Permeable Homes: Domestic Service, Household Space, and the Vulnerability of Class Boundaries in Urban India

Abstract

Servants' movements into and out of middle-and upper-class homes in the South Indian city of Madurai create a mixing of outside and inside spaces. Employers feel that this mixing threatens the security of their homes and class standing. Yet, because the presence of servants is a necessary marker of class, employers attempt to contain the threat by buttressing the symbolic boundaries of the household, controlling domestic workers' movements through space, and manipulating workers' closeness to and distance from employers. These employers' accounts and actions reveal central concepts of and anxieties about class in contemporary urban India, [class, space, domestic service, women, domesticity]Employing domestic workers can feel like a mixed blessing to middle-and upper-class Indian women. Domestic workers help these women support their families' class standing by maintaining clean and ordered homes and by enabling them to pursue other status-producing activities or their own employment. The presence of servants also serves in and of itself as a crucial sign of class achievement. On the other hand, servants' entrances into employers' homes mark the introduction of a dangerous outside into an orderly and protected inside. Employers feel that servants threaten their families and, in particular, their class status. The movement of servants from their own homes into and between employers' homes actually has a number of effects-including the distribution of information, labor, and material and cultural capital, as well as the creation of social networks across classes and neighborhoods. Many of these effects are viewed neutrally or positively by both employers and social analysts. Yet, when I spoke with employers in the South Indian city of Madurai, their most consistent and compelling comments on servants' movements dealt with the dangers posed to their households by servants' entrances and exits.Employers feel they must vigilantly protect their families and homes against the dangers that could destroy the order they have so carefully produced as a sign of their own class standing. Servants represent the dirt, disease, and "rubbish" (Chakrabarty 1991) of a disorderly outside world that employers commonly associate with the lower class and that pointedly contrast with the ideal cleanliness, order, and hygiene of their own homes. Slippage in the other direction, toward the outside, is also a great risk; symbolic and material capital must be prevented from escaping the house through gossip and theft. Employers' accounts project an image of a household whose perimeters need to be carefully and constantly buttressed against the disorderly mixing of categories (cf. Douglas 1966) that servants' entrances and exits entail. The household and its members communicate an image to spectators-from neighbors to American Ethnologist 27{2):462-469. Copyright C 2000, American Anthropological Association. permeable homes 463 coworkers, from fellow guests at weddings to the community at large-who interpret the symbolic markers of class prod...

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