In the context of contemporary culture studies, some researchers have looked at the culture of everyday life (Fiske, 1989) and the theme of
home as part of everyday life (Bennett, 2002). Bennett thinks that the
contemporary definition and understanding of home developed with
the sudden increase in the geographical mobility of people characteristic
of the second half of the 20th century. Rita Felski argues that everyday
life is characterised by the diurnal routine, a quotidian determined
by time, interrupted by celebrations, vacations and national holidays.
We spend our everyday life in our sitting room, on our favourite sofa or
armchair, watching TV, sleeping in our bed or sitting on a chair in the
dining room at table during mealtimes (Bennett 2002: 3). These objects,
the furniture that we use, the rooms they are in, are a part of our private
intimate life, available only to members of the family, like the bedroom,
while the living room and dining room are available not only to family
members but also to a narrow circle of friends.
Naturally, changes demarcate the new borders among the social groups.
By reason of tradition or else for lack of space, many families will go on
living in a room in which everything is done: eating, sleeping, receiving
visitors, working. Other families will bring new departures into the organisation
of their household spaces. Within the home, this process will
lead to the differentiation of private spaces and those that are more open
to the outer world. This implies a change of understanding of the way
in which the rooms are used and the relations among the persons who
inhabit them, and the connection between person and object.
The usual flow of everyday informal conduct in the room is interrupted
and supplemented with occasions in which celebrations take place.
Some of the occasions, such as lifetime and yearly customs, take place in
the home, triggering alterations in the settled arrangement of the living
rooms. It is impossible to look at residential space without the objects
with which it is filled. These objects might be differently designed and
shaped in the different parts of Europe, but in terms of substance they
are the same, and can be considered universal characteristics of living
space. They have particular meanings in people’s social and private lives
as material testimony that came into being in a given time, a given cultural
environment.
In the book Living in a House, Rafaela Sarti writes that “things have made
their contributions to the shaping of social relations, and social relations
have in return been expressed via the mediation of things. In order to understand
how goods have performed this function, we have to discover the
meaning that they had for the people who bought, inherited, possessed,
used and received them as gifts” (Sarti, 2006). In this study there has been
an endeavour to present the manner in which certain objects tell of something,
and how people use them; certain forms of everyday life have
been analysed, including such concepts as diverse as the deployment
and purposes of objects in the rooms of a house and the order in which
parents and children can sit down at the table. These objects, by their
very uninterrupted presence in the home of a given family, become for
the members of the household signs by which they identify their home
and accordingly symbols of the security of their private settings.
Going deeper into the subject, in the museum collection we also find out
about the social relations in the family.
