Anna Hoare

In many countries, where legal controls and commercial interests have increasingly privatised public space, formerly democratic spaces are emerging as political instruments used to enforce or deny categories of citizenship. Nomadic and post-nomadic subjects find themselves at the forefront of relations with the state that are mediated and defined by new constructions of public/ private space, and architectures and settlement forms frequently represent the primary interface of this relationship. Nomadism, understood not simply as an ecological corollary of spatially complex economies, but as sociality linked to a distinctive system of dwelling, tests the willingness of contemporary nation states to recognize plural cultural forms of family life and livelihood, and to admit nomadic and post-nomadic subjects to full participation in social and political life, including rights to private property and public space. In this paper, based on anthropological fieldwork in Ireland and the UK, ...

Anthropology understands the body as permeable membrane and composite substance, through which orders of social relations are incorporated, naturalised, and re-objectified in the material world of objects and exchanges. The body is the site of techniques through which bones, flesh and skin come into being as dense and expressive, and where its genealogy in labour, creativity, inequality and pain is gradually laid down. The to-and-fro of construction and resistance emerges in intersections of narrative ‘self’ and notions of personhood: the body as a medium of individual experience and the basis of action, visibility and recognition. This paper explores the unfinished social-materiality of the body as ‘destination’ (Grosz 1994: 21) in the lives of Irish Travellers, and considers camps as means of eliciting aspects of complex personhood, often based on relations between women and between the living and the dead. Through repetition and structured variation camps are experienced as sourc...

The idea that architectures materialise and inform spatial-political orders of relations, those of domestic life as well as those authorised by the state, is familiar within anthropology. But architectures as designs for living and instruments of authority remain insecurely embedded in changing political economies, and fragilely dependent on transforming lives and resistant identities. Architectures - including those that do not yet exist - may become sites of political contest and social transformation. The paper explores such critical instability in the architectures and settlements of post-nomadic Irish Travellers. Once regarded as the intermediate stage of an anticipated ‘assimilation’ process, Traveller sites in the UK and Ireland have become the most distinctive element of a post-nomadic cultural trajectory, embodying a new social-political identity, that of the ‘compatible group’, and an ‘emergent ontology’ (Haraway 2003: 7) materially connected to architecture. Combining cot...

Bourdieu’s originality lies in combining a theory of embodied cognition derived from Piaget with a theory of power sedimented in everyday structures of time, space and material forms. The house, the privileged site of this ‘dialectic of objectification and embodiment’, overspills material form into human cognition and embodiment, where ‘history turned into nature [is] denied as such’. The paper considers structures of habitus and field in architecture and dwelling among Irish Travellers. In the material and legal forms of UK Traveller sites the house operates negatively as an ‘officialising’ structure. This example of metaphorical ‘unhouseness’ explores the paradoxes of opposition within a symbolic field, where post-nomadic architectures challenge systems of meaning and control that underpin and are authorised by the house. Second, I revisit Bourdieu’s theory of history, embodiment, and practice in Irish Travellers’ camps, where understandings of flows and stoppages of substance bet...

The Caravan Sites Act 1968 imposed a duty on local authorities in the United Kingdom to provide sites for ‘gipsies’ (sic). Contradictory aims of active repression, enforced dependency and notional integration combined in a mode of dwelling invented and controlled by the state, but increasingly promoted, transformed and privatised by Travellers themselves. In a ruling in 2004 against the United Kingdom, the European Court of Human Rights found that local authority sites were ‘homes’ under Article Eight of the European Convention on Human Rights, and tantalisingly described the UK’s Traveller population as ‘nomadic in spirit if not in actual or constant practice’ (Connors v. the United Kingdom, ECtHR 267, 2004, Press Release of the Registrar: 4). This paper explores the paradox of permanent temporariness imbedded in the relation between the UK Traveller site, the legal category of the gypsy, and the house of the post-war planning system. It argues that post-nomadic architectures and subjectivities radically challenge the public-private nexus of citizenship, property, and family objectified in the post-war ideal of the permanent house. In the house, as Engels (1948 [1891]) describes, political economy and the materiality of dwelling and family life collide, and the tension of contradictions eventually gives rise to new house forms and concomitant social relations. The paper draws on anthropological fieldwork in the UK and Ireland to revisit the house as a field of productive instability.