ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the argument developed in the preceding chapters. It draws together two themes that resonate throughout the book to discuss the roles of knowledge and routine in changing gendered practices and identities. The chapter outlines the wider implications of this work for anthropology. Women informants who rejected a housewife identity constructed housewives simultaneously as ‘obsessive’ and as experts who had access to privileged sensory knowledge and strategies. By focusing on the different sensory modalities through which people represent their domestic experiences, knowledge and practices the people can open up paths to understanding how they employ types of knowledge that are not apparent in research that attends only to the visual/material home. The sensory knowledge and practices discussed above, however, need to be set within a wider framework of activity that shapes and organizes them temporally. The work has similar implications for anthropological studies of gender and gendered knowledge.
