Quoting Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House
"A house, a structure used for habitation by people, generally has walls and a roof to shelter its enclosed space from precipitation, wind, heat, and cold. Animals including both domestic pets and "unwanted" animals (such as mice) often live in houses. (...)
"Families, as well as other social groups, generally live permanently in houses. English-speaking people generally call any building they routinely occupy "home". Many people leave their house during the day for work and recreation but typically return to it to sleep or for other activities.
"A house generally has at least one entrance, usually a door or a portal; some early houses, however, such as those at Çatal Hüyük, featured access by means of roofs and ladders. Many houses have back doors that open into what some English-speakers call the backyard or the back garden. When built in appropriate climates, houses may have any number of windows to let in natural sunlight and to provide a view to the outside. "
Source of image (photo by Ian Britton): http://www.freefoto.com/preview.jsp?id=13-19-1
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Common people, and also archaeologists, as long as many other "social scientists" like sociologists, anthropologists, etc., use often the term "house" as a universal device, more or less built by people, in order to get a shelter for themselves.
Architects design and make houses, among many other pieces of work, and scholars interested in the history of building/dwelling, or in the symbology of the house (Gaston Bachelard for instance) have largely developed the endless connotations of the theme of "the house". It is an obvious, undisputed thing in itself - what needs to be explained is its variations.
Many have tried to trace the "history" of the house in a more or less lineal way, from the most primitive "cave" or "hut" until the ultra-sophisticated "intelligent house" of late modernity. In a certain way, house (and its derivates, like hamlet, village, city, town, metropolis, etc.) is the very symbol of culture, of the creativity of human beings, of "artificiality" and imagination, and also of social life.
So "the house" is seen as a cultural construct that, departing from nature, reveals a more or less complicated system of ideas and symbols: the house is a blue-print of culture, something superimposed to nature, and expressing the peculiarities of each people, etc. In any case, the concept/object "house" is something obvious, corresponding to a universal need of shelter, protection/defence, and comfort (heat, rest, food consummed in common, etc).
The house is also very much associated with the "family", the domestic life, the intimacy, the primary social group and a "closed" environment to which the "ego" belongs. So, the house is also the home, the place where a certain amount of people feels strongly tied to a shared tradition of beliefs, uses, symbols, feelings, experiences: the nest of the solidary group, the society.
The house is a universal projection of the idea of the "domus", a sign of the capacity of man to live, to survive, and to impose himself to nature, distanced from the dangerous and unknown "wild". The house is a cultural thing, because even the animals that build shelters, do it by "instinct", through biological legacy; man, instead, does it by cultural tradition and by mental ability to conceive projects and them to materialize them in space, through architecture.
The house corresponds to a basic function - to protect, to shelter, to make people join together around the fireplace and the shared food - and based on that "function" mankind has invented an extraordinary paraphernalia of forms, equipments and symbols that are but local manifestations of that general, universal function/need. The house is also a container of time, of memories, of the reliques of the ancestors, the guarantee of an identity and of a set of norms and behaviors that are traditionally inherited by younger generations. It is the core of the continuity and of a certain stability of things, the order in opposition to the desorder and chaos that often are associated with the open, unpredictable world outside. This is at least our "Western" version of the matter.
It is this kind of universalization of an European concept that we need to examine critically today.
___________
Archaeologists are asked "to find" houses, if possible well conserved, giving a picture of past "daily life". Frozen, like in a photo, and grouped, like a city or something huge, is better (Pompeii for the Romans, or Akrotiri, in the Cyclades, for the Bronze Age, for instance).
But places like Çatalhüyük (Turkey), or Skara Brae, Orkney (Scotland) are also attractive, among many others, because they seam to conceal, to frame, moments of past "daily life".
It is this liminal point between past and present, life and death ("only people is missing in this journey into the past") that seems to represent something very appealing of the curiosity of people.
Death is interesting (skeletons, mummies, the horrible), ritual is good (proving that men were no more beasts, but sensitive people, believing in some transcendent reality) but "real living people" especially if captured in a moment of time, are fascinating (Pompeii for instance), because they allow us to see death face to face, and in a certain way to feel eternal, to feel like escaping time for a moment. The illusion of reversibility is thus provided by archaeology and I think that it is this fetishism that sustains much of the public interest by the discipline.
Trying to satisfy their "customers" (public, through the media, museums, exhibitions, etc.) and to meet their expectation, some archaeologists let themselves go into oversimplifications of complex realities, using concepts and notions that are (and some of those archaeologists are perfectly aware of that) simply inventions or at least possibilities presented as proved convictions.
It is urgent to see, in some assertive conclusions, in the very emphasis they use to affirm certitudes, a sort of rethoric discourse that in fact is extremely naif, or tend to disguise the doubt and perplexity that each one of us, archaeologists, experience in our dialogue with the complexity of things.
Many older fields of knowledge are confronted with difficulties and doubts. This is the very ethos of research.
Why should archaeology, in turn, take for granted such common sense concepts as obvious things, as universals - like "house", and many others - to domesticate the past, to give a false impression of having solved the many questions that confront us? Probably there is something of unconscious in all this, some belief that culture/science is the religion of modern laic times, and that we need to provide, in order to exist, a modern version of the book of Genesis, of the myth of origins.
So we present the "house of Adam", before and after the Fall, i. e., in the Paleolithic (the primitive, almost "natural" tent) and, later, in the Neolithic (the first house, the first sedentary life, the first surplus... to sum it up, our brave forerunners).
Enough is enough. Please let us go into a more interesting and subtle archaeology as soon as possible. Submitting ourselves to common sense is dismissing our real mission: to do our job honestly, and to present not marvellous stories, but the reality of our findings - both in their certitudes, and in the problems that they continuously raise. The true excitement of discovery not as a moment, and a solitary action, but as a process, and a collective one.
The public is not a child. And even speaking to children we should learn them to divide observations (serious science) from the pure fiction (invented things, false knowledge, simplified stories) or the pure projection into the past of common sense, fake universalized ideas.
When they grow up, they will remember.
The marvelous of the world does not force us to give them "fast food", ready-made ideas about our past. To the contrary. The marvelous of the world is its mystery and, by serious thinking, our capacity to face it.
voj 2007
Architects design and make houses, among many other pieces of work, and scholars interested in the history of building/dwelling, or in the symbology of the house (Gaston Bachelard for instance) have largely developed the endless connotations of the theme of "the house". It is an obvious, undisputed thing in itself - what needs to be explained is its variations.
Many have tried to trace the "history" of the house in a more or less lineal way, from the most primitive "cave" or "hut" until the ultra-sophisticated "intelligent house" of late modernity. In a certain way, house (and its derivates, like hamlet, village, city, town, metropolis, etc.) is the very symbol of culture, of the creativity of human beings, of "artificiality" and imagination, and also of social life.
So "the house" is seen as a cultural construct that, departing from nature, reveals a more or less complicated system of ideas and symbols: the house is a blue-print of culture, something superimposed to nature, and expressing the peculiarities of each people, etc. In any case, the concept/object "house" is something obvious, corresponding to a universal need of shelter, protection/defence, and comfort (heat, rest, food consummed in common, etc).
The house is also very much associated with the "family", the domestic life, the intimacy, the primary social group and a "closed" environment to which the "ego" belongs. So, the house is also the home, the place where a certain amount of people feels strongly tied to a shared tradition of beliefs, uses, symbols, feelings, experiences: the nest of the solidary group, the society.
The house is a universal projection of the idea of the "domus", a sign of the capacity of man to live, to survive, and to impose himself to nature, distanced from the dangerous and unknown "wild". The house is a cultural thing, because even the animals that build shelters, do it by "instinct", through biological legacy; man, instead, does it by cultural tradition and by mental ability to conceive projects and them to materialize them in space, through architecture.
The house corresponds to a basic function - to protect, to shelter, to make people join together around the fireplace and the shared food - and based on that "function" mankind has invented an extraordinary paraphernalia of forms, equipments and symbols that are but local manifestations of that general, universal function/need. The house is also a container of time, of memories, of the reliques of the ancestors, the guarantee of an identity and of a set of norms and behaviors that are traditionally inherited by younger generations. It is the core of the continuity and of a certain stability of things, the order in opposition to the desorder and chaos that often are associated with the open, unpredictable world outside. This is at least our "Western" version of the matter.
It is this kind of universalization of an European concept that we need to examine critically today.
___________
Archaeologists are asked "to find" houses, if possible well conserved, giving a picture of past "daily life". Frozen, like in a photo, and grouped, like a city or something huge, is better (Pompeii for the Romans, or Akrotiri, in the Cyclades, for the Bronze Age, for instance).
But places like Çatalhüyük (Turkey), or Skara Brae, Orkney (Scotland) are also attractive, among many others, because they seam to conceal, to frame, moments of past "daily life".
