Houses and Households: A Comparative Study

Abstract

A growing interest in households is found among many archaeologists and cultural anthropologists, but these disciplines require improved methods, theories, and comparative knowledge to advance the aims of household research. Many questions about ancient and contemporary societies will be left unanswered until there is a more developed understanding of how households influence, and are influenced by, the larger society. Houses and Households expands on and makes more systematic the comparative and cross-cultural approach to the study of households, by investigating the interactions between household behavior and the domestic built environment in a variety of world areas. Focusing on peasant households, this practical volume presents a large comparative data base derived from published ethnographic and architectural reports from China, Japan, Southeast Asia, Southwest Asia, India, Nepal, Egypt, and Mesoamerica. Author Richard E. Blanton proposes new methods for comparative analyses of houses and uses these methods, along with the community ethnographic data, to develop new and evaluate current household theories. Houses and Households is a major contribution to the understanding of cross-cultural and intracultural variation in households and house form, including features such as size of the house, spatial complexity, use of space, decoration, symbolic expression, and costliness. These formal properties are then analyzed in light of behavior related to, among others, gender relations, household decision making, and consumer behavior. The theoretical framework presented and evaluated - developed from a nonverbal communication approach - perceives house form as an outcome of the social and economic strategies of households found in varying community, regional, and macroregional settings.

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