Identity and Narrativity in Homes Made by Amateurs

Abstract

Despite growing interest in the home as an expression of the self and the social world, little research has been performed on the special circumstances of homes created by households, who, without formal qualification or training, research, conceptualize and make their home, and in doing so, invent material objects which convey autobiographical narrative content and offer empirical evidence of consumer practices capable of making coherent, if not transforming, identity. The article discusses the findings of six case studies of self-build homes in east Hampshire, southeast England. By engaging with concepts of narrativity as an approach to the research and as a conceptual device for constructions of identity, the article shifts emphasis away from a consideration of the home as an outcome or product of a design and building process and instead focuses on home-making as a social process. Additionally, the article defines the nature of amateur practices as a general leisure phenomenon, in particular their contemporary social relevance, and identifies the unique “identity formation” properties of amateur self-building. The author proposes that if we consider the place we call home not as a set of formal and aesthetic (primarily visual) considerations but as an autobiographical narrative text, it is possible to determine a more subjectively based inquiry into the value of home as an important social process. From the perspective of the amateur homemaker, “designing” is a discursive practice as is identity formation itself, challenging two related concepts in studies of the home and consumer behavior. The first concerns the promotion of homes from a market perspective that emphasizes the idea that a home is constituted as something that is visually coherent—the “total design concept”—providing a metaphor for secure and stable social identities. The second relates to the many critiques of consumer society that suggest that its practices are antithetical to the formulation of coherent and integrated social identities.

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