss of life. However, seventeenth-century paintings of domestic life do not show the sorrow or the death toll, but portray healthy, thriving mothers and children in sunlit interiors. The sunny imagery of the seventeenth-century painting is so strong that it defies the historic reality of the countless plague victims. In a strange contradiction, up until the Dutch language harbours numerous references to The Plague, or pest as it is called in Dutch. My perception of the glorious Dutch Golden Age, and the sunny imagery if seventeenth-century interior paintings in particular, changed after reading the published transcripts of seventeenth-century Dutch letters written by women to their husbands at sea. What struck me most were the women's heartbreaking accounts of the loss of children due to The Plague. I have since tried to detect evidence of this daily reality in the paintings, given that art historians have warned against their deceptive realism. ... Read more

The article develops a critical and transversal reading of the special issue. Each contribution inspired the author to seek for a mirror image or an analogy in Western societies and test the mentioned Carsten and Hugh-Jones observation of the seemingly self-evident relation between house and the self. Rosalie Stolz’ contribution on the changing communities of sounds in northern Laos changed the author’s perspective on the background of the popularity of camping in the West. Jonathan Alderman’s contribution on the bloody libation rituals performed in the patio of rural houses in Andean Bolivia made her realize that there is a heightened sensitivity in the West towards blood, and more in particular visible blood spatters, be it animal or human blood. From this consideration, the article presents some reflections on the relation between house and blood. The cultural dead-lock between home-ownership and manhood in southern Tunisia, as described by Pontiggia, points to a general relation between the material home and the male self. ... Read more

Associé à la quête du plaisir et au luxe de la facilité et de la commodité, le confort du foyer, décrit comme l’une des réussites de la fin du xıxe siècle, est avant tout attribué au talent des tapissiers. La meilleure illustration en est certainement le fauteuil tonneau, doté d’une assise avec un textile recouvrant les ressorts que l’on venait d’inventer Mais cet article se penche sur le rôle encore plus déterminant des fabricants de poêles, plombiers, chauffagistes et électriciens dans l’élaboration du confort de nos foyers. Car finalement, les sièges à ressorts des tapissiers ont bien moins contribué à notre idée contemporaine du confort domestique que les poêles, la plomberie intérieure, le chauffage central et l’éclairage électrique. Sans oublier non plus le fait que les progrès techniques réalisés dans ces domaines ont eu une influence décisive sur le mobilier et donc sur la création de nouveaux modèles de sociabilité. En d’autres termes, la tendance moderne à l’individualisation domestique et à l’intimité personnelle n’existerait pas sans les efforts des corps de métier techniques du bâtiment. The comforts of home in the pursuit of pleasure, and the luxury of ease and convenience are described as late nineteenth-century achievements to which the upholsterer contributed most, in particular the upholstered tub seats that covered the newly invented interior springs. This article is about the even more important role of stove makers, plumbers, heating installers and electricians in creating the comforts of home. Stoves, indoor plumbing, central heating and electric lighting have contributed far more to our modern idea of domestic comfort than the upholsterer’s sprung seats. Also, developments in heating and lighting had a decisive influence on furniture arrangements and hence on the creation of new patterns of sociability. In other words, the modern trend of domestic individualisation and individual privacy would not have been possible without the efforts of electricians, plumbers and heating installers. ... Read more

Part of the chapter: Material Culture, Infrastructures and the Built Environment ... Read more

Photo essay to photo series (pages 19-31) about French ski resorts in summer. Words Irene Cieraad, Photographs Olaf Unverzart and Sebastiaan Schels. ... Read more

In the light of a newly discovered source of thousands of seventeenth-century Dutch letters found in the English National Archive a case is made for a radical reinterpretation of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings. These so-called “homescapes” feature in the historiography of the modern home as proof of the fact that seventeenth-century Holland was the cradle of female domesticity. However, the captured Dutch letters written to the home front by seamen sailing on the large Dutch mercantile fleet, as well as the women’s letters to their seafaring husbands tell quite a different story. Especially the letters from the home front narrate of dire circumstances and shed a new light on the subjects of the homescapes, more in particular on the subject of letter-reading and letter-writing females, and intimate mother-and-child scenes. The nineteenth-century revaluation of the glory of seventeenth-century Dutch painting in general and the homescapes in particular explains how the myth of Holland as the cradle of female domesticity came into existence. ... Read more

Home is one of the core concepts of Western culture. The concept of home defies easy definitions because it also holds a strong personal meaning, which changes through the course of a lifetime. In general, it refers to a personal bonding with a place and an emotional attachment to living beings in that location. Western culture and society thrive on the emotional, social, and spatial opposition between the domains of home and work. This opposition is the outcome of a historic development of the progressive separation of the two domains that accelerated in the nineteenth century in response to industrialization and subsequent urbanization but was only completed in twentieth century. ... Read more

This article presents an interpretation of nostalgia in which it is traced back to its original meaning as an emotion concerned not with time, but with place, the Alpine mountains of Switzerland, which in the early nineteenth century became associated with notions of the medieval past. With recourse to nineteenth-century anthropological theories of cultural evolution, an attempt is made to explain the term’s shift in meaning. Nostalgia, as an emotion glorifying authenticity, was and still is propelled by imagery created in a wide variety of media. It found early and long-lasting expression in the international popularity of the Swiss chalet. ... Read more

Domestic space in the singular has become a generic term for the private space of the house, the household, or the home as opposed to the public space of the street or the urban space of the city as a whole. Yet, the domestic space concept has only a short scholarly history, especially in its opposition to public space. In the late 1970s the duality of domestic versus public space was criticized by feminist scholars for the patriarchal dominance of the public, male domain of the street over the secluded female domain of the house. This gendered opposition also paralleled an important economic schism in industrial, or so-called capitalist, societies of the unpaid domestic labor of women versus the wage labor of male breadwinners performed outside the domestic domain. The terminology of domestic spaces in the plural is even more recent and implicitly criticizes the bipolarity of the domestic/public opposition. As such, the plural acknowledges not only the internal zoning of domestic space according to usage, age, and gender, but also a more gradual transition of public and private spaces in modern domestic architecture. ... Read more

This concerns the preface by I.G. Cieraad for the Iranian (Farsi) translation of the book. ... Read more

Met de opkomst van de amateurfotografie in de twintigste eeuw werd de woonkamer het nieuwe decor van familieportretten. Hoewel onervarenheid van de fotografen nogal eens tot kwalitatief ondermaatse kiekjes leidde, hebben de foto's, zo laat cultureel antropoloog Irene Cieraad zien, grote cultuurhistorische waarde. ... Read more