Braun, Karl  /Dieterich, Claus-Marco/

Moser, Johannes  / Schönholz, Christian (Hrsg.):

Wirtschaften. Kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven.
Marburg 2019, S. 15 –35.

Orvar Löfgren
Mine or Ours?
The Home as a Moral Economy

Introduction
„Mine“ says the small child again and again, with a broad grin. ‚Mine‘ is one of the
first words she has learnt and now she uses it everywhere, and not only about my toys
but my grandma, my food. There is a feeling of intoxication in establishing borders
and categories, of taking command of people and things: the teddy bear held in an
iron grip, or the arms around Grandma’s knees. Slowly she is socialized into the cul-
tural field of ‚mine‘, ‚yours‘ or ‚ours‘. It isn’t an easy journey. Why are you not allowed
to take back something you just gave away to a friend? Slowly the child is trained in
the grammar of ownership: possess, control, acquire, share, borrow – which all has a
central role in the ways in which a child explores the world and becomes an individu-
al in dialogue with others. Me and mine!
When people recall how this socialization occurred (as kids, or as parents) it is
about many things. It can be conflicts about toys, negotiations about boundaries,
about forbidden or permitted activities. It can be memories of creating secrets of your
own or exploring the private spaces of others. Childhood is only the first phase of this
education, it continues throughout the rest of life, in couple-making and in the later
stages of reorganized household constellations. My main question here is how ideas
about ‚mine‘ or ‚ours‘ are established and how they change over time, but also how
such processes are related to the moral economy of the home or the family. In a sense,
this means dealing with very basic training in householding, in managing resources,
consumption and interests.
Studies of the making of ‚mine‘ and ‚ours‘ are often carried out in rather abstract
philosophical contexts that focus on discourses of selfhood and individualization.
What can a European ethnologist contribute to this interdisciplinary field? I want to
focus on practices often taken for granted or made unconscious in everyday life.
My methodological approach has been the bricolage (Ehn et al. 2016), a combin-
ing of a wide and eclectic range of historical and contemporary materials. First of
all, I have drawn on an ongoing project carried out with Billy Ehn on ‚the invisible
16 Orvar Löfgren

home‘, in which we have collected interviews and observations but also asked people
to write about different aspects of domestic life. This material has been complement-
ed by going through a number of extensive surveys of the ‚life at home‘, but also by
studying images of home life in popular culture and the media. Finally, I have reread a
number of ethnographic studies of the home, where the theme of ‚mine‘ and ‚ours‘ is
not in the foreground but continually comes up in different situations.1
The bricolage approach also has a theoretical dimension. I am interested in the
interplay of the many elements brought together in learning how to handle and to
understand versions of ‚mine‘ and ‚ours‘, for example in the material and emotional
dimensions of everyday routines. Here I have found Doreen Massey’s (2005) concept
of throwntogetherness helpful. How do objects, people, feelings, sensibilities, activ-
ities and time-dimensions co-exist? Massey’s concept explores the ways in which
diverse elements come to cohabit in a setting or a situation, often as unexpected
neighbours. But in order to understand how these confrontations work, a few other
theoretical tools are helpful. There are other scholars who have focused on the agen-
cy and affective power of things. Jane Bennett (2010), for example, uses Deleuze and
Gattari’s term assemblage as an example of a „confederate agency“ of the ways in
which different elements turn into co-actors. Another helpful approach can be found
in the concept of entanglement (see the different takes on this in Ingold 2010 and
Hodder 2012) − the ways in which humans and things, as well as sets of things, be-
come co-dependent.

What is in a moral economy?

My project was actually kicked off by a quote, which had long been resting at the back
of my thoughts. „What is a home?“ asked anthropologist Mary Douglas, back in 1991.
Douglas’s answer was that it is not primarily a physical space with walls and a roof,
doors and windows; it is, above all, an internal order, with its own rules, rhythms and
moral considerations. The home is made by intertwined routines, silent agreements
and ingrained reflexes about ‚this is the way we do it here, in our home‘. The family or
the household is the training ground in which basic norms about ‚mine‘, ‚yours‘ and
‚ours‘ are learned. It is an arena where the concept of moral economy can be useful.
It was the British historian Edward Thompson (1961) who originally coined this
concept in his discussion of early English working-class culture. The concept is meant
to deal with situations and contexts where the rational laws of the market don’t ap-

1 The material from the ‚the invisible home‘ project mostly deals with experiences of homemaking
during different stages in the life cycle, especially during childhood and later couple-making
(for a presentation of some of the material, see Löfgren 2014). When nothing else is stated, my
examples are taken from this material. With regard to home survey studies, I have compared
some older Swedish studies (Åkerman 1941, Hanssen 1978) with a few unpublished recent and
very extensive surveys, which compare Swedish patterns with other European countries. The
ethnographies of home that I have used are referred to in the text.
Mine or Ours? 17

