ABSTRACT
This chapter intends to survey one particular approach to the relationship between the home interior and the people who dwell within the home. The approach is ethnographic and associated largely, but not entirely, with the discipline of anthropology and with material culture studies. In most cases what are expressed in the relationships between people and homes are not so much individuals and their possessions as whole households or families and their configuration of relationships to each other and to details of their home decorations. In a series of papers, recent ethnographies have explored this aspect of the process of accommodating whereby what we observe is the simultaneous building of homes and relationships. The chapter suggests that accommodation has to be understood as a reciprocal process, which not only involves making the home suitable for the relationships we have with ourselves and with other people, but also adapting ourselves to the needs and sensibility of the house as a material object.
