Decorating Culture: Notes on Interior Design, Interiority, and Interiorization

Tang, Xiaobing

doi:10.1215/08992363-10-3-530

Cited by 29 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…Xiaobing Tang writes of middle‐class fashioning in 1990s China, where the reification of interiority and difference contrasts with the socialist state's moralizing discourses. Material pursuits generated vitality in a fusing of “objects, desire, money and action” when compared to the debasement of conscience and “purity” by ideological coercion (Tang 1998: 532, 535).…”

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confidence: 99%

FROM SOCIALIST MODERN TO SUPER-NATURAL ORGANICISM: Cosmological Transformations through Home Decor

Fehérváry

2012

Cultural Anthropology

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Although the trend of bringing the “natural” world indoors took off in many parts of the world with the end of the Cold War, this article focuses on the case of Hungary, where the shift to and then away from state‐socialist versions of modernist design was particularly politicized. From the 1960s to the present, Hungary witnessed a shift from the dreams of modernist utopia imbedded in “man‐made” miracle materials like plastic and concrete to the neoliberal social order imbedded in “natural” (in fact super‐natural) materials like organic wood flooring and high‐quality roofing tiles. I draw on scholarship working with a Peircean semiotics of materiality to elaborate an approach to aesthetic styles in material worlds that can track transformations in such styles over time and link them to wider political cosmologies. I argue that the “organicist” materialities that emerged to humanize socialist apartments in generic modern buildings were part of a critique of the modernist project and its “unnatural” attempt to dominate nature and engineer human souls. After the fall of state socialism, the continued affective appeal of this Organicist aesthetics worked to legitimate neoliberal ideologies even as people bemoaned the suffering and inequalities generated by the new order. The emerging middle classes embraced the powers of a “natural” order that included a free market as much as it included a natural lifecycle. In so doing, they are inscribed as moral persons, and as such deserving of material worlds in which nature is enhanced and controlled. The morally justified search for quality produces inequality. The article is thus an exploration of the constitutive relationships among things (like residential housing and furnishings), people (esp. people's embodied experience), and ideology (of the state, market or of a particular group).

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FROM SOCIALIST MODERN TO SUPER-NATURAL ORGANICISM: Cosmological Transformations through Home Decor

Fehérváry

2012

Cultural Anthropology

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“…Unlike gong that has been regarded as the moral foundation of the Chinese society similar to the ancient Greek formulation of public, si has traditionally been associated with the ignoble, an association that persisted into the 20 th century and received new impetus during Mao's era from 1949 to 1976 (Zarrow, 2002). As personal desires and financial profits are increasingly regarded as natural human tendencies during the post-Mao era, personal lives, including romantic sentiments and conjugal intimacy, have assumed growing importance for the Chinese (Tang, 1998;Yan, 2003Yan, , 2010. The proliferation of private romantic bubbles in social and collective settings manifests the rise of the private and personal in opposition to the public and social in the lives of young Chinese.…”

Section: 如果我宿舍的人看见了，会属于熟人范畴，会感觉不好意思，但是如果是被陌生人看见就随便了无所谓。mentioning

confidence: 99%