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.