ply, but where moral concerns or ideas are strongly embedded in social and econom-
ic relations. Taking the concept into the home means focusing on household mem-
bers not just as rational economic actors but as persons acting within a sphere of
rules, values, rituals and understandings shaped by the specific history of the actual
household and its members. Moral positions in the home influence economic deci-
sions, and even seemingly insignificant or trivial economic activities may turn out to
have a strong moral charge.
The home is everything the hotel is not, writes Mary Douglas. The hotel is a mar-
ket institution ruled by customer relations, and in a hotel you get what you pay for.
Domestic life, on the contrary, is also organized by ideas about right and wrong, fair
and unfair. Here you have to learn to do your part, to take responsibility and to share.
The personal good must be balanced against the interests of others or ‚the common
good‘. It is about demands, duties and rights, but it is also about power, hierarchy
and subordination. At home, one shares; spaces are shared, as is the remote control
for the TV, food in the fridge, household chores, and many other things. Yet, at the
same time, there are constant negotiations about what is ‚mine‘ and what is ‚yours‘.
What am I entitled to? What happens when household members have different ideas
about where lines should be drawn? Various principles about fairness and routines
are created: taking turns, queuing, drawing lots, exchanging  …
The home is constructed around a strong sense of what is ‚ours‘, things we have to
do together and take responsibility for. Who took the last drop of milk without buying
some more? Who leaves the light on or turns the thermostat up again? At home you
have to synchronize routines and activities but also needs and interests, which may
create tensions between my own needs and ‚the family good‘ (an interesting moral
concept in itself). There is often a vague ‚we‘ hovering in the background. Do we real-
ly need a new TV? An extra room? Dessert for dinner?
The home is a site of negotiation, with constant wheeling and dealing and at-
tempts to make different priorities and interests cohabit. The moral economy of the
home also reflects different positions and thus engages with questions of class, gen-
der and generation. The moral economy of a given home is rarely visible in grand dec-
larations about rules, rights and duties; it is hidden in mundane situations, which
explains why seemingly trivial objects, routines or actions can all of a sudden result
in a flare of affect, and power structures and hierarchies can be reinforced or chal-
lenged. The long tradition of idealizing the home as a haven underplays the ways in
which the home is also an arena of tensions and conflicts.
So how do you explore such a moral economy that is often hidden in silent agree-
ments and rules being taken for granted, as well as in movements, routines and bodi-
ly reactions? Dennis Wood and Robert Beck (1994) followed a family for seven years,
observing the patterns in the family’s use of the living room. They were interested in
how the children’s socialization into ‚home rules’ highlighted values and rules about
‚our home‘. Over time they identified 233 rules governing the use of this living room
space. In a sense the children became chemical agents who made silent rules or tacit
18 Orvar Löfgren

agreements about domestic values visible, „forcing the rules to disrobe“. „What is a
home for a child but a field of rules?“, they ask (1994: 1).
At home you are constantly educated in rules and routines, but these may not
become visible or conscious until they are confronted with other moral economies.
What kinds of rules, for example, apply at the neighbours’ house or at Grandma’s?
An eleven-year-old who lives in a collective is at a party at a neighbour’s house.
When the meatballs appear, the child asks the hostess „how many are we allowed to
take?“, as he has learnt to do at home. She smiles her middle-class smile and says
„but, my dear, you may take as many as you want!“ She looks more than surprised as
he loads 14 pieces onto his plate.
Another concrete situation of learning is about commuting between home and
the daycare centre. In daycare settings, there is a scarcity of ‚mine‘ and an abundance
of ‚ours‘. „We ask parents not to let the children bring their own toys in the morn-
ing“, reads a scribbled note in the doorway, „it makes for conflict during play.“ There
is some tough training at the daycare centre in learning to share activities and stuff.
Especially striking is the learning and relearning which occurs among children
who commute between their divorced parents who have new partners and homes. The
adults may create new rules one must learn to handle, or can be provoked by. The
teenage girl stands outside her mother’s home with her bag and hesitates; should she
get out her own key or should she knock? Is this really my home or am I a guest? After
some hesitation, she knocks (Winther 2013b).
The hidden normality in such learning or rule-handling of ‚mine‘ or ‚ours‘ can also
be problematized by looking at situations in which they don’t seem to apply or are
constantly questioned. Studies of ‚queer domesticity‘ (Bryant 2015) illustrate how
traditional ideals of heteronormative family life are challenged or reworked. Other
examples are found in the tensions surrounding guests, lodgers or servants. If you
are one of these, to what extent are you a part of the family or the home? Studies of
au pairs often focus on such conflicts and ambiguities, with themes such as hierar-
chy, independence, inclusion or exclusion. The au pairs take part in the many tasks
that make or remake the family in everyday life, but are they really a part of the fami-
ly? (Dalgas 2016.) Among families who were interviewed, opinions differed:
„If you’re living with an au pair then, for me anyway, it is crucial that that person becomes a
member of the whole family. And, therefore, the first word is ‚anything that is in here‘ – and
this is quite genuine – ‚is yours‘. So it could be the fridge, the TV or whatever.“ (Cox 2003: 340)
Others disagreed: „Whereas lots of people say, you know, the au pair deal is that
they’re supposed to be a part of the family and I’d say ‚you are not.‘ If you want a bud-
dy family then we are not the family for you.“ (Cox 2003: 340).
There is a lot of ambivalence surrounding the au pair. Are they an employee, or
a family member, a big sister or a servant? Boundaries between work and family to-
getherness are blurred. Now you are part of the family, and now you are not  …!
Mine or Ours? 19

There are other situations in which idealized versions of a moral economy are
challenged. A psychologist working at an institution for young women with drug
problems encounters people who have a totally different view of ‚mine‘ and ‚yours‘. If
these young people want something, they don’t hesitate to grab it – they never ask!
They have often grown up in homes where the boundaries between ‚mine‘ and ‚yours‘
were transgressed all the time, by drug-addicted parents and   /or siblings. For some,
this leads to a constant jealous guarding of the little that is ‚mine‘ because they know
it can be taken away from them at anytime. The staff learns new rules. A new staff
member brings in the cake for afternoon coffee. She is told, „first you have to divide
it up into pieces, otherwise someone will just grab the whole cake“. In settings like
this it becomes obvious what happens when people do not share understandings of
solidarity, empathy, generosity or trust.

