Kitchen as a material and lived space

2018

Kitchen has been one of the most intensively lived spaces at home, yet its furnishings have often vanished, especially in the 20th–21st centuries. Th e complex materiality of the kitchen related to multiple practices going beyond food production and consumption has rarely attracted curatorial interest in museums. Th is article presents a comparative analysis of four recent exhibitions in Estonia focusing on the kitchen space against the background of contemporary material culture theory and museum studies. We examine how kitchens were interpreted and represented, asking if and to what extent were the expositions based on ethnographic inquiry and how the stories of and practices associated with things were communicated to the audiences. Concurrent kitchen expositions and kitchens as parts of museum displays enable a novel methodological approach for studying the (re)presentation and interpretation of similar material objects. Besides reconstructing authentic milieus, the museums succ...

Estonian Journal of Archaeology, 2023

The material culture of the medieval and later foodways in Estonia was in a constant evolution, influenced by various changes in the local society as well as in the broader human environment. In this paper, we will broadly outline these changes through the development of the equipment used both for making and consuming food and liquids in the domestic sphere. Based on the surviving evidence, it is possible to note several processes, some bound with the cultural transfer from abroad, others connected with the political and economic situation in the area under discussion.

This essay seeks to broaden understandings of the domestic kitchen which consign its' significance to the preparation or cooking of food, an activity assumed to be undertaken chiefly by women. Here, I take a consumer practice perspective, examining 'the kitchen' not as a monolithic physical 'site' (in the spatial sense) occupied primarily by women users, but as one where a range of practices cohere, reflecting multiple meanings and uses among those individuals who inhabit them. Exploring how the domestic kitchen has -over the last century -been conceptualised as a barometer of ideological dialectics, as an orchestrating concept and as the symbolic heart of the home, I reveal how this most humble of domestic spaces is both material and symbolic, figurative and substantive, rendering it a serious -but often neglected -object of academic inquiry.

Extending the focus of previous geographical research on public spaces of remembering, this paper demonstrates the ways in which memory work also takes place in private domestic spaces. The paper draws on a combination of life history and ethnographic research undertaken in Northern England, examining kitchens as a specific lieu de mémoire, showing how they serve as places where valued items are displayed and material artefacts are curated as part of the construction and reproduction of personal memories and familial identities. Using ethnographic and visual evidence from two case study households, the paper demonstrates the role of material artefacts in curating the past and materialising memory. Additionally, life history interviews with older women reveal narratives of everyday cooking practices which seemingly contradict popular discourses of the past, questioning conventional ideas about the distorted nature of nostalgia. In combination, our data represent complex narratives in which the past can be seen as infusing the present, and where present-day concerns are revealed as actively shaping public discourses which favour a return to an idealised past, which may have little bearing on people's actual lived experience.

2015

This article offers an examination of the contemporary kitchen: firstly, as an object that continues to draw on the forms established by the Modernists in the early 20th century. Using 'real' kitchens alongside contemporary media representations, the 'signs' of kitchens for their meaning, along with a consideration of the contemporary kitchen as a physical space in relation to some of the prevailing ideas about, and attitudes towards, space in both the economic and cultural realms. The aim was to reveal something of the cultural significance of the contemporary kitchen, not only as a reflection of the dominant ideologies of functionality and efficiency; of productive activity and as 'the heart of the home', but to propose that the contemporary kitchen is significant for its articulation through its appearance, size, materials (as well as in its fixed nature) and in marketing and media representations, of a much wider range of messages and meanings that may in...

Drawing upon narrative and visual ethnographic data collected from households in the UK, this essay explores the material and emotional geographies of the domestic kitchen.

Consumption, markets & culture, 2018

This paper investigates practice dynamics in kitchens situated at the boundary between markets and consumption. The kitchen is conceptualized as a market-consumption junction, a space where multiple concerned actors in markets and consumption come to shape, and get shaped by, the practices in the kitchen. Drawing upon archival research of the Swedish household magazine Husmodern (1938-1958), this study traces two matters of concern in and around the kitchen: the scarcity of resources in food markets and the lack of time to prepare food for consumption. Findings reveal how thrifty and convenient practices became enacted, and their transformative implications for consumption, demand, and market action. The mechanisms involved in disrupting and reconnecting the dynamic elements of practices (meaning, competence, and objects) are explained through the notions of concerning, agencing, and overflows, which recursively work to redraw the boundaries between markets and consumption to establish novel practices.

Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics

The article examines varied interpretations of food heritage in contemporary Estonia, relying on the authors’ experiences of a three-year research and development project at the Estonian National Museum (ENM). The study focuses on the museum researchers’ collaboration with different stakeholders, representing small entrepreneurs and the public and non-profit sectors. The authors tackle the partners’ expectations and outcomes of diverse cooperational initiatives and the opportunities and challenges of a contemporary museum as a public forum for discussions on cultural heritage. The project revealed that diverse, complementary, and contested food heritage interpretations exist side-by-side on the Estonian foodscape. Additionally, the project enabled the authors to become better aware of the researcher’s role in the heritagisation process and of the museum as a place for negotiating the meanings and values of food culture.

2018

This thesis examines everyday food practices such as sensed by seven households in the city ofStockholm, Sweden. By sensuously exploring the acts of acquiring, preparing, cooking, eating,and wastin ...

This article offers an examination of the contemporary kitchen firstly as an object that continues to draw on the forms established by the Modernists in the early 20th century. Using contemporary media representations, it examines the signs of kitchens for their meaning along with a consideration of the contemporary kitchen as a physical space in relation to some of the prevailing ideas about, and attitudes towards, space in both the economic and cultural realms. The aim of the article is to reveal something of the cultural significance of the contemporary fitted kitchen, not only as a reflection of the dominant ideologies of functionality and efficiency; of productive activity and as ‘the heart of the home’, but to propose that the contemporary fitted kitchen is significant for its articulation through its appearance, size, materials (as well as in its fixed nature) of a much wider range of messages and meanings that may include, but are not limited to, the concepts of cultural capital, the spectacle, as well as articulating our fears of impermanence, social alienation and even perhaps, homelessness.