Chapter 12 Ethnography and housing studies revisited

Abstract

I would like to be able to report that the film Salmer fra kjokkenet (Kitchen Stories) (dir. Bente Hamer, 2003) was a direct consequence of the powerful arguments I made for the use of ethnography in housing studies almost 20 years ago (Franklin, 1990). Sadly, I cannot! In this touching comedy drama from Norway, a team of Swedish ethnographers working from the Swedish Home Research Institute descend on a remote rural locality in Norway during the 1950s in order to study the kitchen habits and cultures of single living men. It is an improbable quest, until one learns that the same team discovered how Swedish housewives needlessly walk the equivalent distance between Stockholm and the Congo every year as they go about their routine kitchen business; a finding that successfully paved the way for more efficient kitchen design and culture. So it was that the team descended on the very perplexed and uncooperative Norwegian bachelors (the last sub-group in their programme) in order to map out their domestic inefficiencies. Comic tension is built both through their ethnographic props (the researchers were to sit on giant stools in the kitchens, giving them panoptic vision), rules (they were not to talk to respondents, although that proves awkward when lights are turned out by thrifty Norwegians) and living spaces (they were to live in specially designed, round caravans parked outside their respondent's homes). The film would have been a vindication of my arguments not so much because it demonstrates the truth that practical housing outcomes can arise from spending sufficient periods of time studying cultural milleux, but because it also demonstrates that the relationship between researchers and respondents become more productive over time, resulting in more reliable data, better understandings of that millieux and what their problems (and therefore often ‘ours’) actually consist of.

Citation

Franklin, A. (2008), "Chapter 12 Ethnography and housing studies revisited", Maginn, P.J., Thompson, S. and Tonts, M. (Ed.) Qualitative Housing Analysis: An International Perspective (Studies in Qualitative Methodology, Vol. 10), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 271-289. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1042-3192(08)10012-X