THE PARLOR, THE KITCHEN, AND CIVILIZED MANNERS: RESIDENTIAL SPACE, PRACTICES, AND BELIEFS IN GREEK HOUSES OF THE 1970S

摘要

This paper investigates connections between houses and residents' broader cultural frameworks with a focus on private homes built during the 1970s in semiurban and rural areas of Greece that still contain a parlor at the front of the house and an enclosed kitchen in the rear. Using tools and methodologies borrowed from sociology and social anthropology, this research attempts to better understand the relationships between houses, layouts, furnishings, objects, everyday practices performed inside the residential space, forms of speech, and residents' beliefs regarding broader social and cultural issues. The researcher analyzed a sample of houses and conducted qualitative interviews with the residents, who have lived in the homes since they built them. The arrangements of the parlors and kitchens in these houses and the materials used therein reproduce a socially defined belief that imposes restraints on the human body and conceives of the coordination of activities with other members of the family or guests as good manners, while the liberation of bodily movements and individualized activities are conceptualized as the opposite of good and carry negative connotations. This belief is examined as part of the civilizing process conceptualized by Norbert Elias and further developed in the works of social thinkers Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens.