INVESTIGATING THE VISUAL DIMENSION IN MATERIAL CULTURE RESEARCH ON THE HOME
INVESTIGATING THE VISUAL DIMENSION IN MATERIAL CULTURE RESEARCH ON THE HOME

Summary/Abstract: In qualitative research, visual data have the potential to reveal information and knowledge that would hardly be accessible through any other means. This perspective is potentially valid for any kind of research on social phenomena, even more so for research on the material culture of home that originates in the analyses of people's appropriation of domestic environment through their visually perceivable design and furnishing choices. However, anthropologists of'material culture often prefer other types of research methods, they rarely draw upon the theories and methods of visual anthropology, and they approach visual data intuitively or use them in a purely illustrative way. In this paper, I address the approach to the theme of home and housing in projects from two different branches of social anthropology - visual anthropology and the anthropology of the material culture of home. Also, I address these methods with a preliminary analysis of the visual data from my own research on the individual's construction of home among young people in contemporary Bratislava.

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