Private matters
The home is full of boundaries between ‚mine‘, ‚yours‘ or ‚ours‘. Some of these bound-
aries may be very visible and material; others are more difficult to catch hold of  –
they are ephemeral, unstable, hidden.
In her study of privacy in everyday life, the sociologist Christena Nippert-Eng
(2010: 7) asked her informants what privacy means to them. The most common an-
swer is about having the ability or power to control access to some things, places or
information. Others stressed the importance of being left alone and at peace, not
troubled by demands or intrusions from others. A few emphasized the freedom to live
without regulations or restrictions. Nippert-Eng explores how people manage their
privacy, the strategies and means used to create boundaries, spaces and routines to
delineate their privacy. „Intimacy has a map“, writes Svetlana Boyd (2000: 227) in
which the private is linked to the intimate. It means a focus on the innermost and
frequently on the domestic. Which corners, paths or activities do people view as be-
ing very personal, something you are very careful about sharing or not sharing (and
with whom)?
Establishing private spaces, belongings or activities is an important way of under-
standing how a child develops an understanding of ‚mine‘. At home this process is
given a very concrete material form through one’s own room and one’s own stuff. The
idea of what the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott has called „transitional objects“ can
be widened to embrace the child’s attachment to objects as early tools delineating
the self as a person, establishing boundaries between ‚mine‘ and ‚others‘ (Highmore
2011: 72). It can be anything from a cuddly toy animal to a roadside find. Virginia
Woolf, in one of her short stories, writes about a child picking up a pebble on the
beach to be put on the shelf in the nursery, delighting in the benign sense of power
this selection produces. The stone takes on a personal relevance. „It might so easily
have been any other of the million of stones, but it was I, I, I!“ (Woolf 1920: 63).
20 Orvar Löfgren

In the 1920s, the nursery was a space for only a select number of children. The
nursery had emerged in 19th century upper-class settings as a way of keeping chil-
dren from disturbing the adults, but during the 20th century there emerged some
new debate on children’s rights to privacy (Palludan & Winther 2016). In the USA, in
1931, a conference panel in the White House argued for children’s need for a room of
their own: „a place where they may play or work without interference from or conflict
with the activities of the adult members of the family“ (Senior 2014: 164). The mod-
ern nursery emerged as a project for those who could afford it. In a similar manner,
toys were now discussed as educational tools for forming the child as a person (Cross
2004).
As children grow up, zones that are more private are created and the issue be-
comes more when and how parents have the right to enter these territories. For how
many years may a mother continue to go through the children’s pockets or their bed-
room drawers? At what age are kids allowed to lock their own room? (Munro & Madi-
gan 1999: 112) Issues of ‚mine‘ or ‚ours‘ are under constant negotiation; boundaries
are created and challenged. This becomes very evident in the teenager’s room, where
an anti-home can be created with provocative colours, large posters and loud music.
It should be made quite clear who rules here!
To make oneself private can be seen as a very personal and individual activity,
but it is highly coloured and framed by cultural conventions, which may be seen in
the constantly changing history of privacy (Ariès & Duby 1991). The debate on chil-
dren’s need for privacy has ranged from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Dr. Spock, and
from different standpoints (Cross 2004). Antoine Prost (1991: 69) reminded us how
in late 19th-century bourgeois French society, parents took it for granted that their
children’s and teenagers’ mail should be read; it was not only the parents’ right but
their duty. Later generations came to see this as an intrusion into private territory,
but with the growth of social media and children’s online life new debates about pa-
rental supervision have developed.
Ideas of ‚mine’ are also linked to mundane transformations. Take such a simple
activity as the family meal, in which the shared turns into ‚mine‘ or ‚yours‘ through
a journey from the common bowl to the individual plate (Wilk 2016). As the food is
spooned onto the plate it is changed into ‚your food‘, not only your property but your
responsibility. You must finish what is on your plate, and you shouldn’t try to steal a
meatball from the plate of a sibling.
Here we are in the terrain of container technologies; objects or activities which
separate and hold together: my plate, my drawer, my room. One good example of such
containers of privacy are suitcases and handbags. Mundane items in the supermarket
or on a table, from cosmetics and underwear to corkscrews and pocketbooks, are just
that, everyday stuff, but collected together in a suitcase or a bag, they acquire a new
aura of intimacy and often also of secrecy. It is a throwntogetherness that may turn
into a personalized version of ‚me‘ (Löfgren 2016).
Mine or Ours? 21

My secret spaces, objects and thoughts constitute a special dimension of making

oneself private. It is one of the ways in which children experiment with self-mak-
ing. Regina Bendix (2016) has discussed how children discover and learn practices
of secrecy and the different powers inherent to the keeping, revealing and breaking
of secrets. During childhood, secrets are made and hiding places developed (my hid-
den bag of sweets, a toy which I have ‚borrowed‘), and issues around both ownership
and the private are tested, establishing boundaries between what is mine and what
belongs to others. Secrets change form and function during the cycle of life – from
the small child’s hiding places, which demand to be discovered, to the teenager’s di-
ary that no one must open but where the curiosity of others is a thrilling possibility.
People remember their childhood fascination with what they perceived as the secret
territories of their parents. Sneaking in to look through the drawers in the bedside
tables, rifle through pockets in the wardrobe, looking in mother’s handbag, finding
the secret key to dad’s desk or to the lock of the older sister’s diary.
Christena Nippert-Eng discusses how adults create and share secrets, but also the
interest in the secrets of one’s partner or household members. What is it that is so
secret that I am not allowed to know? Where in an overcrowded home does one hide
the most private things? Nippert-Eng’s informants guide her around the landscapes
of secrets: the innermost corner of the bottom drawer, the space behind the cabinet
in the garage. Locked spaces carry a magical attraction. In different ways the impor-
tance of being a separate person is woven together with the production of privacy
and secrets.

‚Mine‘ and ‚yours‘ turning into ‚ours‘

If childhood is a concrete laboratory for learning about ‚mine‘, ‚yours‘ and ‚ours‘, the
later stage of coupling is another. To move in together with a partner means chang-
ing ‚mine‘ and ‚yours‘ to ‚ours‘. Our home, our furniture, our habits. This new ‚ours‘
can constantly regress back to ‚mine‘ and ‚yours‘. Your taste, my stuff, your bad hab-
its.
Two researchers who have discussed this relearning are Sarah Kjær (2007), with
her study of young couples in Copenhagen, and Jean Claude Kaufmann (2002) who
has followed couples from their first morning together. At the start of a new relation-
ship there is often great tolerance for the partner’s habits and their stuff. Falling in
love makes it easy to share everything, even a toothbrush and a towel, but gradually
routines and boundaries change and the beloved one’s good habits become bad ones.
In Daniel Miller’s The Comfort of Things we meet London couples in all kinds of
constellations and follow the ways in which ‚mine‘ and ‚yours‘ is changed to ‚ours‘, or
back again:
„Typically, one can watch couples develop their relationship vicariously, through the gradu-
al merger of all sorts of items in the house: books, CD collections, pictures on the wall. The
things, and not just the people, start to take up residence with each other, getting to know
22 Orvar Löfgren

each other and sometimes becoming indistinguishable from each other – to a degree which
has subsequently made divorce lawyers significant profits.“ (Miller 2008: 157)
In his interviews there is a range of homes where the words ‚mine‘ or ‚yours‘ are sel-
dom used. The couple keeps talking about ‚we‘ and ‚ours‘ (we think, our interests, our
stuff). Then there are what Miller calls „a his-and-hers-house“: „His office, her office;
his books, her books; his ornaments, her ornaments  …“ (157)
In Miller’s interviews, a marked (and well-known) gender order emerges. Above
all, it is the work, interests and tastes of the women that organize most of the home.
Charles puts it like this: „She’s come in and rearranged my house, that’s basically it.
And she’s imposed her will on my house, that’s how it goes. Just because she’s a wom-
an, that’s what happens.“ (158). He sighs about all his male friends who have wit-
nessed the same development, without reflecting what his responsibility is for this
division of labour. For him the solution is:
„You’ve got to have a little shed somewhere, or my little room downstairs where you can shut
the door and just have a little peace and quiet on my own and just have my few things around
me.“ (Miller 2008: 158)
For men like Charles who don’t really feel at home in their own home, such retreats
are important. They are discussed in greater details in the American study Where Men
Hide (Twitchell 2006). They can be anything from a favourite chair, to the car, the
garage or the garden shed, in which ‚my‘ rules and aesthetics should rule. Women,
on the other hand, often complain about not getting enough recognition and cred-
it for the housework they have done and the endless drudgery of keeping the home.
The kitchen is a good example of this; it is a space that is produced and redone con-
stantly in the routines of the everyday. A woman remembers her mother, who felt the
moral need to leave the kitchen spotless and orderly every evening. At night there
was a moment of bliss for her as she contemplated the shining sink, the neat order on
the shelves and the spotless floor. This was her order and tomorrow she would have
to start all over again. Kitchen battles remind us about the ways in which aesthet-
ics – personal or shared – are part of the moral economy of the home. It is a question
about different ideas of style and fashion, but more fundamentally about issues of
order, neatness, harmony and balance (Light et al. 2005). When people say „I can’t
have it like this in my kitchen, you are not allowed to mess it up“, a claim to own-
ership emerges. The kitchen may be ours, but it is above all mine, because I put so
much work and loving care into it (Pink 2012: 62). The fridge is another example of
this: „I get mad when someone has left a half-rotten courgette in the vegetable box.“
(Bouchat 2005: 72)
In other cases it can be the man who sees himself with the overarching respon-
sibility for ‚our home‘. Take the family father, for example, who seems to have taken
onto himself the responsibility of managing the home as he makes his nightly tour
switching off the lights and turning the heating down (Pink 2009).
Mine or Ours? 23

In studies of conflicts between couples, the theme of ‚mine‘, ‚yours‘ or ‚ours‘ is

played out in different ways. Your bad habits, your dirty clothes on our floor – or the
fights about economizing on electricity, like the man who says to his wife „Next time,
you can pay the electricity bill“. It can also be about interior decoration and aesthet-
ics, with the battle about where to place the husband’s stuffed pike, or „that irri-
tating small table your mother gave us  …“ (Kaufmann 2007: 25). The conflicts over
whose domestic order is the one that counts – ‚mine‘ or ‚yours‘ – is often hidden in
the details. A man sighs about his wife often quarrelling about small issues:
„When I leave the TV sofa to go out into the kitchen, she leans forward with an angry sigh that
can be heard throughout the flat and then straightens out the sofa cushion – ‚How many times
have I asked you to arrange the cushions when you get up?‘“

A corner of your own – islands of privacy at home

At home there are small islands that may enhance the feelings of togetherness or in-
dividuality. It can be about finding times when one is allowed to be alone: „I always
rise before the rest of the family and have my breakfast because then I can listen to
my music and create my kitchen atmosphere.“ Small private islands may emerge that
enhance feelings of togetherness or individual demarcation. Some pieces of furniture
lend themselves to create ‚mine‘ or ‚ours‘. Consider the chair, the table and the sofa:
„The chair is related to the bench and the sofa, also made for sitting, but is radically different
from them. The chair is made for one, and one only, which is an important characteristic. The
chair separates us, it is like a small island in the room. The chair has, in other words, always
something rejecting in it, even if in principle it is available for anyone.“
This is the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård (2016: 51) reflecting on the ways
in which a chair may organize relations and boundaries and turn into ‚my chair‘. In
a similar manner the form of the table enables certain relations: ‚my given chair at
the table‘. Some seats can be more important than others. One young man puts it as
follows: „At home we say that daddy owns the chair on the short side, nobody would
dare take that. And at one time grandad owned the same space.“ In the 1950s, func-
tionalist architects talked of the necessity of getting rid of the square or rectangular
table that lent itself to such a hierarchical order. The new modern family should be
seated at a round table, which was supposed to emphasize equality (Hedebo Olsen
2018).
Another important enabler has been the living room sofa. Since the modern sofa
first appeared in the 19th century it has been seen as something that creates a to-
getherness, a ‚we‘. At an early stage it had an erotic charge; a tool for enabling inti-
macy, as with the couple who sit together on it (Ehn and Löfgren 2010: 138). Later it
became the symbol of family togetherness. The prime time of family radio listening
or TV viewing called for a shared sofa (Brembeck 2012). Sometimes it carries an ide-
alized togetherness, at others it becomes an arena of conflicting interests, as when a
24 Orvar Löfgren

