OIKOS: Affects, Economies, and Politics of House-ing
A Seminar at Princeton University
May 14-16, 2015
This seminar explores the house as a key nexus of political-economic and interpersonal/affective
realities in flux. We seek to generate knowledge at the intersection of three rarely conversant
research areas: the anthropology of family and kinship (including affect, care, and relatedness);
the economic dynamics of households (related to the provision and management of money, the
circulation of objects and food, and planning for the future); and the anthropology of public
policies and housing (concerning rights, governance, and citizenship).
We draw on oikos, an ancient Greek term, because it suggests a definition of the house not as a
bounded unit but as a dynamic relation between the familial spaces of the home and the public
spaces of the polis. In attending to “house-ing” (as a cluster of material, symbolic, and worldmaking practices), we aim to apprehend people’s plasticity within a range of built environments,
and to ask how public policies, markets, and city infrastructures become intimate and vital
matters. House-ing, in our perspective, is a privileged space to comprehend the production of
rationalities among various scales, agents, and agencies—including the people who inhabit and
transform their houses and familial ties, community leaders who demand housing policies,
recipients of public housing, and experts charged with devising and implementing housing
projects, among others.
The United Nations predicts that over the next 35 years, the world’s urban population will
increase by 72%, spurring global shifts in habitation, settlement, and social organization, and
raising new questions about the relationship between urban and rural worlds. In this context,
housing emerges as a key locus of political contest—for instance, new middle class housing
projects and massive favela “pacifications” in Brazil; disaster-recovery efforts for those who lost
their homes in the 2010 earthquake in Haiti; housing-oriented recovery initiatives in the United
States after the 2008 economic crisis; and mass urbanization in the wake of war and economic
restructuring in Colombia, Guyana, Mexico, and Turkey. We understand the house as both a
socio-spatial and a moral category—as an unstable nexus where macro-political shifts become
experiential realities, and as a site for the ongoing, unfinished processes whereby policies are
enacted, revised, and woven into lives.
Foregrounding the house and housing configurations as objects of ethnography, we seek to
illuminate individual and collective experiences as they articulate with economic rationalities and
political institutions in the making. How do people simultaneously connect to, interpret, re-work,
and transcend political-economic projects that aim to reshape both the materiality of the house
and the subjects that inhabit it? How might desires, familial relations, and attempts at economic
survival be “housed”? How can anthropology engage experts in politics, planning, and
development, “peopling” our collective understandings of houses and housing? How can
ethnography conceptualize the blurred, evolving boundaries between urban and rural spaces
(manifest in the mobility of people and money, for example)?
In the OIKOS seminar, we will discuss scholarly papers that foreground the house as a site of
empirical and conceptual analysis. We are especially interested in ethnographic projects that
traverse scales and registers of evidence, drawing together the technical, political-economic,
material, and human dimensions of the oikos, and that experiment with multiple media. By
considering the house and the process of house-ing as creative subjects/objects of ethnography,
we hope to bring people’s open-ended world-making practices and large-scale political and
economic shifts into the same critical analytic frame.
Department of Anthropology