Lecture
The Anxiety of the Normative: Style Biographies of the Home
Spatial Anthropologies
Royal Danish Academy,
Copenhagen, DK
6 May 2022
In this talk Clarke considers the starting point for the analysis of the spatial anthropology of the home as a social process that is anxiety provoking as much as it is expressive. The obvious precedent within anthropology for such an argument is the work of Pierre Bourdieu and the evidence that matters of aesthetics, taste and style, clearly transcend the idiosyncrasies of individual agency, instead operating as manifestations of socialisation and power relations in the form of ‘cultural capital’. Using ethnographic method, this talk argues for a closer look at the intertwining and immediacy of social relations and style in the making of biographies beyond the Bourdieusian model.