Week 6

Context
This plan was submitted in the sixth week of class for Homeplace: The Social Use and Meaning of the Folk Dwelling in Southwestern North Carolina, by Michael Ann Williams. The theme for this week was experience.

Plan
1. I thought the discussion of privacy within a one-room house or crowded room was incredibly fascinating (p. 56-61). This might be because this reminded me of the stories that I used to hear from my father about his experience growing up in a small crowded farmhouse in Taiwan and the difficulties of having many siblings and not enough space to sit everyone around a table (so men ate their meals first, women second). Equally fascinating was Williams' point that oral histories could reveal things about the spatial organization of a (big) house that a blueprint could not. But at the end of her book, Williams writes that oral testimony is not the only means by which we can understand architectural use and meaning (p. 144). So when is oral testimony useful and effective, and when is it not? How would our reading of the books we read by Glassie change if he had also included a discussion of homes similar to Williams,' and vice versa? (In some of the descriptions in Homeplace, I found myself wishing for more blueprints or photographs after having seen so many in previous weeks)

2. We've discussed the topic of gender before in our class, and it's no surprise again here when Williams says that "women were generally more articulate and insightful about the use of interior domestic space. Most men seemed more comfortable discussing the physical rather than the social and symbolic dimensions of architecture..." (p.10). She did acknowledge that these stereotypes were not always completely applicable as girls and women also worked outside, some even preferring it to work inside. But I would have loved to have seen more on the men's experiences inside the home; even if men did feel more comfortable talking about the exterior or physical aspects of a house, I think that more male experiences of home would have been really fascinating. Do other people in the class agree? (What might we expect or hope to hear?) How would direct experience building a house or being attuned to the construction of a house shape one's abstract thoughts about the events happening within? See also Gender

Folktropes