Abstract
Rachel Hurdley’s Home, Materiality, Memory and Belonging is a beautifully argued examination of the complex and shifting relations between the domestic sphere, identity and everyday things. Taking the mantelpiece as its object of enquiry, the study exemplifies the very best cultural and sociological analysis. The seemingly banal practice of arranging photographs, knickknacks, everyday objects – some loved, some hated – is here rendered as deeply embedded within a politics of gender, class, taste, national identity and practices of remembering. Reminiscent of Kathleen Stewart’s A Space on the Side of the Road (1996), Hurdley spins together primary and secondary data with personal anecdotes, vivid illustrations and deeply personal narratives. Goffman, Simmel, Foucault, Douglas and Bourdieu serve as touchstones throughout, but it is the voices of the participants, from the seemingly comfortable middle class to recent arrivals and asylum seekers, who give the book its distinctive voice.
Hurdley has organised her study into three sections: Pasts, Presents, and Cultures of Home. These are further broken down into eight chapters, bookmarked by an Introduction and Conclusion. The book begins with a vignette of Hurdley’s own (dis)organised mantelpiece, the stories it tells and, given the absence of fires in many modern homes, why it retains its prominence. These opening observations draw Hurdley to questions about the arrangement, ordering, naming and differentiation of things and memories. As noted later, the mantelpiece becomes understood as ‘a shelf, an edge … a crossover of time periods that contests, challenges, comforts and constrains practices of identity and remembering’ (p. 204).
The Mass Observation Archive forms the backbone of the study, supported with Hurdley’s own interviews, fieldwork, surveys and, most intriguingly, a film series with asylum seekers and refugees. The first two chapters recount the development of the mantelpiece from the homes/hearths of ancient Greece and the Medieval world to the mantelpieces of today – ‘hangovers from the past’ (p. 49) but deeply resonant of the shifting patterns of family, gender and class through which the home is both constituted and constitutes. The following discussion of Mass Observation’s first study of mantelpieces in 1937, repeated in 1983, mirrors and draws out Hurdley’s own method of compiling, sorting and organizing data – a metaphor she uses to great effect in understanding mantelpieces as doing history; ‘casting out [and] pulling apart’ (p. 93). Part two, ‘Presents’, fleshes out many of the book’s central themes, notably the mantelpiece as a site for doing identity. Here, it is not the objects themselves or ‘what’ Hurdley finds on mantelpieces that steers the discussion but the ‘how’; how the pieces fit together, who speaks of them, the background hum of stories not told, the enunciations and everyday practices that bring to light dynamics and performances of power through remembering, forgetting and organizing one’s domestic life. Spanning theories of gift giving, building social relations and the everyday practices of belonging, the central argument asks what do mantelpieces ‘do’? While the function of the mantelpiece has changed from a space above the fireplace, its continual prominence in the home attests to its importance as a site of doing memory, homeliness and distinction. Of course, these are not simple terms and in Hurdley’s hands ‘home’ and the lived, messy, discordant and deeply political trajectories through which it is lived becomes a site for thinking about the production of kinship, domestic relations and memory making.
The book’s final chapters, ‘Cultures of Home’, provides a fascinating account of those absent in earlier chapters. Here, the professionalized mantelpieces found in museums are explored but it is the voices of the poor, colonized, dispossessed and ‘other’ who bring into sharp relief the negotiation and micro-politics of domestic, political and nationalized memory work. Culture, as Hurdley argues is ‘power at work’, and what is ‘already in place’ illustrates the ‘slips, slides and frictions of “different” cultures [that] work always to keep some in the centre of contemporary networks of belonging, while “the rest” fall off the edges’ (p. 199).
Inevitably, as with any book, there are misgivings. After having so clearly enjoyed this, it feels strange to suggest it might have been shorter, but at times the book did feel slightly drawn out. I also wonder how well the book may be used as a resource into which one might dip in and out. This is a book that needs reading from beginning to end, the argument developing along often unexpected trajectories. But, this is not a criticism. Like the subject at its heart, Hurdley has drawn together an impressive range of theories and data to flesh out the complex articulation of kinship, identity and domesticity performed through organizing mantelpieces. Of interest to anthropologists, sociologists, cultural studies scholars and anyone interested in the recent turn to the study of materiality, this is a readable, accessible and inspiring piece of work that confidently coalesces debates about time, place and practices of belonging.