It is this liminal point between past and present, life and death ("only people is missing in this journey into the past") that seems to represent something very appealing of the curiosity of people.
Death is interesting (skeletons, mummies, the horrible), ritual is good (proving that men were no more beasts, but sensitive people, believing in some transcendent reality) but "real living people" especially if captured in a moment of time, are fascinating (Pompeii for instance), because they allow us to see death face to face, and in a certain way to feel eternal, to feel like escaping time for a moment. The illusion of reversibility is thus provided by archaeology and I think that it is this fetishism that sustains much of the public interest by the discipline.
Trying to satisfy their "customers" (public, through the media, museums, exhibitions, etc.) and to meet their expectation, some archaeologists let themselves go into oversimplifications of complex realities, using concepts and notions that are (and some of those archaeologists are perfectly aware of that) simply inventions or at least possibilities presented as proved convictions.
It is urgent to see, in some assertive conclusions, in the very emphasis they use to affirm certitudes, a sort of rethoric discourse that in fact is extremely naif, or tend to disguise the doubt and perplexity that each one of us, archaeologists, experience in our dialogue with the complexity of things.
Many older fields of knowledge are confronted with difficulties and doubts. This is the very ethos of research.
Why should archaeology, in turn, take for granted such common sense concepts as obvious things, as universals - like "house", and many others - to domesticate the past, to give a false impression of having solved the many questions that confront us? Probably there is something of unconscious in all this, some belief that culture/science is the religion of modern laic times, and that we need to provide, in order to exist, a modern version of the book of Genesis, of the myth of origins.
So we present the "house of Adam", before and after the Fall, i. e., in the Paleolithic (the primitive, almost "natural" tent) and, later, in the Neolithic (the first house, the first sedentary life, the first surplus... to sum it up, our brave forerunners).
Enough is enough. Please let us go into a more interesting and subtle archaeology as soon as possible. Submitting ourselves to common sense is dismissing our real mission: to do our job honestly, and to present not marvellous stories, but the reality of our findings - both in their certitudes, and in the problems that they continuously raise. The true excitement of discovery not as a moment, and a solitary action, but as a process, and a collective one.
The public is not a child. And even speaking to children we should learn them to divide observations (serious science) from the pure fiction (invented things, false knowledge, simplified stories) or the pure projection into the past of common sense, fake universalized ideas.
When they grow up, they will remember.
The marvelous of the world does not force us to give them "fast food", ready-made ideas about our past. To the contrary. The marvelous of the world is its mystery and, by serious thinking, our capacity to face it.
voj 2007
8 comentários:
Aí está...o dedo na ferida. Coloca vários problemas que estão hoje subjacentes, não só há forma de se fazer arqueologia, há forma do discurso, como às próprias questões de terminologia. As sementes estão lançadas, resta continuar a trabalhar, a escavar, a pensar, duma forma englobante e não restritiva.
Acho que sim. Quando as pessoas perceberem a beleza que é abrir fronteiras pelo simples facto de olhar de maneira nova para as coisas aceites como evidentes...então a "escola do Porto" terá cumprido a sua missão, ultrapassando o cinzentismo do pensamento puramente repetitivo e acumulativo.Tenho saudades desse futuro, em que as nossas intuições de agora serão celebradas na nossa ausência - e para esse DESENCONTRO RADICAL trabalho.Sabendo que não será preciso comparecermos.
O problema é sair do senso-comum e criar uma Arqueologia diferente, que não se revista apenas de critica e descontrução de rotinas e conceitos. É urgente criar novos discursos, interdiciplinares, que não desfoquem os problemas para fugir deles, como numa teia de luzes ofuscantes, mas que pensem o que identificamos como um problema.
Gostava de lhe pedir que esta reflexão sobre a casa e a domesticação do e no passado não ficasse por aqui.
Ana Vale
De acordo.
Se tiver saúde, não ficarei por aqui - quem quer parar?... mas acredito mais, e por isso faço este blog, no que resulta de uma ecologia da interacção, do que de uma ecologia do isolamento e auto-deslumbramento. Cada um de nós, com o que faz, é muito responsável pelo que os outros conseguem fazer, e eu dependo de si e de muitos outros para desenvolver estas breves notas, escritas à pressa numa língua estranha depois de um dia de burocracias e de banalidades...os empecilhos da vida feliz e criativa.
Ninguém diz mais nada?...
