Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

A key to understanding the mobility of residence patterns in Oceania can be found in the movement of houses themselves. In this article I explore the processual dynamic of residence over a 12‐year period in Longana and document the high frequency with which people moved houses and households while maintaining a strong preference for virilocality. For example, more than 80% of the buildings changed households, underwent major physical changes, or both between 1978 and 1982. The reasons why houses change hands and move about relate to the domestic cycle and highlight competition between the requirements of renovation and plans to construct new buildings. Further, the impermanence of local building materials gives rise to a contradiction between rootedness and transience that defines the meaning of place. Finally, houses serve as symbols of kinship that articulate land and people and that express a link between matrilineal and patrifilial groups.

No abstract

Wheelchair accessibility is more than a matter of grab bars, ramps, and door widths. Accessibility can also be understood as a way of thinking and talking about the rights of people with disabilities that contains a critique of the notion of disability itself. This article examines the social and cultural construction of accessibility in the context of a particular kind of nonprofit rental housing in Canada. We present findings from a study of 17 urban housing cooperatives with varying degrees of accessibility, including three “fully accessible” co‐ops. We are particularly concerned with issues of power and control in narratives about building accessible co‐ops. We are also interested in spatial assumptions and how residents express their experience in spatial terms. Spaces framed by a discourse of accessibility and built to the standards of wheelchair‐users express a shift in power toward people with disabilities. Yet these spaces also reveal the diversity of people's needs. We conclude that discourses and practices of accessibility both inscribe difference in the built environment and deny it, allowing people to assert individual freedom, control, and choice. [accessibility, space, housing, cooperatives, Canada]