Homemaking, Homebuilding, and the Significance of Place and Kin in Rural Kyrgyzstan

Abstract

In rural Kyrgfyzstan, homes built by their owners house multigenerational families and are filled with objects that have been bought, made, acquired, and received. Many of them come as gifts cementing alliances with other families through marriage. This article discusses how kelin (daughtersin-law) and their families negotiate aspects of themselves and their relationships through interactions with these objects and places of domesticity. Many studies of Central Asia identify patrilineage and land as major factors in the constitution and experience of kinship and personhood. This article shows how the home provides an interesting alternative site for the examination of these. It is a perspective. X REBECCA REYNOLDSmoreover, that is vital when women's experience is relatively overlooked. Ethnographic fieldwork with households in Kyrgyzstan is drawn on to discuss the significance of domestic places and domestic objects for daughters-in-law. It highlights the negotiation of personhood outside the more discursively powerful locations such as lineage, place, and geographical region. It does so through focusing on ways of experiencing, envisioning and creating old and new homes, arguing that these are intimately connected to personhood. It is suggested that homebuilding can be understood as an explicit narration of self, while daily interaction with objects in the home is a more implicit form of self-expression and negotiation.

When the Family Occupies the Future – Self-Processes and Well-Being of Kyrgyz Children and Young People

“…The parents' generation bases its claim on the understanding of family as it is socially practiced in Kyrgyzstan. Multi-generational families are the ideal (Reynolds, 2012) and a statistically proven reality. They come about because adult sons in particular remain living in their parents' household.…”

Dressing and Undressing the House

“…In this analysis of the built environment in Viștea, I intend to contribute to literature on the material culture studies of the home. A wide range of research revealed that domestic objects and home decorations constitute a dynamic relationship between remembering and forgetting and illuminate notions of kinship and gender as well as local symbolic categories (Carsten and Hugh Jones 1995, Empson 2006, Grossman 2015, Iuga 2011, Reynolds 2012. Following Levi-Strauss, studies considered the house as a "corporate body holding an estate made up of both material and immaterial wealth" (Levi-Strauss 1983: 174) and explored the relations between the fabric of social organisation, local identity and shifting idioms of household (Pine 1996(Pine , 2002.…”