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269
Historical Sources
and Methods
Domestic Practice
in the Past
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HOME CULTURES
>
The study of domestic practice is methodologically challenging, both in historical and contemporary contexts. How
is it possible to analyze what people do in their homes,
when domestic spaces and practices often remain hidden from view?
How is it possible to recover past domestic practices, which cannot
be studied by ethnographic observation, home tours, interviews, or
participatory visual methods? Whilst the home and domestic practice
have inspired a wide range of methodological innovation in contemporary research, what historical sources and methods can be used to
understand domestic practice in the past? What are the wider implications in relation to the methodological distinctiveness of studying
both home and practice?
The articles in this special issue address a wide range of sources
and methods for studying domestic practice in the past. Four of them
were presented at a one-day conference on Domestic Methodologies
in June 2012, convened by the Centre for Studies of Home, which is a
partnership between the Geffrye Museum and Queen Mary, University
of London. The theme of the conference emerged from significant
recent interest across the humanities and social sciences in developing distinctive methodologies for studying home. Papers focused on
the challenges involved in identifying and analyzing different sources
about domestic life; the development of different methods to study
home across a range of time periods, places, and contexts; the ways
in which private and often hidden domestic subjects can be made
visible; and the ethical issues involved in researching home.
The special issue is situated within broader debates about practice,
both in relation to methodology and domesticity. Key theoretical foundations include Bourdieus work on practice and the habitus and de
Certeaus work on the practice of everyday urban life, alongside more
recent approaches inspired by non-representational theory (Bourdieu
1977; de Certeau 1984; Thrift 2007). The so-called practice turn
across the humanities and social sciences is wide-ranging in conceptual, methodological, and empirical terms (see, for example, Hitchings
2012; Jacobs and Merriman 2011; Schatzki et al. 2001; Simonsen
2007; and see Harrison 2009 on the limits of an ontologisation of
practice). A central theme revolves around an emphasis upon doings, on actions and practices, insofar as they are understood to be the
origin rather than the effect of signification and meaning (Harrison
2009: 987). Research on practice is well established in relation to
such doings at home. As Baxter and Brickell show in the special
issue of Home Cultures (11(2), July 2014) on home unmaking, a
long tradition of research on home has focused on home-making,
analyzing the often routine practices of everyday domestic life and
work. Some of the most innovative methodological work on home
focuses on domestic practice, including research on the home rules
underpinning everyday domestic life and the use of domestic objects
(Wood et al. 1994), ethnographic observation and other participatory
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can be used successfully, the lists of rooms and furnishings aggregated to produce practiced or real-world norms against which
individual cases can be compared, or allowing the degree to which
advice literature was followed to be assessed. An intensive imaginative reading of a single inventory supported by as much evidence as
possible about the household from other sources, and compared to
the norms, can suggest rich stories of intention and choice. Hoskins
work draws on nineteenth-century inventories, which, with the exception of Jane Hamletts work (2010), have been little used in the study
of nineteenth-century homes, largely due to the fact that they were
thought not to have survived in sufficient quantities.
Whilst court records and inventories present the home at particular moments in timewhen a crime has taken place, an accident has
happened, or the owner has diedAlice Dolans article looks in detail
at the everyday workings of one household over an extended period of
time. Through her analysis of the account book of Richard Latham, a
plebeian farmer from Lancashire, Dolan presents a new methodology
to explore aspects of the seasonal and life-cycle temporalities of the
household through references to the provisioning and care of linen.
Whilst Laura Gowing focuses on the significance of the bed for domestic practice over time, Alice Dolan concentrates on linen to explore
the seasonal and other temporalities of domestic work within one
household. As both articles show, a focus on particular objects within
the home can reveal much about past domestic practice for families
and other members of a household.
Advice literature is a commonly used source in much research into
domestic practice. Karen Harveys article, while recognizing, as stated
by Fletcher, that neither husbands or wives were able or willing simply to match their behaviour to the rules of prescription suggests a
way to move beyond what she identifies as a too-common distinction
between prescription and practice (Fletcher 1995: 154, 172). Tracing
the ideas and practices of oeconomy through the cultural sound box
of both the prescriptive literature and manuscript sources such as
letters, diaries, and account books, provides a more rounded view of
experience. These sources have also been successfully employed in
other studies. Ben Hellers work, for example, on leisure in the second
half of the eighteenth century has used the evidence from diaries
to examine the nature of social interaction in the domestic sphere,
presenting a useful sample of detailed diaries and a methodology
for analyzing them (Heller 2009). Amanda Vickery has shown how a
study of the diaries, letters, and account books of women from gentry,
commercial, and professional families in Lancashire in the eighteenth
century reveals the detail of their engagement in domestic management and refutes the idea that elite women declined into indolence
and luxury during this period (Vickery 1998). She has used an even
wider range of sources in her investigation into Georgian homesaccount books, ledgers, inventories, surviving furniture, and textilesto
see, as she has put it, if she could wrest a narrative from numbers,
bare details and inanimate objects1 (Vickery 2009).
Through their focus on new methodologies, sources, and ideas,
the articles in this special issue address the relationships between
materiality and practice, domestic practice by individuals and households, and the spatiality and temporality of domestic practice. The
articles show ways in which past domestic practices on the ground
can be revealed, and then understood through their wider cultural
resonances.
Note
1. See http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/901 (accessed May
28, 2014).
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References
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