HOUSE POETICS examines how value is created in society, arguing that it is not defined simply in material terms but should be situated in the relations that build alliances, reputations and symbolic wealth. It explores the value regimes that tie people together, validate social interactions, sanction rules and obligations, and ensure the prosperity of a social group. Houses, as intergenerational social groups that grow around a material and symbolic estate not restricted by biological kinship, are a good analytic category for addressing this question. Houses draw their power from their members and their longevity, but none of these features are adequately explained by existing theories: if House membership is not restricted to biological ties, what mechanisms bring such groups together? How is their tendency to grow continuously (and therefore be flexible and adaptable) reconciled with their conscious efforts to endure over time, and therefore to resist change? A perspective that helps us understand how groupings of things, people, energy flows, and ideas (such as those represented by Houses) come about and are constantly reconfigured through new relations is Assemblage theory. But Assemblage theory does not explain why some assemblages endure in time and are not constantly dissolved and remade as something else. HOUSE POETICS used a combined ‘Houses-as-assemblages’ model to explain why social practices that emphasised particular kinds of collective identities persisted through periods of drastic social change in Bronze Age Cretan society.
The objectives of the project were: a) to construct a theoretical model for examining how Houses create and transmit value; b) to develop a methodology for grasping the relations that bring Houses into being; c) to understand how Houses can change through time and vary in their spatial expressions. Overall, HOUSE POETICS aimed to redefine the practices of kinship, understood as broad processes of social as well as biological solidarity.
HOUSE POETICS tackles a question pertaining equally to society today, by looking at the interplay between links and boundaries: how specific social practices (e.g. burial practices; production techniques and technological traditions; kinship) link different fields of action thereby generating the boundaries that define a group. This approach helps us understand why some social practices are more valued than others for constructing group identities.
