ABSTRACT
In the postwar period, consumption-oriented approaches emerged with particular force. This large body of literature on consumption studies and the home emerged predominantly from an intersection of Marxist analysis, feminist critique, and the rise of consumption studies more widely. Walter Benjamin’s evocative description of the bourgeois home enveloped in folds of velvet conveys the power of the fossil metaphor that has long dominated the anthropological study of architectural from. S. Gudeman and A. Rivera’s work on the household economies of Colombia notes that houses function to differentially regulate flows of animals, foods, bodies, labor, and other generative substances between households and the wider market economy. The stability of material assemblages in homes as evidenced in collections, heir-looms, photographs, and the like, would typically be curated with great care and would form the basis upon which relationships between family members would be produced and sustained.