young couple fight over how to use it – as the computer gaming platform for the male
partner, or as a space for intimacy and serious talk (Kjær 2007).
To remain alone on the sofa when the others have gone to bed may create a medi-
tative island of solitude. „Finally the sofa is mine…   .“ David Scher (2007: 86) remem-
bers his mother who always claimed her own corner of the sofa, smoking her Pall
Mall, eating egg sandwiches and watching TV, while at the same time keeping an eye
on her nine children from her observation post. In the late evening she had the sofa
all to herself, playing solitude with a Manhattan cocktail to hand. When the sofa’s
best days had passed, David asked his brother to saw off the arm rest: „…  t he one with
Mom’s patina. The one with cigarette burns. The dog-chewed, ketchup stained, Mir-
acle-Whipped, pawed-by-a-thousand little-hands arm.“ Now it hangs on the wall at
home in New York as a memory of his mother.
The search for private spaces in the home can also turn into a metaphor. As one
woman expresses it in an interview: „In a couple relationship one should always have
one’s own room – my activities, my interests, my friends“. Family therapists often talk
about the need for living your own life as a complement to partnerships (Westerling
2008: 206f).

The bedroom
„The first time my three-year-old said ‚ours‘ instead of ‚mine‘ was when she had
climbed into my bed saying: Mum, this is our bed, no one else can be here.“ For the
child, the bed became a clearly delineated ‚ours‘ against the outside world, and beds
and bedrooms have a special place in the ways in which they organize ‚mine‘ and
‚yours‘. How come?
In a study of middle-class families in California, ethnographers noted how the
parents’ bedroom was the focus for both dreams and rearrangements. A majority
of the families interviewed in the study had created a large ‚master bedroom‘ with
a separate bathroom and walk-in closet. Many of them talked about this room as a
‚sanctuary‘, a retreat in a family life overflowing with stuff and activities. The mas-
ter bedroom should be large, beautiful, quiet, without too much stuff. For some, the
model was a four-star hotel room. Here, the children should not be allowed. The bed-
room was the parents’ room and most days it just stood „quiet, dark and waiting  …“
(Arnold et al. 2012).
The idea of a shared bedroom is relatively new. In earlier upper-class settings,
wives and husbands had separate rooms. Nineteenth-century ideas about the couple
as an intimate and romantic unit challenged that separation and the idea of sharing
a bedroom was brought forward. More than anything else, the bedroom has become a
very charged space, as Jean-Claude Kaufmann’s ethnography of bedroom life shows.
The bedroom is often ‚ours‘, but this can be manifested in many different ways. A
shared aesthetic can be introduced or the partner is allowed to fashion his or her own
side of the room. In some situations the room can turn into ‚mine‘: „Our bedroom is
Mine or Ours? 25

my domain, I spend a lot of time in there, with clothes, with writings and reading,
watching TV“, says one of the women who were interviewed (Kaufmann 2015: 184).
The bedroom transforms everyday activities, it feels different and better than being
in the living room, she adds. It is also striking that in more recent years, the bedroom
has become more of an alternative and improvised arena of many tasks. Beds are get-
ting wider in order to accommodate laptops, coffee trays, books and papers (Munro &
Madigan 1999: 111).
But the bed is, of course, charged with strong emotions; it is the space for sexual-
ity and lust, but it is also where one retreats when one is ill and wants to be on one’s
own. In bed, couples make love, they quarrel or daydream, they sleep or lie awake
thinking about life. Two major ideas of modern life collide in the double bed: the
couple as a romantic unity, and the need to be an autonomous individual. My side
of the bed, my needs for sleep and my habits are contrasted to that of my partner’s.
Micro-rituals and routines for the boundaries between intimacy and the separation
of bodies and needs are developed here, as Kaufmann points out. Especially loaded
are such boundaries as when a couple runs into a crisis, or they begin to think about
separating.

Materializing the self

In a study of feeling at home, Ida Winther (2013a: 54f.) follows Danish children
through their living spaces. Where, when and how do they feel most at home? Most
of them mention their own bed in their own room, cuddling up with the pillows and
blankets, eating one‘s favourite sweets, listening to some favourite music, texting or
watching the screen. This is what Winther calls the sacred space for kids, the ultimate
‚my territory‘. The children she interviewed tell her that in their room they feel in full
control of their own space and their stuff, from the desk to the pictures on the wall.
A bubble of self-care and cosiness is created. The existence of such a micro-world of
‚me‘ is taken for granted by these (mainly middle-class) children, but how has this
kind of world developed and what can it tell us about processes of self-making? The
road to this warm, comfortable and personalized world has a long and winding histo-
ry.
One starting point could be the cultural and political history of homemaking, of
comfort and privacy. The historian John Lukacs (1970: 623) wrote of this as follows:
„As the self-consciousness of medieval people was spare, the interiors of their houses were
bare, including the halls of nobles and kings. The interior furniture of houses appeared to-
gether with the interior furniture of minds.“
Lukacs uses the history of comfort to understand how new ideas of self-making and
self-understanding in France and England in the 17th and 18th centuries were devel-
oped and how these ideas were materialized in changed perceptions of domestic liv-
ing and space; the house became the setting for an emerging interior life – a world of
26 Orvar Löfgren

‚mine‘ and ‚ours‘. Svetlana Boyd (2000) has also discussed this historical topography
of intimacy and privacy, from precarious medieval retreats, a window corner, a clear-
ing behind the barn, to the growth of a bourgeois landscape of private spaces and
personal belongings. As Witold Rybczynski (1986: 2) points out, Jane Austen’s novels
exemplify this new focus and the need for private space at home.
In Austen’s novel Mansfield Park, first published in 1814, we follow Fanny Price,
who moves from a poor and crowded household, where there was little place for pri-
vacy, into the manor house of her rich relatives. Here, she finally gets a room of her
own to which she can withdraw. She retreats there to find shelter and comfort among
her belongings, her flowers, books and clothes. Here she has her writing desk, which
provides a space for creative imagination and self-reflection. If she doesn’t feel like
doing anything, she can just sit and daydream:
„The comfort of it in her hours of leisure were extreme. She could go there after anything un-
pleasant below, and find immediate consolation in some pursuit, or some thought. Her plants,
her books… her writing desk, and her works of charity and ingenuity were all within her
reach;“ (Austen 2000 [1814]: 122).
In Fanny’s new world, the need to be alone with one’s own feelings is organized
around new practices: to huddle up in one’s own bed, to keep warm with a favourite
scarf or unlock the small box in which the most personal secrets are kept – the stack
of letters, the lock of hair, the miniature portrait, or other souvenirs. The objects be-
come very personal and intimate belongings: they surround one, one handles them,
they give one’s room a distinct flavour. The self and the objects form an alliance, and
this making of a new self-awareness is a central theme in Jane Austen’s discussion
of her heroines. They need a space to retreat to, a room to withdraw to when life be-
comes too much. The room and its objects become co-actors, actively helping them to
handle their feelings and moods.
In Fanny’s childhood home there was neither a private room nor a private bed.
Her move into something of her own is part of a slow transformation of the view on
the home and the individual that emerges in early modern Europe, in upper-class set-
tings first of all. It is linked to the general development of new ideas about the im-
portance of the self, with a search for self-reflection and self-understanding. Its roots
are found in the Renaissance world, but it is in the 17th and 18th centuries that chang-
es become more evident (Porter 1997). The winding roads of individualization and
selfhood have been followed over the centuries into the present by several genera-
tions of scholars using different perspectives.2
There are several lines of inquiry, which use different concepts – such as increased
individualization, heightened self-awareness, and the establishment of a stronger ‚I‘.
Such developments have been described in terms of a stronger need to be alone and
to have time for self-reflection, materialized in a need to withdraw, to be left to one-

2 The literature on individualization is extensive, from scholars such as Norbert Elias and Philippe
Aríes, to Michel Foucault, Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck and Richard Sennett, to name a few.
Mine or Ours? 27

self, to be one’s own master. It is, however, striking that much of this debate focus-
es on changes in ideas and attitudes rather than on everyday life practices. There
is a constantly changing material infrastructure of self-making that needs to be ex-
plored further, and it is by no means unilinear or one-dimensional, as an exploration
of meanings of ‚mine‘ and ‚ours‘ in 19th and 20th domestic settings reveal.
As new opportunities for solitude and interiority emerged, boundaries between
the individual and the collective were established and marked in different ways. Peo-
ple stopped sharing eating bowls; they wanted to sleep alone in their own bed, to
have control over a space of their own, to have personal belongings (Chartier 1991:
163f.). Or as Orest Ranum (1991: 207) has expressed it: „The significance of having
clothing, a bed, or a rosary of one’s own went beyond mere ownership.“ The small box
or casket became an important possession in upper-class settings in the 17th and 18th
centuries. Valuables and important belongings were kept in them; and they could be
locked, not so much to prevent theft as to signal that these were the owner’s most
private belongings (Ranum 1991: 248).
In the making of Fanny’s new world at Mansfield Park, there are several important
practices that were expanding in the 18th century. Reading out loud is replaced by si-
lent, personal and introspective reading (Chartier 1991), and the new genre of novel
reading opened up new spaces for daydreaming and imagination, putting your own
life and problems in relations to those of others. Another theme was the elaboration
of personal memories. Souvenirs and keepsakes had an important place in Fanny’s
room: „she could scarcely see an object  … which had not an interesting remembrance
connected with it. Everything was a friend, or bore her thoughts to a friend.“ (Austen
2000: 122) The diary was another important tool. The writing desk and the diary rep-
resented a constant invitation to develop and reflect on the self (Ranum 1991: 225).
For men, this was enabled by the establishment of the study and personal libraries,
rooms to which they could withdraw. But as Virginia Wolf pointed out in A Room of
One’s Own, there was an irony in the fact that Jane Austen herself had to write her
novels in the living room that she shared with the rest of the family, while the men
could be given a separate working space.
In 19th century bourgeois settings, spheres of privacy and intimacy became more
elaborated and also genderized (Davidoff & Hall 1987, Frykman & Löfgren 1987). The
male space of the smoking room, for example, had props and designs that accentu-
ated the manliness of the owner. Domestic settings and personal belongings were
seen as increasingly important for both family and personal identity. The new self was
touched and formed by belongings and objects that came to be seen as passageways
into the self, as Frank Trentmann elaborated on in The Empire of Things (2016: 231).
„We get so attached to some pieces of furniture that they become to us as if endowed
with a kind of affection themselves, and we half believe not only that we love them,
but that they love us“, wrote an English art critic in 1871. (Cohen 2009: xvii) He was
reporting from an era of immense expansion in domestic consumption in British ev-
eryday life, a Victorian era that Deborah Cohen has described as the first period in
28 Orvar Löfgren

which people became closely identified with their belongings (Cohen 2009: xi). The
newfangled concept of ‚personality‘ became, Cohen argues, fundamentally inter-
twined with the domestic interior.
Jean-Christrophe Agnew, in analyzing the increased interest in interior design in
late 19th century America, points out that „the commodified home became something
more than a likeness or even an expression of selves placed within it: it became some-
thing interchangeable with those selves, something out of which those selves were at
once improvised and imprisoned, constructed and confined“ (1989: 133). From early
on, this linking of self-expression and domestic consumption opened up a critique
that is still with us. What if this consumption not only helped to create a self, but also
made it weaker, more shallow? (Trentmann 2016: 104)

