This book explores social change in Japan at the most intimate site of social interaction – the home – by providing a detailed ethnography of everyday life in a sharehouse. Sharehouses, which emerged in the 2007 'sharehouse boom', are a deliberate alternative to life in the family home and are considered an experimental space for the construction of new social identities.
Through a description of the micro-level, mundane, material interactions among residents within a mid-sized, mixed-sex sharehouse, the book considers what these interactions indicate about existing – and often conflicting – ideas about intimacy, privacy, gender, the individual, family, community, and the home.
In so doing it highlights how sharehouse residents, though a dramatic rejection of the twentieth-century domestic model, with its ideal of the family home as a partnership between a male wage-earner and a dedicated housewife, and its implied separation of 'family' and 'outsiders', are nevertheless uneasy about overturning existing gender roles and giving precedence to the individual over community, and are regarded as a foreign import.
By:
Caitlin Meagher (Skidmore College USA) Imprint: Routledge Country of Publication: United Kingdom Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 156mm,
Weight: 320g ISBN:9780367561666 ISBN 10: 0367561662 Series:Japan Anthropology Workshop Series Pages: 148 Publication Date:01 August 2022 Audience:
College/higher education
,
General/trade
,
Primary
,
ELT Advanced
Format:Paperback Publisher's Status: Active
Caitlin Meagher is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Skidmore College, USA.