ABSTRACT
The material culture researcher Sofie Chevalier uses the term 'focus', or 'focal point'. Two different sets of data, interviews and pictures, required a combination of verbal and visual methods of analysis. When analysing narratives, author used the frame of material studies related to theories of identity – as Hurdley put it, 'people telling stories about objects they have in their homes are also telling stories about themselves'. This chapter is based on field research she conducted between 2004 and 2009. She studied 26 urban homes, carrying out interviews with their owners and recording the arrangement of pictures in the interiors with the help of a camera or drawings. Russian rural dwellings in the nineteenth and twentieth century were organized along a symbolic axis that ran between the stove and the krasnyi ugol.