Mediascapes – shared and personal

The links between identity and homemaking took new forms during the 20th century.
Consumer electronics were introduced into the home, beginning with the telephone,
the gramophone and the radio, and later followed by television, computers and mo-
bile phones, to name a few. These innovations not only changed the home but also
the relations between its members. What is interesting here is how such media inno-
vations and domestic uses came to mould ideas of ‚mine’ and ‚ours’ as well as creating
new dimensions of the moral economy of the home. It is no coincidence that the first
time the concept of the moral economy came to be applied to domestic arenas was
through research on media use in the 1980s and ‘90s. Questions of use, of access, the
sharing and control of the new domestic media, brought forward issues about values
and moral dimensions (Silverstone 1994, Silverstone et al.1992). There were heated
discussions about when, where and how household members should have access, but
also to what degree media use should be monitored – by parents, for example.
Consider a middle-class living room in the 1990s. The TV set still has a central po-
sition, and the TV sofa, a platform for family viewing, creates a special kind of ‚we‘.
Yet there are also conflicts around who controls the remote control or what channels
should be made available. There might be an elegant hi-fi set (Daddy’s pride and joy)
surrounded by rules of use and handling. There is a small table for the family tele-
phone line, but there is also a new mobile that has been left on the sofa. In the corner
sits a computer, connected to the internet. All these technologies are surrounded by
rules and rituals of access and use, reflecting gender patterns as well as the social po-
sitions in the household.
There is a changing history of ‚mine‘ and ‚ours‘ here. When the radio entered the
home in Western societies, during the 1920s and ‘30s, it became a kind of family
shrine, a gathering point for the family. A new listening ‚we‘ took form, but conflicts
also arose about what programmes were interesting, or which ones were suitable and
who should listen to them.
Mine or Ours? 29

For quite a long period, the telephone was seen as a tool for the man of the house,
used only for ‚Important Messages‘ (Löfgren 2000). Later, it came to be shared by oth-
er members of the household, but there were often heated discussions about use and
access, which tended to culminate when the telephone bill arrived. Later, to allow for
some privacy, the family phone could be equipped with a long cord, making it possi-
ble to take it into one’s own room.
There are sensitive issues of unclear and scarce resources that it is difficult to
share. At one time there were battles about access to the telephone and about the
telephone bills, or who was taking up too much time in front of the shared TV or com-
puter. There was the man who colonized the sofa and the Playstation, or who jealous-
ly carried the remote control around with him, even into the bathroom. But with the
increased miniaturization of domestic media, and cheaper prices, it became possible
for family members to acquire separate media machines, maybe a new TV set in the
bedroom, a game station in the teenager’s room or a mobile phone in the pocket. ‚My
room‘ took on a new dimension. Children used the new media technologies to create
new forms of privacy in the home and to assert their independence. Back in 1990,
one teenager said:
„I’m the only one who knows how to use my electrical equipment. Nobody else comes into my
room – I think of it as my space… Up here I can watch anything I want… As soon as I go into
my room, it’s like I’m on another planet.“ (Morley 2000: 91)
This privatization was often accompanied by a new worry. The TV sofa was desert-
ed. „The family is disintegrating, as people lock themselves into their personal media
worlds“, was a new complaint.

Dimensions of class
„The self is always located by prior historical classificatory schemes of value“, writes
the sociologist Beverely Skeggs in her study Class, Self, Culture. The great variations
in social and historical conditions of self-making means that „being classed, raced,
gendered or sexed by culture places limits and/or enables advantages.“ (Skeggs
2004: 75)
In my discussion of some trends in the materialities and emotionalities of
self-making since the 18th century, I have focused on experiences in upper- and
middle-­class settings. If we turn from the manorial life of Fanny in Austen’s Mans-
field Park to the situation in peasant villages of the same period, the conditions of
self-making were quite different. Looking at Swedish village life in the early 19th cen-
tury, the ethnologist Börje Hanssen has stressed the weak conditions for and the
interest in self-making among the peasantry. It is not only a matter of difference in
access to resources, private spaces and belongings, but also a radical cultural and
mental difference. In the villages there was no romantization of childhood, or incen-
tives for the child to see itself as a special and unique person. The word ‚mine‘ as in
30 Orvar Löfgren

‚my mother‘ or ‚my home‘ or ‚my belongings‘ did not have a central position (Hanssen
1978: 16f.).
Even at the beginning of the 20th century, in many European settings the poor
still owned only a few things, as Antoine Post (1991: 64) reminds us. They could be
stowed in a pocket or in a small pouch: a knife, a smoking pipe, a rosary, a watch or a
piece of small jewellery, things often received as a gift which had strong symbolic val-
ue although they were just trinkets – these were the only things one could call one’s
own.
In a similar vein, there were still few resources for privacy and personal space
even in early 20th century Europe. As late as the 1930s, a majority of Swedish families
lived in one room and a kitchen. A room of one’s own was still out of reach. Fold-out
sofas, collapsible beds and mattresses were arranged every evening to provide sleep-
ing spaces, and children often had to share beds. Wardrobes were also shared, and
personal possessions would be crammed into a box or a drawer (Åkerman 1942). We
have to move into the 1960s to see children getting a room of their own (as teenagers
at least) on a wider social scale.
Class differences are also about what feelings can be experienced or verbalized.
Author Hertha Müller remembers her childhood in a poor village in Romania after the
Second World War. Here, people never talked in terms of ‚mine‘ or ‚ours‘, or put words
to feelings about domestic togetherness:
„Maybe the feeling of togetherness was so strong that one did not experience the feeling. It
was normal for everyone to belong together, one did not express it with words and gestures. It
was still something obvious and clear – one sits together at the table, uses the same door, the
same cutlery and pots, our clothes hang together on the washing line – one belongs togeth-
er, this is what the outer things guarantee  … That one could speak of oneself was something I
first found out later, in town.“ (Müller 2014: 15)
Self-making is not just simply a history of growing affluence and access to resources.
Class continues to play an important role in perceptions of and attitudes to the self.
In a study of socialization in daycare centres in New York, the anthropologist Adrie
Kusserow (2004) has shown how differently the self can be constituted in different
social classes. In working-class settings, individualism was about learning to survive
in a tough world: to trust yourself, keep away from others and protect what is yours.
Children were not seen as in need of a private sphere or a territory of their own. At the
other end of the social scale among upper-class families in Manhattan, people talked
about a very different kind of individualism, about the need for children to have au-
tonomy and private space: „Privacy was thought to help develop and construct indi-
viduality – unique tastes, desires, and feelings – as well as confidence and assertive-
ness.“ Even a three-year-old should be given possibilities to create a private sphere,
a room of her own, with her own things where she could have her own thoughts. The
child was a flower that must be given all opportunities to develop in its own unique
way, Kusserow writes. Creativity and autonomy were interwoven.
Mine or Ours? 31