“So ‘the house’ is seen as a cultural construct that, departing from nature, reveals a more or less complicated system of ideas and symbols: the house is a blue-print of culture, something superimposed to nature, and expressing the peculiarities of each people, etc” (VOJ).
De algum modo, penso que a casa pode ser, a um certo nível, “a blue-print of culture”.
Mas mais do que “something superimposed to nature”, é “something within nature”… (o Lloyd Wright ilustra isso à sua maneira).
A casa (a construção) plasma-se num espaço que ultrapassa os limites do “habitado”.
Neste aspecto, os caçadores-recolectores (em geral) demonstram bem isto: o seu território de milhares de km2 é a sua “casa”; os vários “sites” (no sentido funcionalista do Binford) são como que os vários compartimentos. Da mesma forma que os móveis e todos os objectos que existem na casa fazem parte do “mundo doméstico”, também os elementos que integram o território dos c-rs são elementos que lhes são “familiares”, plenos de sentido. Da mesma forma que nas casas velhas há quartos assombrados, também nos teritórios dos c-rs há “sectores” mais “indesejados”, interditos por discursos mitificados... mas também há os preferidos, os lugares magníficos, tal como nas nossas casa...
Na sociedade contemporânea fala-se muito em “cidadãos do mundo”... mas verdadeiramente “cidadãos do mundo” são as sociedades “primitivas” porque elas e o mundo são uma coisa só.
Em todo caso, continuo a achar que alguns desses elementos que integram esse “mundo primitivo” podem dar-nos algumas dicas para podermos dizer (ainda que com muitas limitações) “como foi”...
Sérgio (a improvisar e cheio de sono)
Nota: o comment acima já foi escrito há alguns dias... mas ainda vai a tempo..
Sem dúvida alguma, é extremamente urgente, adoptarmos novos discursos, contemplando uma maior abertura a conceitos mais amplos e fluidos, todavia devemos ter o cuidado de não cair num fosso a que eu chamo “pós-modernismo extremo”, o levantar de questões sucessivas, sem sugestão de hipóteses alternativas!
De facto, é tempo de abraçarmos uma investigação que contemple uma interdisciplinaridade tão vasta quanto possível. Sugiro mesmo que façamos disto o nosso método científico!
No que concerne ao conceito de “casa”, o que argumentarei aqui, é que quando estamos a falar sobre sociedades neolíticas ou calcolíticas, e tendo em consideração as diferentes “escalas de tempo de movimentos” que provavelmente existiram ( Edmonds, M.), não deveríamos pensar em “houses”, como fazemos com as nossas próprias casas, mas antes como um “conceito” muito mais amplo e fluído, onde certamente a “house” foi a “landscape”!
Eu penso que todos os locais contemplados na “mobilidade” dessas sociedades( Thomas, J.), independentemente das diferentes “escalas de tempo” ( Edmonds, M.), foram como que uma pequena parte da “célula” da casa que foi a “landscape”!
Foi andando, sentindo e observando pela “landscape” que as comunidades pré-históricas construíram a sua identidade/personalidade, através de um “conhecimento incorporado” (embodied acknowledge) numa interacção do seu corpo com a “landscape”!
Como Tim Ingold refere no trabalho “From de complementarity to obviation”, nos não andamos somente porque estamos biologicamente dotados para isso, mas também porque dispomos de um espaço físico que o permite fazer e porque observamos outros indivíduos a faze-lo!
Todas estas ideias de conhecimento incorporado têm sido provadas noutras disciplinas como a psicologia e educação, “ teaching is optimized by a total integration of the human body in the learning experience”, “the existence of mirror neurons confirms that we learn by doing, by watching other people doing, and by thinking about their actions and our own, furthermore, in the embodied learning environments of the future, we shall learn how to use objects and contexts, combined with motion and emotive expression, to ensure that new forms of learning take place” (Geoffrey Edwards and Marie-Louise Borbeau).
Esta aprendizagem aplica-se igualmente em relação à “landscape”.
Deste modo, eu entendo a casa pré-histórica, como todo o conjunto de locais, que permitiram ao Homem adquirir capacidades/faculdades/perícias (skills), que deram forma à sua identidade/personalidade e que, principalmente, o fizeram capaz de conhecer e viver o seu mundo com sucesso!
Considerando todo este conjunto de ideias, penso que temos que repensar o conceito de casa na pré-história!
Desculpem os estrangeirismos, mas uma vez que sugiro a adopção de um discurso mais fluído e amplo, não encontro outras palavras que me assegurem maior fluidez e vastidão que as utilizadas.
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