ABSTRACT
The preoccupation with embodiment emerges with particular force during the 1980s with the rise of feminism and the impact of phenomenological approaches that focus on the body and gender as privileged sites of meaning and experience. Phenomenological accounts attempted to come to terms with the prevailing mind/body split that was the product of European modernity. L. Prussin notes that the materiality of the body and the materiality of built form and material culture are implicated in relation to one another. The fixity of forms described in architectural vernacular studies gives way to a preoccupation with flows and processes in anthropological studies of consumption in the home. Although such studies tend to sideline the materiality of architectural form, they suggest how other forms of material engagements are important through those that produce disembodiment and other realms of ontological attachment and the affordances of the banal, “inauthentic,” and generic to produce forms of authenticity and meaning through ever newer flows and engagements.
