Home, Death and Dying
My interests in home, as a site of material culture and as an analytic category, relate to my anthropological research on death and dying, and on gender. This began with participant observation in a residential home for older adults, as well as a hospice. I am interested in the shaping of the life course through relationships with the domestic home. This includes the exclusion of particular age-based social categories or categories of experience (for example the breakdown of the body´s boundaries) from the private home and their relocation within other kinds of `homes´; the shifting meanings of objects and space as individuals experience ageing, death and bereavement, for example, the capacity of objects and space to acquire new agency and become charged with new and potentially distressing significance, then going on to assume the status of bittersweet memorabilia ; the capacity of the materialities of bricks and mortar to embody individuals who no longer inhabit that space (for example, the presence of dead family members; the ghosts of individuals who may have conducted acts of violence within the home, and the spirits of their victims); the constraints of the domestic home as a site within which social identities may come to overlap in problematic ways (for example, as daughters become mothers themselves) and the ways in which this is expressed in the (non) expression of sexual knowledge and (the absence of) the practice of sex itself within the home.
I have therefore published work which engages with: (1) home as an emotional landscape within which the residual items of the dead can achieve the status of fetish objects which can be neither used not abandoned (see Hockey, J., Penhale, B. and Sibley, D (2005) `Environments of Memory: home space, later life and grief´, in J.Davidson et al (eds) Emotional Geographies, Ashgate, Aldershot), (2) home as a site from which the members of particular social categories may find themselves excluded (see Hockey, J. (1990) `The ideal of home: domesticating the institutional space of old age and death´, in T.Chapman and J.Hockey (eds) Ideal Homes? Social Change and Domestic Life, Routledge, London, (3) home as site which encompasses more than the materialities of bricks and mortar (see Hockey, J. (1990) `Houses of Doom´, in T.Chapman and J.Hockey (eds) Ideal Homes? Social Change and Domestic Life, Routledge, London, and (4) home as a problematic site for sexual knowledge and practice (see Robinson, V., Meah, A. and Hockey, J. (2004) `"What I Used to Do … On My Mother´s Settee": spatial and emotional aspects of heterosexuality in England´, Gender, Place and Culture, 11(3), 417-435.