Houses

Our environment, natural or built by man, influences the culture. I'll leave a discussion of the natural environment to another post, but today I have been thinking about how our culture and our environment shapes what we build for housing and then how what we build, shapes our culture. For example, in areas where land is scarce, apartments are built high. In Utah, we build a lot more houses, but even apartment buildings are never as high as they are in Hong Kong or New York. So who is deciding what it important in our built spatial culture--the builders, the buyers, the sellers--who?

Culture of Houses

In my area of the world in Utah, it is the culture to own a single family house. My father has asked me repeatedly, "When are you going to buy a house?" For a Utah Mormon family (maybe for other cultural groups as well, but I can only speak for my own), buying a house is social rite, maybe even a "spatial" rite that shows we have arrived at a certain point in our lives. What that certain point is is open to discussion: maturity, perhaps the next stage after marriage, perhaps not, perhaps a mark of stability, mark of financial success, a sign that your family is or will be increasing (I can think of example to support and contradict each of these examples). Many of my close friends and family in a similar time and place in their lives to my own have recently bought houses, and have created in me a pull to have my own house as well. I have spent the past couple of months thinking, dreaming, creating, shopping for my very own house.

In other areas of the United States, a house is not necessary to show that you are a "grown-up."  Two friends who have lived in New York City and desire to live there once more told me that in New York, the size of your apartment doesn't really change as ypu advance on the payscale; rather the only change is in the location. It might not even get that much nicer. And the rent is always a huge part of your paycheck. Living in New York, you rent.

On the other side of the country in Oregon, I noticed that mobile homes were much more prevalent than in Utah.  In Utah, mobile homes are incredibly stigmatized, are clustered in mobile home parks, and I'm actually surprised when I see one that looks nice. Traveling through Oregon, the mobile homes were found on individual lots, not necessarily concentrated in parks. They were scattered in tall forests and close to beaches in small coastal towns. A friend I met after my travels who had just moved from a mobile home in Oregon agreed that Oregonian mobile homes did not have the stigma they had in Utah. Many families and individuals chose to live in them because of the Oregon's high property taxes--mobile homes are considered personal property rather than "real" property that is taxed under property taxes.

Our home, whether it be a house, an apartment, or mobile home, shapes who we are and how people perceive us. Perhaps that is why so many in people in my regional culture want a house, because that is what others expect of them.

Home Shaping Our Culture

I loved my house growing up. There were always houses that I thought were lovely, but my house was great. I never questioned my house or its design until I was married. My husband is a perceptive engineer and he questions objects and structures, demanding why they are they way they are. My husband has pointed out quirks about my childhood home that had never come up in my mind. To me, it was just my home and that hallway was the way it was, just because. Well actually, I had never thought about the placement of that hallway, or that window, or that closet. I think my childhood relationship to that house is the same as our relationship to our culture. Living in it, we just accept it and live with it, but an outsider can easily come in and point out its flaws and weaknesses (or perhaps its strengths that we never noticed). My husband is a house anthropologist, you could say.  Also, leaving my house, living elsewhere, then coming back to it, I see the house in a different light. The toilet that I had never considered (because who considers toilets?), now seems short and tiny, and I've nickname that bathroom the "hobbit bathroom."

Something my husband has helped me see about my childhood home is how the built structure of the house created traditions.  One of my family traditions that I'd like to perpetuate is eating in a dining room. Few of my friends ate at their separate, "formal" dining room, eating most often in their kitchens.  In looking for houses, I find separate dining rooms are going extinct, like fine china and silver. A dining room is an extra that people must pay extra for. I was trying to figure out why this was, when, I for one would love to eat away from the huge mess I usually create cooking in the kitchen. My husband once again pointed out that my family ate in the dining room because there was no where to eat in the kitchen. We had a long skinny kitchen with a great bar and a bit of space for a small table, but no where we could seat comfortably a family of 7. After this revelation, I felt slightly dismayed. There was not some huge, cosmological meaning behind our family tradition of eating in the dining room, but rather it was a decision of spatiality.

Funerals

My grandma died last week. Among other things, this got me to thinking about mourning rituals. Interestingly, Mormon culture doesn't have too many mourning rituals because according to our worldview, death is a release and a new beginning to a better life after this life of mortality and pain.  We are, however, not without some ritual. As my grandma began to fail from her two month, untreated battle with cancer, my family gathered and waited, supporting my grandpa and being with my grandma in her last moments on this earth. It was amazing to be there together as a family; yes there were teary eyes, but there was no sobbing and wailing.