Conclusion
Ideas and practices of ‚mine‘ and ‚ours‘ are shaped through a throwntogetherness,
the ways in which different ideas and materialities, moods and modalities, feelings
and activities come together. It is not only a question of integration and mixing, but
also of resistance, uneasy co-habitation, conflicting aims and interests. Above all,
I have been interested in how the material and the emotional are thrown together,
how they are woven and linked together.
Fanny’s new room at Mansfield Park, or Hertha Müller’s silent objects, are good
examples of what June Bennett has called things joined into a „confederate agency“,
or a „vibrant assemblage“. Bennett points out that an assemblage owes its capacity
for agency to the ‚shi‘ effect: a Chinese term that describes something which is hard
to verbalize:
„…  t he kind of potential that originates not in human initiative but instead results from the
very disposition of things. Shi is the style, energy, propensity, trajectory or élan inherent to a
specific arrangement of things.“ (Bennett 2011: 35)
‚My belongings‘ are a special kind of confederate agency or active assemblage. Things
are united into my world and change together. My main point has been that we need
to focus on the micro-physics and the material infrastructures of these processes,
which have a strong material dimension. This is often what I find missing in much of
the debates about the social, cultural and political organization of individual auton-
omy and awareness in the making of the modern self. Notions of ‚me‘ and ‚ours‘ fetch
their strength from the ways in which the self is intertwined with objects and practic-
es, which become more and more personal. They are part of what Russell Belk (1988)
has called the extended self. ‚My material world‘ is the result of a slow adaptation:
living, thinking with and handling them makes them a part of ‚me‘. In understand-
ing these processes, questions of ownership, control and sharing have to be related
to ideas and practices of intimacy, privacy and secrecy, but also to the wider issue of
moral economies, which have many dimensions. They contain values and rules, eth-
ics as well as aesthetics and are shaped by power relations within the household.
The home becomes an arena for constant negotiations, where different priorities
and interests must co-exist and where it is possible to follow the strong emotional
and moral charges of ‚mine‘ or ‚ours‘ that give them a forceful cultural power. These
words have a similar power to the classic cultural dichotomy of ‚we‘ and ‚them‘ – a po-
larity which creates a Gemeinschaft inwards and separates outwards. ‚We‘ is constant-
ly mirrored in ‚those others‘.
‚Mine or ‚ours‘ is thus permeated by a moral dimension of control and together-
ness, inclusion and exclusion. Adding ‚mine‘ or ‚ours‘ can recharge a situation or re-
lation in a split second. My children and your hopeless kids; your dirty linen on the
floor is your responsibility, not mine  … Strong emotions, ranging from ugly feelings
such as frustration or cold scorn, or warming sentiments like a romantic ‚we‘, are put
32 Orvar Löfgren

to work in seemingly trivial everyday situations. By changing ‚ours‘ to ‚yours‘ a rela-

tion is redefined: it is not my problem but yours!
Both ‚mine‘ and ‚ours‘ can be used as effective excluding techniques. My chair,
my room, my needs. On the one hand, you are not part of this; maybe you are just
a guest, a visitor or an intruder in my life; on the other hand, people can be invited
to join ‚ours‘ by sharing things, resources or activities. A new ‚ours‘ is materialized.
In situations like this boundaries are tested: someone joining the household, an au
pair, a relative or a lodger, may be told that „you are now part of our home“, but they
may discover that the situation is more complex than this.
Learning the intricacies of a domestic moral economy is part of childhood train-
ing. The family situation may vary, but children take these lessons along with them
into further stages of their life, when they live alone, when they embark on a part-
nership, or start a family of their own. The early lessons are still there, as well as the
strong idealization of certain types of families and homes. Even a single household
carries an echo of such moral economies.
Domestic moralities vary over time and between social contexts, as I have shown,
but there is an important social tension that has been influential over at least the
previous two centuries of homemaking. During the 19th century the family was ide-
alized in new ways, which created a different and strong kind of ‚we‘ – the family as a
haven, united against the world (Gillis 1996) – but this development runs in parallel
with an increased individualization. Children were taught to become autonomous in-
dividuals, and at the same time to be part of a strong family identity. There is an inter-
esting interweaving as well as a conflict here between ‚home‘ and ‚the individual‘, as
private spaces were carved out in the shared family home.
The moral dimension of life in the home has had varying strength and focus in dif-
ferent contexts and eras. It has often been argued that 20th century individualization
made the family weaker. It is evident that there has been a growing focus on individ-
ual needs and rights in the family during recent decades (Westerling 2008). One re-
sult of this is much more discussion about what is fair and what is not fair. What kinds
of rights can a child or an adult claim to space, belongings and interest? ‚My‘ need for
privacy! (Brembeck 1996).
However, this does not mean that the moral economy of the family has been weak-
ened; rather, that it has taken on new forms and functions. The traditional idea of the
family as a unit with marked duties and a firm division of labour and clear social po-
sitions has been transformed into the more flexible „negotiating family“, a constant
wheeling and dealing, with demands and counter-demands. In a sense the family is
still a „greedy institution“ (Coser 1974), claiming heavy emotional and social com-
mitments from its members (Sørhaug 1996). This major tension is constantly played
out in the home, but in changing ways. There is no one-dimensional or unlinear pro-
cess in individualization or domestic organization in the previous centuries. My focus
has been on the everyday making and constant remaking of ‚mine‘ and ‚ours‘, the dif-
ferent kinds of affordances that enhance or block certain ways of expressing the self.
Mine or Ours? 33

People explore notions of selfhood, learn to narrate and remember themselves, but
above all they live it in close interaction with the material world. Seemingly trivial
and mundane details come into play: the order in the kitchen, the uses of the mobile
phone, the sofa arrangements, the morning routines, as well as spaces and moments
of privacy or togetherness.

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