After a death, there is always a viewing, often the day before and then right before the funeral. In the interim between the viewing and the funeral, the family is gathered together to close the casket and a family prayer is offered with the family. The funeral is a time of remembrance and hope for the future. After the funeral, the casket is born out to a waiting hearse and as many of the family as wants, travels to the gravesite, which is dedicated. After all of this, the family returns to the church building where usually the church congregation has prepared a meal for all the family.

Most of the funeral parts are fine with me, but the one I really don't like is the viewing. The idea of a reception to trade condolences and sympathies is fine, but I do not enjoy seeing the deceased person. To me, it is no longer the person. I hate looking at them and seeing their empty features and falsely colored skin. So much of the funeral is about celebration and rejoicing, but when you look at the person, all you can think about is death. DEATH in capital letters. I don't like it. Does anyone know why the tradition of open casket viewings persist? Please tell me what you think about them.

A Jewish psychiatrist agrees with my dislike of viewings and supplies some of his own suppositions why we do viewings, although I disagree with his scriptural backing of his dislike (seen later in the article--I didn't copy that bit). In the introduction of his article, he writes:

"It has become a common practice at American funerals, among all religious faiths, to display the body of the deceased as part of the funeral ritual or service. This custom is of recent American origin, having no roots in ancient culture or contemporary European usage, with the exception of the "lying-in-state" of kings and emperors....The viewing of the corpse is one of the fundamentals of the economy of the funeral industry. Before the body is offered for presentation to relatives and friends, it must be perfumed, restored to a look of perfect health, dressed in expensive garments, and placed in a respectable, "comfortable-looking" casket. These requirements of viewing usually constitute the bulk of the funeral costs.

The new, American, quasi-religious ceremony is justified to the public by two high-sounding phrases. One is that viewing the corpse is "paying your last respects." This form of farewell to the deceased is made to seem the minimal courtesy a man can pay his beloved; it has become the natural and logical thing for mourners to do. The second is that it is a necessary aspect of "grief therapy," helping the bereaved to remember a sweet, content, smiling face rather than the vacant, pain-ridden, drawn look of a cadaver.

To the layman, both these arguments seem quite plausible, requiring no further investigation--certainly not at the time of death. The practice of viewing the remains has, therefore, become standard, and a "traditional" part of the American funeral."

Carrots

Peeling carrots for vegetable soup this evening got me to thinking about the connection between culture and carrots. In my family, I was taught to peel my carrots. I didn't think about why this was--I just did it; it is still something that I do habitually.  One Sunday early in our marriage, we were at my mother-in-law's house. She handed me the carrots and told me to wash, but not peel them, since they were organic and therefore had no pesticides on them.

Oh. Okay. Is that why I  peel carrots? Because of the pesticides and harmful chemicals that could be on the skins? No one had ever explained to me why I was doing this, but for some reason and my own family culture, I don't think this was why we peeled carrots.

However, if it wasn't pesticides, what was it? It wasn't because the skins are hard to eat like bananas, bitter like oranges, or give me the shivers like pears (I know, I'm weird, right?). You barely notice a carrot's skin is there. My mother-in-law says that most of the nutrients of the carrot are in the skin. If this is true, then, all those carrots battles waged between my elementary me and my mother were all over naught because those carrots only held residual nutrients.

After some brief online research, this is what I found about carrot skins:

 "According to the Carrot Museum of the United Kingdom, most of the beneficial nutrients in a carrot are contained in the carrot's peel or just below the skin. The peel of a carrot contains many antioxidant compounds. Antioxidants are linked with a lower risk of tissue damage from the action of free radicals. By removing the peel of a carrot, you are removing much of the antioxidants, vitamins and minerals naturally present in the vegetable." Found http://www.livestrong.com/article/518814-should-carrots-be-peeled-or-are-they-more-nutritious-with-the-peel-left-on/#ixzz2BJXqxI53

The Carrot Museum, who really should know, agrees with my mother-in-law.  However, Dr. Reiners, root vegetable expert at Cornell University and who works at one of the top agriculture research stations, was quoted by C. Claiborne Ray, writing in the New York Times, that plenty of nutrition is left in the carrot after you peel it. His rule is if the color is below the peel, the vitamins associated with that color (in the carrot's case, orange shows the presence of beta carotene) are also below the peel. For the article, go here: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/11/science/q-a-peels-and-vitamins.html

I guess whether you peel your carrots or not is more a matter of culture rather than a matter of life and death.